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Over 50,000 Illegal Aliens From Terror-Prone Countries Remain Despite Final Deportation Orders

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It’s peculiar enough that in the years following 9/11, we’ve brought in a record number of legal immigrants from countries with a strong presence of terrorist organizations. It’s downright puzzling that there are 51,000 illegal aliens from countries flagged as terror hot spots who still remain in our country, even after receiving final deportation orders.

Last week, I reported that there are over one million illegal aliens who remain in this country despite having received final deportation orders after endless extra-constitutional “due process.” Another 1.5 million have pending final deportation orders and are on their final appeals. The lion’s share of them are from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Clearly, ICE lacks the resources, or in some cases the broader department lacks the political will, to deport these people. For example, evidently, if an illegal alien becomes a flight attendant, she then has a “political” right to evade our sovereignty laws.

Be it as it may, the first concern of our immigration agents should be those illegal aliens who remain in the country who hail from global terror hot spots. According to the official DHS definition, Special Interest Aliens (SIAs) are individuals from 35 countries that “have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations,” aka countries from the Middle East or those in Africa and Asia with a presence of terrorist networks. While the list of countries has evolved over time and continues to vary from agency to agency, according to a 2011 DHS inspector general’s report, ICE lists the following countries as Specially Designated Countries (SDCs) that are said to “promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members”:

Afghanistan
Algeria
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Djibouti
Egypt
Eritrea
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kuwait
Lebanon
Libya
Malaysia
Mauritania
Morocco
Territories of Gaza West Bank
Oman
Pakistan
Philippines
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Somalia
Sudan
Syria
Tajikistan
Thailand
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
United Arab Emirates
Uzbekistan
Yemen

Pairing those countries against the data I’ve obtained from the Immigration Reform Law Institute for my column last week concerning aliens with final and “pending final” deportation orders, here is the tally of “SIAs” who remain in the country even at this stage.

Notes: I added South Sudan, which is now considered a separate country. I also added Sri Lanka because Border Patrol has listed this country as SIA-designated in the past, and we’ve had a significant number of Sri Lankans come to our border in recent years.

It is mind-boggling to think that 51,000 illegal aliens from these countries could still remain here despite final deportation orders. Another 60,000 are still working their final appeal. Remember, we have had enough security issues with some legal immigrants from these countries who are better vetted. Can you imagine how little we know about these illegal aliens who remain in our country?

I asked ICE if there is a policy in place to “prioritize the deportation of those, say from Somalia and Iran, more than from countries without a presence of terrorist organizations.” Brendan Raedy, a spokesman for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office, replied, “I wouldn’t say any particular country or set of countries is prioritized for removals, but rather that ICE prioritizes its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security.”

Clearly, Border Patrol has a special modus operandi for dealing with those from these countries who are apprehended at the border. This might help us gather such intel for a threat assessment on the front end, but many illegal aliens from these countries also overstay their visas, which means that ICE, through deportation proceedings, will be the first agency to deal with them as illegal immigrants. It’s perplexing that there is no procedure in place to focus specifically on those from specially designated countries.

Jessica Vaughan, who has tracked interior enforcement issues for the Center for Immigration Studies for decades, expressed frustration about these numbers in light of how hard it is to even land a final deportation order these days. “The constant onslaught against immigration enforcement that is occurring in the courts, in sanctuary city council chambers, in state legislatures, and even in Congress is having an effect on ICE’s ability to do its job,” said Vaughan. “The dysfunctional state of our immigration courts makes matters worse. Even criminal aliens can milk our due process to stave off deportation for many years, through endless appeals, asylum applications, skipping out on proceedings, pop-up marriages, grievances against immigration officers, and more, and this can become a public safety threat. Equally concerning is the number of non-departed aliens from countries associated with terrorism. There is no way that ICE or other counterterrorism law enforcement agencies can stay on top of potential threats that might be lurking in this huge haystack of 50,000 cases.”

Astoundingly, all of these 2.5 million illegals with final or pending final deportation orders are still counted in the Census and distort our representation!

Vaughan believes the administration can do more to clear the backlog in the system. “The Trump administration needs to take steps to streamline the deportation process and not allow all these cases to languish. They have made great progress on getting uncooperative countries to take back their citizens, but there is more that can be done. Additional resources should be dedicated to working the docket of people who have absconded, especially the 300,000 criminals who are among the non-deported. In addition, ICE needs to try to keep more deportation cases out of court by using expedited removal and other accelerated forms of due process.”

Unfortunately, now some of the original progress in deportations is faltering because ICE resources are being drained to deal with the new gushing flow at the border on a daily basis. Interior arrests by ICE dropped 12 percent for the first three months of this fiscal year compared to the same time period in FY 2018. This is yet another reason why stopping this flow must be the number-one job of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Senate.

It’s truly amazing to watch how we refuse to expend our resources to maintain basic sovereignty over our territory and protect ourselves from security concerns of foreign nationals, including those from terror-prone countries. In the context of the news of the day, when we now know that the Mueller investigation drained off 40 FBI agents, issued over 2,800 subpoenas and roughly 500 search warrants, and interviewed about 500 witnesses just for a political investigation, one is left with the disquieting thought that the political leadership in the federal law enforcement agencies are not exactly prioritizing the biggest safety concerns to America when parceling out their resources. (For more from the author of “Over 50,000 Illegal Aliens From Terror-Prone Countries Remain Despite Final Deportation Orders” please click HERE)

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How Presidents Bush and Clinton Dealt With a Much Smaller Wave of ‘Asylum’ Migration

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After just a handful of Haitian migrants successfully landed on the shores of Florida, President George H.W. Bush issued the “Kennebunkport Order” (Executive Order 12807) on May 24, 1992, to affirm the sovereignty of America and protect our people against harmful effects of such migration. The order directed the Coast Guard to seek out and interdict any Haitian boats and promptly return them to Haiti or another country of origin, irrespective of their claims, in light of the fact that most were coming for economic reasons. Fast-forward 26 years to a Central American migration built on the same asylum fraud, with hundreds of thousands more people and more harmful effects on our border and interior. Isn’t it time for a similar strategy?

President Clinton called the policy “cruel” and “illegal” during his campaign and promised to treat the Haitian boat migrants like refugees and process them. Then, after Clinton won the election, his promise spawned a new wave that looked like it would bring in as many as 125,000 migrants. Clinton recognized the real-world consequences of his words, and on January 15, just five days before his inauguration, Clinton announced that he would continue Bush’s policy of a closed door and warned migrants that “leaving by boat is not the route to freedom.”

It’s important to remember that there was a bipartisan notion, built on 200 years of history, that immigration should never burden Americans in any way. That is why, even before Bush’s order, most of the Haitians were taken to Guantanamo Bay, off our soil, so that the pending adjudication would not place the American people on the hook for their fiscal burden, potential diseases, crime, social problems, and children born in the U.S. When the facility at Guantanamo became full is when the Bush administration began the policy of completely ignoring their claims and sending them straight back home.

While the liberal groups did challenge the order in lower courts, the courts declined to place an injunction on the policy as they do today. The Second Circuit eventually sided with the migrant groups on the merits, but the Supreme Court, in Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc. (1993), categorically reversed it 8-1. The high court noted that the president’s delegated authority under 212(f) and 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) override any asylum considerations and that the president had full authority to exclude anyone from our shores. This case was cited by Chief Justice Roberts in the travel ban case of Trump v. Hawaii last year. This should be the end of the story as it applies to today’s problem.

In fact, the case is even stronger with the Central Americans. The Haitian migration coincided with the military coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and some were concerned his supporters would legitimately be persecuted under the new government, which was actively opposed by the Clinton administration. Indeed, 10,000 of those processed at Guantanamo eventually won the right to come to America. No such dynamic has unfolded in Central America. In fact, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales is an ally of America and close with President Trump. This mass migration today is all about economic migration. And whereas the exclusion of Haitians was implemented before any harm was done to our homeland, nearly one million Central Americans coming as families or teens have been brought over our border, into our communities, and into our schools since 2014. The influx is now on pace for 1.2 million a year if nothing is done to stop it, as DHS Secretary Nielsen now predicts 100,000 will have arrived by the end of this month alone.

In 1993, Clinton promised to beef up more processing centers in Haiti itself to adjudicate asylum requests, but he would not allow them to come here and make the American people foot the bill. Moreover, he made it clear that much of his flip-flop was based on the fact that these people were economic migrants, not victims of political persecution.

As Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., said in defense of Clinton’s change of heart, “When you’re faced with new realities, then you have to deal with them. … Clinton the candidate did not have the benefit of much information that President-elect Clinton has.”

The lesson from the Haitian migration is twofold. All our political leaders, including judges, understood that when there is a mass exodus of economic migrants scamming us with asylum requests, we need not commit national suicide and let them in to make those requests on the American people’s dime. There is no reason we can’t dismiss the migration from Central America wholesale as not subject to asylum law, just as Bush and Clinton did with Haiti. The delegated power accorded to the president to block all entry overrides even legitimate asylum considerations and certainly fraudulent ones.

There is simply no reason, based on settled law, that the president can’t give an address directly to the Central Americans and inform them, as Clinton did with the Haitians, that endangering your families to come here through the cartels is “not the route to freedom.” He should promise to set up processing in their home countries for them to apply, but state unequivocally that it will not be done on our soil. He should then beef up the military at our border to block anyone from entering and immediately turn them back. Rather than plucking them from the border and bringing them to our territory, we should return them to the other side.

What about if they step foot on our land nevertheless? If the president uses his lawful powers to bar entry, that means, by definition, nobody could have effected a lawful entry. The Second Circuit already said this. On January 14, 1998, President Clinton issued a terse one-page order invoking 212(f) and 215(a) to shut down all immigration from Sierra Leone until the military coup agreed to reinstall the democratically elected government. Clinton viewed the security of that government as sufficiently in America’s “national interest” to shut down immigration. The Second Circuit (Sesay v. Immigration and Naturalization Service INS, 2003) tossed out a claim of asylum from a Sierra Leone national, noting that he could not have lawfully entered the country at the time, given the president’s order. Thus, irrespective of the merits of his claim, he could not be eligible, entirely because the president shut off the spigot, even though the man managed to step foot in our country. As we’ve noted so many times, nothing trumps sovereignty, and nobody can unilaterally assert jurisdiction.

Congress’s own research arm, the Congressional Research Service, states that “Collectively, Sale and these other decisions suggest that Section 212(f) gives the Executive significant power to bar or impose conditions upon the entry of aliens ‘on our shores seeking admission’ or ‘on the threshold of initial entry.’”

Besides, the president has inherent Article II powers to prevent anyone or any product from entering our shores. As Justice Thomas wrote in his recent concurrence in Trump v. Hawaii, which is being ignored by the lower courts every day, “Section 1182(f) does not set forth any judicially enforceable limits that constrain the President. … Nor could it, since the President has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country.”

Just a few weeks of this policy would grind the current invasion to a halt, as it did with the Haitians in 1993.

Trump should give an address to the nation from the Rose Garden with his attorney general, making this case to the American people. None other than Attorney General William Barr was also attorney general at the time of the Haitian boat crisis. He of all people should be able to make the constitutional and precedent case to the American people and show how lower courts have no right to interfere.

Some things never change in life, and history does indeed repeat itself. The only thing that has changed is our resolve as a nation to preserve our sovereignty and to protect Americans first and foremost from the ill effects of mass migration.

Earlier this decade, when courts were preventing Arizona from defending its sovereignty when Obama refused to enforce federal immigration law, Justice Scalia asked, “Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws? A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding?” (For more from the author of “How Presidents Bush and Clinton Dealt With a Much Smaller Wave of ‘Asylum’ Migration” please click HERE)

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2 More Americans Killed by Illegal Aliens Who Should Have Been Deported

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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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At SCOTUS This Week: Conservatives Won an Immigration Battle but Continue to Lose the War

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If lower courts, over the course of a few years, systematically gut an area of our law and Constitution with completely illegitimate rulings, and finally, after five years, the Supreme Court walks back one of their rulings while explicitly preserving the foundation of their civil disobedience against the law, is that even a victory?

A headline on Tuesday heralded (or decried) a “Trump victory on immigration detention” at the Supreme Court. In fact, this has nothing to do with Trump; the case at hand was one of the many ways California district judges and the Ninth Circuit impeded even the Obama administration from deporting the worst of the worst. In Nielsen v. Preap, the Supreme Court reversed a Ninth Circuit decision preventing ICE from detaining criminal aliens without bond hearings who were released by sanctuary cities for a period of time before ICE recaptured them. After allowing countless violent criminal aliens to go unapprehended and commit an unknown number of avoidable crimes for almost five years, the Supreme Court finally slapped down this nonsense.

That is the good news.

The bad news is that the five justices in the majority just foreclosed only one of the many avenues the Left has to block deportations and violate our sovereignty in just one step of the ever-growing deportation process. As the lower courts and the legal profession continue to engage in civil disobedience against our immigration laws, the Supreme Court, in the Preap decision, implicitly blessed almost all of the other lawsuits in similar but slightly different cases by explicitly greenlighting judicial jurisdiction to hear these cases to begin with. Clarence Thomas, who was joined by Gorsuch in opposing this rationale, made it clear that current law bars the courts from hearing all litigation against the deportation procedures at this step in the process. Thus, the difference between the concurring opinion of Thomas and Gorsuch and the majority opinion of the other three Republican appointees is akin to the difference between a surgeon slicing out 100 percent of a tumor and slicing out only part of a tumor, which, as anyone knows, is all the difference.

Open-borders political and legal advocates work together to create policies and legal loopholes to direct a simultaneous push-pull on our immigration system and legal precedents. Everyone in this country should agree that illegal aliens who have been convicted of crimes (even in a state like California) should be immediately detained by ICE upon their release from prison so they can begin deportation proceedings. Yet sanctuary states let them out onto the streets without notifying ICE. Given the complexity of early release and good time credits accrued in prison, it’s impossible for ICE to fully keep tabs on who is being released when sanctuaries don’t allow them to station agents in the jails and prisons.

That’s only half the problem. After they create a dynamic where it takes a while for ICE to discover and apprehend the aliens on their own, the lawyers swoop in and say that ICE can no longer detain them based on the original criminal conviction because there was a gap in time between release from prison and re-apprehension by ICE. Indeed, in 2014, a district judge in northern California issued an injunction on these detainers, causing unimaginable harm to public safety by releasing criminal aliens on bail. Just the fact that these absurd rulings can result in such a consequential result for 4-5 years when we all know the Supreme Court will overturn the ruling is in itself a constitutional crisis. We need to end these lower court injunctions once and for all.

But it’s worse than that. Our statutes, for the most part, are not broken. In 1996, Congress, with near unanimous support and the signature of President Bill Clinton, passed an immigration reform bill that was designed to shut down all this lawfare. The numerous statutes explicitly stripped the courts of any power to adjudicate cases, much less place injunctions, on detention of aliens in several stages of the deportation process. The language is as categorical as can be. For example, §1252(b)(9) prohibits all federal courts from reviewing “all questions of law and fact, including interpretation and application of constitutional and statutory provisions, arising from any action taken or proceeding brought to remove an alien from the United States,” except for the final stage after the final deportation order is given, which was not the case here.

Yet Justices Alito, Roberts, and Kavanaugh have now affirmed that this unanimous action of Congress explicitly barring the courts from getting involved is meaningless. They found a lawyerly way of explaining why these three statutes won’t apply here. The end result is that the lower courts will continue to come back with more injunctions on 99 percent of the other cases even with criminal aliens at this stage of deportation, and certainly in other stages of the deportation process. Remember, we already thought we won a big case last year in Rodriguez v. Jennings, reversing the Ninth Circuit on demanding bond hearings for criminal aliens every few months in ICE detention. Yet it didn’t foreclose on this case because it was slightly different.

As Thomas said clearly, “I continue to believe that no court has jurisdiction to decide questions concerning the detention of aliens before final orders of removal have been entered.” He was joined only by Justice Gorsuch.

Alito, writing for the majority, explicitly invited the immigration lawyers not only to come back with more illegal adjudications against statute, but to then file constitutional claims on these detentions. “Our decision today on the meaning of that statutory provision does not foreclose as-applied challenges—that is, constitutional challenges to applications of the statute as we have now read it.”

Then, Kavanaugh wrote another concurrence in which he wanted “to emphasize the narrowness of the issue before us and, in particular, to emphasize what this case is not about.” He went on to affirm previous bad precedent of the court, which has become a hallmark of his tenure on the bench so far.

Folks, this case is a textbook example of how we lose the war while winning occasional battles. Since most of the “conservative” justices refuse to categorically rebuke the lower courts on standing, jurisdiction, or more forcefully on the merits of constitutional claims for rights for aliens, they are almost overtly allowing the lower court civil disobedience to continue. Relying on the Supreme Court to tame this disobedience is like spitting in the wind. Every injunction lasts for years, doing irrevocable harm to our sovereignty, security, and society. In some cases, the Supreme Court agrees with the rulings; in others, it tacitly allows the injunctions to stand without taking up the appeal. But even when the justices reverse the orders, they do so on such narrow grounds that they essentially grant a full victory to the truculent immigration law profession with endless resources to come back for more.

Heck, it’s gotten so bad that now even after the Supreme Court sided with Trump in light of the unprecedented lower court injunction mandating that Trump, as commander in chief, be forced to accept “transgenders” into the military, a lower court is now refusing to take off the injunction!

This is why it’s a joke for some of my colleagues to suggest that we need to “fix our laws.” One could never write laws clearly enough for the judicial activists who openly want to strike down these laws and believe that immigration enforcement is unconstitutional. That’s what the Ninth Circuit did last week when it created constitutional rights to habeas corpus in deportation proceedings. The laws passed in 1952 and 1996 are as clear as can be in most circumstances. And relying on Roberts, Kavanaugh and company to push back in a meaningful way has proven to be a fool’s errand.

This, at its core, is why we are facing the emergency at our border today, and this is why it will continue to get worse until the other branches begin asserting their will against the inferior courts. If the Supreme Court refuses to make statute and its own case law supreme over the inferior courts, the Trump administration should do it. (For more from the author of “At SCOTUS This Week: Conservatives Won an Immigration Battle but Continue to Lose the War” please click HERE)

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Why Aren’t We Deporting Illegal Aliens Who Already Have Deportation Orders?

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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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Democrats Tell ICE to Take ‘Very Ill’ Baby to Hospital, but There’s a Major Problem With Their Demand

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) disputed claims Monday that they are refusing medical care for a severely sick infant that is currently being detained with his father at the border.

The claim that ICE is housing a sick infant originated in a tweet thread over the weekend by RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal services to illegal immigrants. RAICES asserted that they are in contact with a father who said his baby is suffering from “nonstop diarrhea,” “stomach pain” and is unable to eat. The family is allegedly being kept in the Karnes detention center in Texas. . .

ICE, however, denied that they are in custody of any sick child.

(Read more from “Democrats Tell ICE to Take ‘Very Ill’ Baby to Hospital, but There’s a Major Problem With Their Demand” HERE)

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Border Patrol Is Bringing in Illegal Aliens From Behind the Fences

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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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ICE Union Officers to Trump: ‘”Catch and Release” Is Not Just Happening, It’s in Overdrive’

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In a letter sent to President Donald Trump on Monday, ICE officers said they still have to catch and release illegal aliens into the U.S. because they don’t have the resources they need — and that they are forced to waste man-hours on a border enforcement shell game.

First reported by the Washington Times and signed by National ICE Council president Chris Crane and other union leaders, the letter details that the situation currently at the border doesn’t reflect the president’s promises to get tough on illegal immigration.

“As you know, every day thousands of illegal aliens are being released into the United States by your Administration,” reads a copy of the letter obtained by Blaze Media. “‘Catch and Release’ is not just happening, it’s in overdrive. Catch and release must continue as ICE doesn’t have sufficient custody space to hold the massive number of family units illegally entering the United States every day.”

The letter then goes onto describe a work arrangement inside the Department of Homeland Security in which ICE officers are being told to perform duties related to the ongoing catch-and-release policy in order to keep Customs and Border Protection personnel from doing it.

“So ridiculous is the combined DHS, CBP and ICE policy, that Border Patrol Agents and contractors are prohibited from opening the doors of Border Patrol detention vans after transporting immigration detainees to a location for release,” the letter claims. “The Border Patrol transports the detainees for release, but ICE Officers must follow in a separate vehicle for the sole purpose of opening the doors of the van upon reaching the destination so the detainees can exit the vehicle.”

As a result of this arrangement, the officers claim, ICE personnel are being pulled from working on other agency duties like combatting terrorism and hunting down fugitives: “Hundreds of man hours are wasted each day at a time of crisis on the border when the focus of our leadership should be streamlining efforts and eliminating redundant and unnecessary work.”

“DHS resources on the border are overwhelmed,” the letter says.

“Political games in Washington, DC have rendered the United States completely incapable of controlling its southern border. While agencies like ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) cannot control the agendas of political leaders, they have a responsibility to properly manage our resources, under the hand we’ve been dealt, in a manner that best provides for enforcement generally, and first and foremost public safety. That isn’t happening.”

Indeed, contrary to President Trump’s calls to end catch-and-release, illegal immigrants are still being released into the American interior after being apprehended by U.S. immigration authorities. For example, late last week, the Arizona Republic reported that around 50 or more illegal immigrants were dropped off at a Phoenix-area bus stop, overwhelming volunteers.

Last week, CR’s Daniel Horowitz explained the relationship between continued catch-and-release policies and February’s record illegal immigration numbers. Additionally, Reuters reports, current asylum policies have made existing sections of border fencing a magnet for would be border-crossers, rather than a deterrent.

“Again, as there is no custody space, the hundreds to thousands apprehended each day by CBP must be released to charitable organizations that facilitate their travel to locations throughout the U.S.,” the first section of the letter concludes. “In a nutshell, this is ‘Catch and Release.’ And this is where the utter nonsense begins.”

At time of publishing, the Department of Homeland Security had not responded to Blaze Media’s request for comment. (For more from the author of “ICE Union Officers to Trump: ‘”Catch and Release” Is Not Just Happening, It’s in Overdrive'” please click HERE)

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While Everyone Sleeps, the Courts Are Abolishing All Immigration Enforcement

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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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Just ONE Year’s Flow of Illegal Immigration Will Cost up to $150 BILLION

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Do American taxpayers matter in the debate over bringing in under our government completely unchecked number of illegal immigrants with few resources of their own?

On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified before the House Homeland Security Committee that at the current pace of illegal immigration, we will receive 990,000 migrants per year. Most of them are families from the most impoverished parts of Central America who, thanks to catch-and-release, will never be deported unless policies change. Has anyone thought for a moment what this does to the American taxpayer, not to mention the social and cultural problems in our communities and schools?

As explained by border officials, unlike past waves of Mexican migrants, most of these migrants are never being deported. What is the lifetime cost of one year’s flow of non-deported asylum seekers?

In 2017, Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies gave a conservative estimate that the net fiscal cost of each illegal immigrant crossing is $74,722. He used the fiscal cost estimates of immigrant based on education attainment from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) in order to calculate the cost of the average illegal alien. But as Camarota notes, the NAS uses “net present value,” which applies less value to the costs down the road than the immediate costs. He estimates that a straight approximation of “the actual net lifetime fiscal cost of illegal border-crossers, given their education levels, is possibly $140,000 to $150,000 each in their lifetimes.” These numbers include costs like criminal justice, education, and general use of public services balanced against taxes paid, which for a great many illegal immigrants is net zero or negative.

At 990,000 aliens per year, that would be a lifetime cost of between $138.6 billion and $148.5 billion our taxpayers are being forced to accept for a single year’s flow. Much of that cost will be borne by state and local governments, which don’t have the luxury of printing money to service debt.

But those numbers don’t even begin to fully quantify the enormity of the cost. Here are some important factors to consider:

Under our erroneous policies, when illegal aliens have babies in the U.S., those babies are considered Americans immediately and are eligible for every citizen benefit and welfare program under the sun. Many of these families are coming for the purpose of having American-born babies, which will augment the long-term cost both by adding to the population of those from illegal immigrant families and by allowing the families to collect more benefits.

In 2016, about 48 percent of border crossers were from Central America. Now it’s over 75 percent. Most of these people are from rural areas where, according to CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, “poverty and disease are rampant,” and large numbers of them “may have never seen a doctor, received immunizations, or lived in sanitary conditions.” In other words, the pool of migrants has likely grown even more impoverished and uneducated, on average, than when the CIS analysis was done on migration trends from several years ago.

Whereas in past years, most of the illegal immigrants were single adults from Mexico and often wanted to glide under the radar, the Central American families are almost treated as de facto refugees and will be more prone to openly use public benefits. In fact, a number of the children, who are a large share of the migration, are treated as refugees under the unaccompanied alien child policies. Therefore, the children and many of their sponsors will be eligible for more benefits than quantified in this standard analysis of illegal immigrant benefit use.

There are numerous upfront costs that are not included in long-term estimates of their costs to society. Given that they are coming in with so many illnesses and in such desperation, much of the increased costs for DHS, HHS, and even parts of our Defense budget are all the result of our refusal to have a long-standing deterrent at our border and to push back against the judicially legislated policies at our border.

Section 237 of the INA states that “any alien who, within five years after the date of entry, has become a public charge from causes not affirmatively shown to have arisen since entry is deportable.”

How is it that illegal immigrants can just pour into our country and there is no regard for their profound strain on our taxpayers? (For more from the author of “Just ONE Year’s Flow of Illegal Immigration Will Cost up to $150 BILLION” please click HERE)

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