After well over a year and one million illegal alien children and families coming to our border, has President Trump finally forged the deal to end the invasion?

No, the president is not fully asserting American sovereignty by announcing an §1182(f) shutoff at our border, but if his deal with Guatemala succeeds, it may net a similar result.

On the surface, it’s hard to overstate the importance of the third-party asylum deal the president signed with the Guatemalan government in the Oval Office on Friday. Guatemala is agreeing to serve as the first destination for asylum seekers coming northward. This deal will force all but the migrants from Guatemala itself to first apply there. Geographically, Guatemala is the chokepoint for all migration coming north. Anyone from the other countries in Central and South America, as well as from Africa, Haiti, and Cuba, ultimately come through Guatemala before pressing on to Mexico.

Once this deal is fully implemented, in August, according to DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan, all these migrants except those from Guatemala will be ineligible to seek asylum in America. While the Central American migrants were overwhelmingly from Guatemala at the start of this crisis in 2018, in recent months there have been almost twice as many from Honduras. Thus, fully enforcing the requirement to first seek asylum in Guatemala will shut off most of the migration. For example, according to data I’ve seen from Texas DPS’ weekly border apprehensions in Texas, just 2,577 of the 14,266 aliens apprehended in the state the week of July 17 were from Guatemala. That means 82 percent should be turned back under this agreement (including those from Mexico who are already subject to expedited removal).

This is reason to celebrate the pending end to the border crisis, right?

Will they be turned back at our border?

The key question in light of this deal is whether the illegal aliens will now be turned back right at our border, as they should have been for months, or not. At the end of the day, the president has tweeted many hollow threats over the past year, and they have not deterred the illegal immigrants because they all see the reality on the ground or hear about it from their friends and relatives who just went through the pipeline without the much-hyped restrictions. Will this time be different?

Unless DHS actually turns them back at the border itself, this deal will be nothing more than a glorified Trump tweet. Remember, asylum is not even the issue any more. In many parts of the border, fewer than 10 percent are even expressing a credible fear of persecution. I’ve spoken to several border agents who’ve said that most of them, when being interviewed by Border Patrol, openly say they are coming for work or for medical care. Both of those motives should automatically render these people inadmissible (§1182(a)(4) for medical care public charge and (a)(5) for seeking labor) and they should be immediately sent back.

Yet DHS is still bringing them in (even from behind the wall!), and if they are here with a child, they are released within a few days. Again, DHS is doing this even for people not claiming asylum. Thus, the asylum deal won’t automatically change this policy. DHS must actively turn people back. Until Central Americans and Africans see mass numbers of people turned back, they will not be dissuaded from coming.

However, once the first migrants in the pipeline are turned back, it will likely put an end to this entire charade. Despite the media’s feigned outrage over Guatemala not being prepared to absorb asylum-seekers, no serious person thinks Guatemala will be flooded with migrants once they know America is closed for business. They are not fleeing persecution; they are seeking to come to the U.S., and nowhere else, for work, medical care, and birthright citizenship.

Kevin McAleenan said on Friday that any migrant from south of Guatemala who fails to make a claim there and “instead, in the hands of smugglers, make the journey all the way to the U.S. border, [would] be removable back to Guatemala.” The question lies in the word “removable.” If they continue to feel bound by the insane ruling of Judge Dana Sabraw that all illegal aliens with a child must be released together within 20 days, once we agree to hold them rather than turning them back immediately, we will ultimately have to release them. At present, ICE lacks the funding for enough deportations back to Central America even for single adult males. Thus, with a lack of funding, it will take some time to remove them, and by then, the courts will demand they be released. Turning them back and marching them over the river as soon as they are caught, which we are already doing at ports of entry, is the only solution.

Will Trump hold the line on the courts?

This entire crisis was spawned by the California judges last July shredding immigration law and enshrining the use of children as a ticket into our country. The courts have engaged in civil disobedience against every attempt of this administration to enforce the laws. The entire purpose of a third-party asylum agreement is to finally take this issue out of reach of the courts.

The law states in the most emphatic terms that the courts have absolutely no jurisdiction to hear any lawsuit against a third-party agreement. It is inherent in foreign diplomacy anyway and is as much out of the courts’ jurisdiction as war and treaty powers, but nonetheless, Congress codified it into law. 8 U.S. Code §1158(a)(3) states, “No court shall have jurisdiction to review any determination of the Attorney General under paragraph (2),” which is the crafting of a third-party asylum deal with a foreign country. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

Unfortunately, we’ve been down this road many times this year. There have been many illegal district court rulings on immigration issues over which Congress explicitly stripped the courts of jurisdiction. They did this in the case of TPS amnesty and in several deportation cases, as well as creating habeas corpus rights for illegal aliens explicitly barred by the 1996 law. In fact, just over the weekend, the Supreme Court ruled that the California judges had no valid case with standing to rule against Trump building a border wall with Pentagon funding.

Yet rather than enforcing the jurisdictional bar of the law against the same courts that have continuously been slapped down by SCOTUS, the Trump administration has enforced the lawless rulings against the law.

The left-wing open-borders groups are already threatening to sue the asylum deal, even though it is an act of diplomacy. The Trump administration needs to get out ahead of this by educating the public that all lawsuits against this agreement are barred under immigration law and that it will not participate in any court proceedings, respond with any briefs, or enforce any illegal court ruling.

The bottom line is that we are over one year into this crisis because, until now, the administration has not held strategic line at the border itself against the smugglers and the legal line against runaway California judges. There are no shortcuts to those two imperatives. The deal with Guatemala is a great way of announcing a change in those two policies, but absent those changes, it is no policy at all. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Guatemala Deal a Game-Changer? 2 Questions That Will Determine Success” please click HERE)

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Over 10,000 Americans die every year in drunk driving accidents. Many of them are caused by foreign nationals who either should never have been in the country or who could have been previously deported for prior arrests. Now it appears that the position of anti-ICE activists and sanctuary city politicians is that they will work to thwart the deportation even of serial illegal alien drunk drivers who have been ordered deported by a judge.

On Tuesday, a group of anti-ICE protesters helped a criminal alien lock himself in a car with a 12-year-old boy being used as a human shield after they saw a group of ICE agents coming to apprehend him. The protesters enabled him to remain in the car for four hours in the Hermitage area of metro Nashville and then, after ICE agents had already decided to come back another day, engaged in a political stunt and surrounded the car with a human chain.

One protester who helped form the human chain around the car told the local ABC affiliate, “I could see if these people were bad criminals, but they’re not. They’re just trying to provide for their kids.”

There’s just one problem. The individual was indeed a criminal alien with a final deportation order who has remained an ICE fugitive for nearly a decade. An ICE official confirmed the man’s identity to CR so that CR could locate his criminal history.

The man who locked himself in the car is a 29-year-old Mexican national who has been arrested at least three times in Tennessee. According to Davidson County court records, he was arrested on March 22, 2010, for drunk driving and for driving without a license. He was sentenced to time served and a year of probation.

According to ICE, he was ordered deported by an immigration judge in 2010 but was offered voluntary departure on July 28 (which comes with less criminal offense if he were to re-enter illegally). He was given until November 26 to depart. Instead of taking the offer, he absconded and then was given a final order of deportation in absentia, making him a criminal fugitive.

Astoundingly, he was arrested again on August 31 of that year and was found guilty of misdemeanor identity fraud and driving without a license. Again, he was cycled in and out of the criminal justice system with a final order to leave the country, and yet local officials treated him as if he were an American.

The Mexican fugitive was once again arrested in Davidson County on May 1 of this year for driving on a revoked license with an open container of alcohol, which was also a violation of his probation. Then he was in court on July 2 for a hearing over his probation violation.

How was this man able to cycle in and out of jail and court and interact with state government without ever being turned over to ICE? This was all after a final order of deportation.

Yet local officials who were at the protest treat ICE agents as if they, not the illegal aliens, are the criminals. Nashville Metro Councilman Bob Mendes, who claimed to be on scene at the attempted apprehension, said in a statement, “There are reports I have heard that the ICE agents may have been telling the gentleman in the van that he had to give himself up or else MNPD would arrest him. If that’s what they said, that’s not true.”

Mendes went on to extol the policy of Nashville not to cooperate with ICE.

Mayor David Briley said ICE “stokes fear and distrust in our most vulnerable communities, which is why we do not use our local resources to enforce ICE orders.” He promised to work with local open-borders groups “to make sure residents know their rights and that support and resources are available for undocumented immigrants should the need arise.”

We have now reached the point where these sanctuaries are harboring, aiding, abetting, and shielding from detection those who violate our driving laws, drive drunk, and violate a deportation order for nine years. Those are all violations of 8 U.S. Code §1324. DHS and DOJ have been lax about prosecuting sanctuary officials for harboring illegal aliens.

What these local officials are essentially saying is that anyone is allowed to break into the country and nobody is allowed to be deported, even after they are arrested for subsequent crimes. For activists and local politicians to interfere with enforcement of sovereignty is the ultimate form of anarchy against American citizens.

Moreover, for illegal aliens to refuse to depart and then lock themselves in a car is itself a criminal offense on top of the baseline civil immigration violation. 8 U.S. Code §1253 states as follows:

“Any alien against whom a final order of removal is outstanding…who willfully fails or refuses to depart from the United States within a period of 90 days from the date of the final order of removal under administrative processes” or who “willfully fails or refuses to make timely application in good faith for travel or other documents necessary to the alien’s departure” or who “connives or conspires, or takes any other action, designed to prevent or hamper or with the purpose of preventing or hampering the alien’s departure pursuant to such” or who “willfully fails or refuses to present himself or herself for removal at the time and place required by the Attorney General pursuant to such order” is subject to up to four years of imprisonment.

ICE could go back and obtain a criminal warrant from a U.S. attorney in this case for violation of §1253, but the agency has never had to do this since the implementation of federal immigration laws in the late 1800s. The Ninth Circuit issued a lawless ruling requiring it to obtain a criminal warrant to break into a house or car to get an illegal alien. But that opinion is not valid outside the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, especially as it violates Supreme Court precedent. In Turner v. Williams (1904), the court made it very clear that as long as immigration officers are not trying to criminally convict the alien but rather deport him, “Detention or temporary confinement as part of the means necessary to give effect to the exclusion or expulsion was held valid.” The fact that an alien commits another crime to hamper that apprehension doesn’t make him better off and give him the right to thwart the basic actions necessary to affect the removal.

This principle was clearly established by James Iredell, one of the authors of Article III of the Constitution and a founding member of the Supreme Court. In 1799, he said the following, applying even of people who were lawfully admitted into the country, much more to those who violate today’s immigration laws and are ordered to be deported:

“Any alien coming to this country must or ought to know, that this being an independent nation, it has all the rights concerning the removal of aliens which belong by the law of nations to any other; that while he remains in the country in the character of an alien, he can claim no other privilege than such as an alien is entitled to, and consequently, whatever [risk] he may incur in that capacity is incurred voluntarily, with the hope that in due time by his unexceptionable conduct, he may become a citizen of the United States.”

For now, there is civil disobedience against the immigration laws, even when the subjects are drunk drivers and even accused child molesters. The only question is whether the administration will begin enforcing current law. (For more from the author of “Anarchy: Protesters Help Stop ICE From Apprehending Criminal Alien” please click HERE)

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