Two more Americans – a Washington state sheriff’s deputy and an Alabama schoolteacher – were killed this week because we senselessly allow illegal aliens to remain in our country.

Gouverneur Morris, one of the Pennsylvania delegation, with Benjamin Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention, is said to have declared, “Every society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted; there can be room for no complaint.” As part of those conditions, we require all those who come here on visas to leave by a certain time or apply for an extension, and we require anyone coming to the border for asylum status to show up for a court date. But if we do not enforce those provisions by deporting violators, our laws are a joke and we have no dominion over our territory. Now, two more lives have been taken by senseless illegal alien murders, all because we no longer appreciate the foundational principle of sovereignty as expressed by Morris, the primary author of the actual prose of the Constitution.

Sonya Jones, a schoolteacher in a Christian academy in Mobile, Alabama, was killed on Monday when an illegal alien from Guatemala hit her head-on after crossing the center line of a local highway. Domingo Marcos, 16, is a poster child for what is going on now at the border. He came here in 2017 claiming asylum at the Arizona border, as encouraged and coached by the smugglers. He was, of course, denied asylum and issued final deportation orders. But as I reported earlier this week, there are over one million illegal aliens in this country with final deportation orders who still remain in this country, and very few of them are being deported. Marcos was one of 129,000 Guatemalans with final orders who remain here, and now a popular schoolteacher has paid the price with her life. Marcos was arrested when he was caught fleeing the scene of the accident.

This tragic death was completely avoidable. How many more ticking time bombs of drivers (drunk or otherwise), drug traffickers, murderers, and robbers will remain in the country and do harm to our people as a result of the lack of basic enforcement of our most foundational federal laws? Why is it that if we, as American citizens, absconded from court, failed to renew our licenses, or failed to pay speeding tickets, the law would easily catch up with us, but somehow illegal aliens and visa overstays remain here indefinitely?

Because of an illegal alien who overstayed his agriculture visa, a sheriff’s deputy in Washington state is dead and another local police officer wounded. According to Fox News, “29-year-old Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, a Mexican citizen, entered the U.S. at Laredo, Texas, in April 2014 on a temporary agricultural worker visa.” The maximum duration of an H-2A visa is no longer than three years. Del Toro’s visa expired at some time several years ago, but he still remained in the country illegally for an unknown amount of time. Tuesday night, following a road rage incident with Del Toro, police were called out to the scene, and the illegal alien opened fire on the cops. The 42-year-old Kittitas County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Thompson was killed, and 22-year-old Kittitas Police Officer Benito Chavez was wounded. Thompson is reportedly the first law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in this county since 1927. The suspect in his killing should long ago have been removed from this country.

Why are so many people able to remain in our country completely unvetted after they overstay their visas? Congress passed a law in 1996 mandating the creation of a visa tracking system to monitor and apprehend those caught overstaying their visas, and its implementation was urged by the 9/11 Commission in light of the security problems with so many of these “undocumented” individuals. Just in 2017 alone, 700,000 individuals overstayed their visas, and 85 percent of them still remain in the country.

Between all those who overstay their visas and the one million illegal aliens who remain here after final deportation orders (plus another 1.5 million who have “pending final deportation orders”), ICE obviously has its hands full. This is one of the many reasons why Trump should have held the line on a clean continuing resolution last month to keep this issue alive and make Democrats take tough votes on issues related to deportations. ICE needs more agents than even Border Patrol does. The border is all a policy problem at this point with our self-destructive asylum process. No number of new border agents will change that.

The distinguishing characteristic of a strong sovereign nation compared to an undeveloped country is the ability to monitor and control an external movement into the territory and the ability to apprehend and remove those who trespass on the national private property rights of the people. Yet on every measure, we seem to fail not just in our ability to prevent people from infiltrating our territory, but in monitoring and apprehending those who successfully remain in our country illegally. We the people are regulated or monitored in every aspect of our lives, but somehow illegal infiltrators seem to evade the juggernaut of Big Brother. And all murders that occur as a result of this failure are 100 percent avoidable. (For more from the author of “2 More Americans Killed by Illegal Aliens Who Should Have Been Deported” please click HERE)

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We are told by the legal profession that nothing can be done to block bogus asylum-seekers from entering our country en masse, obtaining catch-and-release, and remaining here pending the outcome of a court decision that may be years in coming. But why is the DHS not at least deporting those who already went through this tedious process and have been ordered to be deported? Doing so would not only help eliminate public charge and potential gang members and drug runners for MS-13, it would deter the current and future wave waiting at the “conveyor belt” through Mexico from making the trip north.

According to new data obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) via a FOIA request, there are 644,488 illegal aliens remaining in our country who have already been served final deportation orders. And those are just from the top four countries of origin – El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The IRLI shared much more data with CR. The total number of illegal aliens who remain in the country despite final deportation orders is 1,009,550.

In addition, there are roughly 1.1 million others from those four counties who have “pending final orders” and are close to receiving deportation orders. Those with pending final orders are usually individuals who have already been ordered deported by immigration judges but are appealing their case to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals (BIA), the appellate body of the DOJ’s administrative immigration courts.

That is a total of 1.7 million illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America with final or near-final orders of deportation. Those numbers are as of June 2018, right before the largest surge in Central Americans began over that summer and intensified in the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019. The total number of those ordered deported or with pending deportation orders for nationals of all countries of origin is 2.55 million.

Putting aside the debate over admissions at our front door, shouldn’t there be a comprehensive effort to empower and direct ICE to begin deporting as many of these people as possible?

The entire reason why Central Americans are now coming in record numbers is because they know that, even though their flawed asylum claims will ultimately be rejected, so long as they obtain entry and are released pending the court dates, they will not be deported. But there is nothing reasonable keeping us from carrying out deportation orders that have already been issued.

It’s quite evident that if we begin deporting specifically the Central American families and teenagers, it will stop the flow of newcomers. By my count, there have been close to one million Central American family members and unaccompanied teens who have come since 2013. Very few have been deported. In fiscal year 2017, only 1.1 percent of non-Mexican family unit aliens had been repatriated and only 1.8 percent of non-Mexican unaccompanied alien minors had been repatriated. Those are pretty good odds to bank on for people seeking to flee poverty and enter the protection of America. What if we began to deport the 450,976 Central Americans with final deportation orders and accelerated the cases of the 715,930 who are close to final deportation orders?

If we prioritized both DOJ adjudicative resources and ICE deportation resources for these people more than for anyone else, it would immediately send the signal back to the next wave in Central America that we actually enforce our laws, according to Thomas Homan, former ICE associate director in the Obama administration. “ICE should do a nationwide operation to locate, arrest, and remove those who have entered the U.S. illegally, including family units, who have had their due process, lost their cases, and have been ordered removed by a judge, said Homan in a statement to CR. “If a final order issued by a federal judge doesn’t mean anything and it isn’t executed, then there is no integrity in the entire system.”

Of course, in general, it makes sense for ICE to prioritize the deportation of the two million known criminal aliens. But it is well worthwhile to divert resources for a few months to deport those who are fueling the current boundless migration.

Why does it seem like Central American families are being treated like a protected class over and above even the benefits that the radical judges are conferring on them – to the point that we are not even bothering to deport those who already have gone through the process? “We did that about three years ago, and it had a significant impact on illegal border crossings,” said Homan, remembering how even Obama eventually shut down the first wave of Central American teens that began in 2013-2014. “It worked to slow down the surge in subsequent years in FY15 and FY16. For those in Central America that knowingly enter the US in violation of law to take advantage of the loopholes, they need to realize that we are a nation of laws and after you have been afforded due process at great taxpayer expense, you must abide by the decisions of our court system.”

There are a total of 1.7 million individuals who have already exhausted all of their options to game our loopholes. Pursuant to law, they must be deported, yet enough illegal aliens to fill up the entire city of Philadelphia remain in this country against the will of the American people.

How is it that, in 1954, President Eisenhower directly and indirectly removed over one million illegal aliens in just a few months without any lawfare, yet we don’t have the resources to remove the million with final deportation orders or the two million known criminal aliens, and certainly not both? Where there is a will, there is a way. (For more from the author of “Why Aren’t We Deporting Illegal Aliens Who Already Have Deportation Orders?” please click HERE)

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Border walls work well to defend a defined border. They are worthless in defending against our amnesty policies of bringing in illegal immigrants from the other side of a wall.

The entire discussion over a border wall and a few billion in appropriations is moot if the judicial tyranny and lawfare driving our asylum policies continue. Border walls are very effective, but if we actively bring in even the illegal immigrants standing outside the fence and believe it is our duty to do so, then what would change if we had more walls?

In recent days, the border migration in the El Paso sector has shifted somewhat from New Mexico to the city of El Paso, Texas, itself. Almost 1,000 people, mainly from Guatemala, came in just on Wednesday of last week. In El Paso, we have the much-vaunted 18-foot fence that is the paradigm for what Trump would like to build elsewhere. The question is, how did these illegal aliens get into the country if they were behind the fence? They did not climb over, as has been done at the Yuma fence in recent months, and were not at an opening or port of entry. It appears that they just stand at the fence and, wait with the confidence that agents will come pick them up.

Reuters reports that those who came in last week in El Paso were not deterred by the fence because Border Patrol herds them to the gates and brings them in. Reuters snapped photos showing the migrants waiting at the south side of the border wall to be picked up. As the El Paso Times reported, “Some migrants reported waiting most of the day Wednesday for the Border Patrol to pick them up as they stood on U.S. soil along the Rio Grande levee on the south side of the tall metal border fence.”

When I reached out to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by email and asked whether agents are now actively picking up illegal immigrants from the south side of the fence, and whether agents are getting legal guidance mandating such action, I was told, “They generally cross the river bed from Juarez and walk up to the south side of the border wall and wait for agents to pick them up.”

The political implication of this development in the eyes of the public and Trump’s base in particular cannot be overstated. In almost every area of our border, and certainly along the Rio Grande River, our border fences are recessed a significant distance into our interior. If this administration is going to continue to accede to the notion that it must bring in anyone who makes it onto our land, even when they are on the other side of the fence, this means that the border wall is moot. CBP could construct an impervious wall from Brownsville to San Diego a hundred feet high, but if our agents are still directed to pick up those on the other side, then what is the point?

Fences worked great back when apprehending illegal aliens meant deporting them expeditiously. Now, we have made it our policy to release almost anyone we catch from Central America. Thus, they walk right up to the wall and we go around and bring them in. Once in, they are released within days, sometimes within 24 hours.

Consequently, this is no longer about more assets, fencing, and border agents like it was in the past, when we were actually trying to deter and turn back illegal immigrants. With the current flow of Central Americans, and with our administration abiding by the most extreme lower court opinions, all the assets we throw at our border will actually be marshalled into facilitating the invasion rather than deterring it. Tragically, in some ways, it’s even worse to have agents in places where there is fencing, because agents are the immigrants’ ticket to entry when they would otherwise have no easy way in.

More fencing and more agents would always be worthwhile in deterring the criminal activity and the cartel member who cross with drugs and known criminals and who will never surrender themselves to agents at a border wall. However, it will do nothing to stop the general flow of illegal immigration until the administration changes its policies or Trump uses his inherent and delegated authority to shut off all cross-border migration.

At some point, conservatives must start asking what this administration’s end game is. Even Obama eventually got tough and started deporting more illegal aliens when they surged in 2014 just because of the sheer embarrassment to his administration. The Trump administration, on the other hand, seems to be following every last extreme lower court ruling over and beyond even what the courts are asking for. At some point, the Constitution is not a suicide pact, much less unconstitutional lower court rulings. If this administration is so weak that it will actively bring in anyone who comes here and then release them, it is a more severe amnesty than anything we fought against in previous years. We are far past the point of debating a border wall. This administration seriously needs to decide whether we have a border at all. (For more from the author of “Border Patrol Is Bringing in Illegal Aliens From Behind the Fences” please click HERE)

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Congress could never get away with creating constitutional rights for illegal aliens to remain here, yet a single lower court just did so on Thursday. And where Congress would face deep reprisal in the next election, faceless judges will never feel the heat.

Conservatives fear that extreme Democrats might actually abolish ICE and all immigration enforcement, but the lower courts are already systematically abolishing ICE’s authority, nullifying immigration enforcement statutes, violating separation of powers, and constantly increasing the wave of bogus asylum-seekers that they originally spawned with other radical rulings. The latest ruling from the Ninth Circuit demonstrates that unless Republicans and the president begin pushing back against these radical judges and delegitimizing their rulings, Democrats will get everything they want without ever facing electoral backlash or even the need to win elections.

It’s truly hard to overstate the outrageously harmful effects of Thursday’s Ninth Circuit ruling. For the first time in our history, the courts have fabricated a constitutional right for those denied asylum to appeal to federal courts for any reason.

Here’s the background.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants are flooding our border, claiming the formula of “credible fear” of persecution. They get to stay indefinitely while they ignore their court dates in immigration court. Because of an amalgamation of several prior activist court rulings, mainly by this very circuit, roughly 90 percent of credible fear claims are approved by asylum officers and the claimants shielded from deportation, even though asylum status is ultimately rejected almost every time by an immigration judge. Unfortunately, by that point it’s too late for the American people, who are stuck with the vast majority of these claimants remaining indefinitely in the country. Yet rather than ending this sham incentive, the Ninth Circuit drove a truck through immigration law by asserting that there is now a constitutional right for even the few who are denied initial credible fear status and are placed in deportation proceedings to appeal their denials, not just to an administrative immigration judge but to a federal Article III judge for any reason.

In past cases, the courts merely twisted statutes and contorted their plain meaning. In this case, for the first time ever and in direct contrast to a ruling by the Third Circuit in 2016, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the immigration statute that denies the federal courts jurisdiction to hear such appeals is unconstitutional under the constitutional requirement of habeas corpus, thereby giving 7.8 billion people in the world habeas corpus access to our courts. This will allow numerous illegal aliens, including the brand-new ones entering now, to stay indefinitely while they litigate themselves into status. The ACLU, which of course led this lawsuit on behalf of a Sri Lankan migrant denied asylum, wasn’t kidding when it proclaimed, “The historical and practical importance of this ruling cannot be overstated.”

This is one of many recent violations of sovereignty doctrine, known as “plenary power doctrine.” This long-standing principle in the courts is that while aliens have due process rights against criminal punishment, they have no rights to litigate against deportation, which is a mere extension of sovereignty, other than the process laid out by Congress. This principle “has become about as firmly embedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government,” not “merely” by “a page of history … but a whole volume” (Galvan v. Press). The concept is “inherent in sovereignty,” consistent with “ancient principles” of international law, and “to be exercised exclusively by the political branches of government.” (Kleindienst v. Mandel).

What is so outrageous about this case is that Congress explicitly stripped the courts of any jurisdiction to hear such claims. The reason why the district judge, who was an Obama appointee, refused to even hear this case is because 8 U.S.C. §1252(e)(2) prohibits the federal courts (not to be confused with DOJ administrative courts) from hearing habeas corpus claims against expedited removal of those denied their credible fear claims unless of course they have a claim that they are a citizen or a legal permanent resident. In this case, the three Clinton appointees of this Ninth Circuit panel, Wallace Tashima, Margaret McKeown, and Richard Paez, ruled for the first time that this provision is unconstitutional and that the district court must hear the case.

The court used the Boumediene v. Bush decision, which created a right to habeas corpus for enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay, as the basis for its decision. That decision in itself was an egregious warping of the Constitution, a decision that Scalia angrily predicted that “the Nation will live to regret.” However, the important distinction is that Boumediene was a case of indefinite detention, whereas this is a case where we are enforcing our sovereignty and getting rid of the person, who can live freely wherever he wants. Applying habeas corpus to deportation is bonkers even by the Boumediene standard.

Now that there is a circuit split on this revolutionary idea, court watchers on all sides predict the Supreme Court will take up the case. While conservatives are fairly confident that this will be added to the endless list of Ninth Circuit reversals by SCOTUS (although I have my concerns about Gorsuch in this case), conservatives need to realize the factors creating an emergency with sovereignty and the lower courts:

We’ve seen over and over again how lower courts create a legal, political, and policy momentum for creating new rights. If they are not nipped in the bud and delegitimized immediately, they wind up growing and eventually being codified, even if initially reversed by the Supreme Court. This has happened with almost every phantom right created by the courts and has already begun with immigration law. We are at the cusp of the courts doing with immigration what they did with abortion and gay marriage, even though it took years for the Left to win in those cases. All of the justices except for Clarence Thomas succumb to pressure to varying degrees and will eventually go along with much of the anti-sovereignty doctrine building in the lower courts.

Many conservatives are suggesting that we “fix” our immigration laws to stop the asylum fraud, among other problems at the border. What this case demonstrates is that courts are so radical they are not just twisting the wording of statutes, they are downright invalidating them by creating new constitutional rights to immigrate. They are even brazenly invalidating statutes that block the courts from hearing cases, as we saw with the TPS amnesty case. Keeping out and deporting aliens as well as defining court jurisdiction are two of the most unquestionable and categorical powers of Congress, and they are backed by case law dating back to our Founding. This is no longer about any one statute. There is no statute to fix. Remember, we already fixed our immigration laws in 1996. Many of the things we want to do, including kicking the courts out of these cases, were already done in 1996, including the statute at issue here. This law passed the Senate unanimously! Passing more laws while continuing to legitimize lower court supremacy won’t help. If we continue to agree that lower courts rule over immigration, no amount of congressional changes could help, because the courts will rule the changes unconstitutional. This is why it’s time to grab the bull by the horns and attack the notion of judicial jurisdiction over these issues to begin with. The Trump administration needs to begin pushing back against the courts.

There is something much bigger occurring here. Putting aside particular smaller areas of immigration law, the legal profession has now pulled the trigger on a long-standing goal of what they refer to as “applying constitutional norms” to foreign nationals, not just in terms of criminal proceedings, but in the context of immigration claims themselves.

Justice Robert Jackson, the great champion of due process and the dissenter in the Japanese internment case, described it this way: “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.” Due process for aliens in the context of immigration decisions is whatever Congress says it is. As the court said in Lem Moon Sing v. United States, “The decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within powers expressly conferred by Congress, are due process of law.” Liberals have been trying to attack this for decades and ensure that even the aliens we successfully deport expeditiously (increasingly a small number) can remain here indefinitely and tie up our courts with lawsuits. If we allow this game to continue, the flow at our border will make what Europe is dealing with look like child’s play.

Every week, we cede another piece of our sovereignty to unelected courts who are actually violating longstanding Supreme Court precedent. The conservative movement needs to push this administration to stand up and put the Supreme Court on notice to guard its own precedents and doctrines and that if it fails to rein in its own quite inferior courts, the administration will certainly not regard those decisions as superior to our own laws. Trump has no other choice. (For more from the author of “While Everyone Sleeps, the Courts Are Abolishing All Immigration Enforcement” please click HERE)

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On Thursday, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border who fail their initial threshold of showing a “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries are entitled to a judicial appeal before they can be deported. The decision could severely undermine the Trump Administration’s efforts at securing the border and expeditiously deporting frivolous would-be aslyees in California and Arizona, which are both border states under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit.

Law360 reports:

The Ninth Circuit looked back at cases dating to the 1700s, determining that under review procedures set by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2008 case known as Boumediene and by legal precedent set in several immigration cases dating back to the 1950s, Thuraissigiam should be covered by the suspension clause [of tbe U.S. Constitution] because he was arrested in the United States, according to the opinion.

The court went on to hold that a procedure that would not allow the California court to review the immigration judge’s determination in Thuraissigiam’s case would be unconstitutional, according to Thursday’s opinion.

“We … reject the government’s contention that because, in its view, Thuraissigiam lacks due process rights, there are no rights for the suspension clause to protect,” the opinion read. “Boumediene foreclosed that argument by holding that, whether or not due process was satisfied, the suspension clause might require more.”

(Read more from “Insanity: Ninth Circuit Finds Constitutional Right for Some Aliens to Appeal Deportation Orders” HERE)

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