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New Mexico Gov. Grisham Is Allowing the Invasion of Her State

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If a governor wishes a border invasion away, does that make her state safer? In the case of New Mexico’s Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, it appears so. Her method of dealing with the plea of her citizens in border counties for more resources is to yank even the existing insufficient resources while proclaiming that no border emergency exists.

Last week, I profiled Hidalgo County, New Mexico, as the hot spot for human and drug trafficking by the Sinaloa cartel. Despite what Gov. Grisham says, the numbers don’t lie. There has been an unconscionable 1,602 percent increase in family units crossing in the El Paso sector for the first three months of this fiscal year relative to this time in FY 2018. The number of unaccompanied alien minors also spiked the most in this sector. While illegal immigration has spiked in most border sectors since last year, no other border sector comes close in terms of increase in trajectory. The El Paso sector includes three border counties in New Mexico and two in west Texas. Most of the latest criminal activity appears to be coming in on the New Mexico side because the state lacks the political will Texas has to deter the cartels and also has limited resources in its border counties.

But in response to a letter written by Hidalgo County officials pleading for more resources to deal with the crime, health concerns, and sanitation problems both from the migrants and the cartel criminals, the governor rudely rebuffed the request and accused the local ranchers of being anti-immigrant stooges of President Trump. Now she has announced she is pulling the National Guard troops away from the border. The guard troops have been there since last April, when the president ordered the deployment in concert with the state governors.

“I’m not going to participate, nor do I think it’s appropriate in any shape or fashion to use the National Guard to attempt to militarize the border where we’re dealing with asylum seekers who their constitutional rights continue to be breached,” Grisham said at a press conference.

Well, the fact that she is at least admitting that there are now record numbers of asylees coming over is an improvement from her denying the crisis altogether. But she is purposely ignoring the fact that the cartels are using the bogus asylees as diversions to bring in all the criminal activity. I’ve got news for Grisham: the cartels have already militarized the border.

An open invitation to the cartels

Maybe Grisham should speak with border agents in the area. She might then understand that thousands of “asylum seekers” don’t just come over on their own. Ramiro Cordero, a local border agent, told the Albuquerque Journal that the cartels are bringing over drugs when agents are tied up with the asylum seekers, especially in areas with no fencing. He explained that this is why we are actually hardly catching any drugs between points of entry any more – because the cartels have our agents strapped down managing the invasion rather than deterring it:

Such seizures have become less common, however, Cordero said, due to the number of agents “busy” with large migrant groups crossing the southern border.

In 2006, he said most migrants were Mexican nationals and could be turned back to their country of origin, but now many are from Central America and have to be detained.

“You can imagine what that does to personnel,” he said. “This is what we’re facing.”

Yet Grisham opposes more manpower and more fencing at the border. As of now, Hidalgo County has either Normandy-style vehicle barriers or barbed-wire fencing only a few feet high that anyone can walk across. . .

The chicken wire will really stop them! The governor feels no need for a real wall or for the National Guard to help those border agents overwhelmed by the invasion.

County Manager Green, a registered Democrat (no tool of President Trump!), told me that her county is “nowhere close to where we need to be” in terms of resources from the state and the feds. She said she has just four sheriff’s deputies to deal with the increased crime from the cartels, and the state has only provided six troopers from the Department of Public Safety and 12 National Guardsmen.

“We still receive calls from ranchers who don’t feel they have been heard,” said Green. “Nor do they feel like a real solution is in the works by the state. This has been problematic for years, yet it seems to be more pronounced over the last three months. Most ranchers are fearful for several reasons to report incidents that continue to occur; therefore there isn’t an accurate data collection of actual occurrences they are faced with daily!”

Green bemoaned the fact that the cartels know they have absolutely no law enforcement on duty from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. every day.

The cartels have already targeted New Mexico as the new soft spot of our border, and this decision will only further embolden them. Jaeson Jones, retired captain for the Texas Department of Public Safety, who actively monitors cartel movements through a series of informants, was very concerned about the growing trend of migration in New Mexico due to the dynamics of the cartel warfare. “The decision to pull our military off the border in New Mexico will have serious consequences for American citizens,” said Jones. “The cartels had already begun moving more people toward New Mexico to avoid the buildup of military along the Texas/Mexico border and to avoid cartel-on-cartel violence in Tamaulipas, Mexico. Illegal apprehensions crossing into New Mexico have risen by hundreds of percent in the last few months. The cartels will exploit this troop withdrawal, and crime across New Mexico will increase dramatically.”

Indeed, the stepped-up enforcement in Texas has already worked to drive the migration westward. Reuters is reporting that between the extra-military presence in Central Texas, the violence of the Zetas splinter cartels on the Mexican side, and the promise from the governor of the Coahuila state to block all migrants, the latest caravan of 1,700 Central Americans is looking to head west. The New Mexico governor’s decision to pull back the troops is an invitation for them to come through the neighboring Mexican states controlled by Sinaloa and enter the U.S. at Antelope Wells in Hidalgo County.

So, if more manpower or fencing is not needed, what is Grisham’s plan to protect her state?

She has none.

Evidently, Grisham feels that she represents 7.8 billion people of the world but not her own citizens, whom she swore an oath to protect. She believes that the Constitution grants an affirmative right for anyone to demand immigration status, but not for ranchers to be protected from the cartels and a U.S. county to be shielded from an external invasion.

The president can act and fill the void of Grisham’s betrayal

It’s time for the president to take over the New Mexico Guard and do the job the governor refuses to do. Last April, when President Trump called out the Guard to help assist the border patrol, he did so using Title 32 authority, which works with the consent of the governor while keeping the individual state Guard units under the control of the governors. However, with Gov. Grisham refusing to cooperate, President Trump can use Title 10 status to federalize the Guard units and keep them solely under his control at the border (the same way he can deploy them to Afghanistan or elsewhere) if he feels we are facing an invasion or problems that cannot be dealt with by civilian law enforcement.

This law is pursuant to Congress’ enumerated power in Art. I Sec. 8 to “provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions” and “to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States.” The reason why we have the National Guard, referred to as “organized militias” during our Founding, is precisely to repel this sort of invasion from belligerent criminal organizations. While there was much debate among our Founders, and even concern, about the power to use the militia internally to deal with rebellion, nobody doubted its use to repel foreign invasions like those we are experiencing today from the Mexican cartels.

As then-Vice President James Monroe wrote to the chairman of the Senate Military Committee in February 1815, “The power which is thus given to Congress by the people of the United States, to provide for calling forth the militia for the purposes specified in the Constitution, is unconditional.” He explains that it is “a complete power, vested in the National government, extending to all those purposes” because if it were “dependent on the assent of the Executives of the individual States it might be entirely frustrated.”

During his visit today to El Paso, Trump would be wise to call the National Guard into federal service and designate the cartels as terrorist groups. These are all powers he holds unquestionably, and using them would be an effective leverage point in budget negotiations over the border wall.

Hidalgo County, in many ways, reflects America. It has picked the winner of the presidential election in almost every race since 1932. The county officials are of mixed background and work together. They have enough resources to deal with 5,000 peaceful citizens, but they don’t have the resources to protect 5,000 square miles from paramilitary organizations invading their jurisdiction. County Manager Tisha Green told me that “to ensure the safety and welfare of its citizens” they are “hiring two additional officers out of our general fund budget.” But they need more, and they shouldn’t have to pay for a federal and state responsibility dealing with an external challenge to national sovereignty. If the New Mexico governor wants to bury her head in the sand, President Trump should act on their behalf. (For more from the author of “New Mexico Gov. Grisham Is Allowing the Invasion of Her State” please click HERE)

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Stacey Abrams Forgets the Obama Administration Put Kids in Cages

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. . .During her remarks about immigration, [Stacey] Abrams conveniently gave credit to President Barack Obama for “humane” policies.

From 2014:

According to sources on the ground in Nogales, who have asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their jobs, 1000 OTM (other than Mexican) unaccompanied juveniles from Central America are already being sheltered in a warehouse and Border Patrol agents are expecting 2000 children by the end of next week. Estimates show overall 60,000 unaccompanied juveniles will illegally cross into the United States this year.

“It’s just chain-link cells so we have aliens sleeping all over the floor and they told us to probably expect another thousand over the next week, week and a half,” another Border Patrol agent tells Townhall. “We have these huge chain link cages, 20-feet tall with razor wire around them, this is inside a warehouse. They are probably 50 by 100 [feet] and there’s probably 10 or 11 of these big cages like that and so there’s probably 100-200 aliens in each cell, or cage and there’s just park benches right down the middle, two rows of park benches and then they give them these little rubber mats, a little foam pad to lay on. We don’t have enough blankets so they’re issuing out those foil blankets, it’s like a piece of tin foil and that’s all they get. There are so many people crammed. The smell is just horrendous, horrendous.”

(Read more from “Stacey Abrams Conveniently Forgets the Obama Administration Put Kids in Cages” HERE)

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SOTU: Trump Calls on Congress to Put Drug and Human Traffickers out of Business at the Border. Kamala Harris Shakes Her Head ‘No’

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As President Donald Trump addressed the illegal immigration issue in his State of the Union address, Democrats were notably silent, refusing to stand or clap.

At one point, after Trump called on Congress to “confront an urgent national crisis” and “secure our very dangerous southern border” and said we should be committed to putting “the ruthless coyotes, cartels, drug dealers, and human traffickers out of business,” Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., actually shook her head “no.”

Trump will have no problem running against Democratic candidates this radical. (For more from the author of “SOTU: Trump Calls on Congress to Put Drug and Human Traffickers out of Business at the Border. Kamala Harris Shakes Her Head ‘No'” please click HERE)

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Non-Citizens Voting in Our Elections Is a Huge Problem

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Let’s just imagine for a moment that there weren’t millions of criminals among the illegal aliens invading our country. Let’s assume that we are not dying from drugs, gangs, and diseases brought in and that there are no violent cartels bringing them in. By itself, the fact that illegal immigrants are likely voting in our elections is a national emergency in its own right that should demand immediate attention from our political leadership. The latest news from Texas’ election officials should raise the prominence of this most odious manifestation of stolen sovereignty, but thus far, aside from a Trump tweet, it has not blown up into a national issue.

Over the weekend, the Texas Department of Public Safety released the details of a voter registration analysis showing that 95,000 registered voters are suspected of having registered to vote as non-citizens. They further found that 58,000 of those registered voters cast ballots at least once since 1996.

Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott immediately highlighted the importance of this finding and how urgent it is that the state act upon it:

The state government is calling on all the counties to send out letters to those people on this list and ask them to respond to an inquiry whether they have indeed become naturalized citizens. The 11-month investigation ordered by Paxton showed that these 95,000 individuals who applied for driver’s licenses as aliens registered to vote at some later date. According to the Longview News-Journal, the Texas Tribune contacted 13 of 15 counties with the highest numbers of these registered voters. Only one county, Galveston, said it is sending letters immediately.

Amazingly, within hours of the release, the Texas Tribune sought to “fact-check” this assertion and suggested that this is not really as much of a problem as the headline number indicates:

The Tribune is claiming that these numbers don’t prove much because they are a count of those who provided immigrant identification documents, such as green cards and work permits, as documentation for driver’s licenses. Therefore, the Tribune reporters are suggesting that some of them may have become naturalized but offered immigrant documents to verify their identity at the department of motor vehicles.

It’s amazing the lengths to which the liberal media will go in order to deny the problem of non-citizens voting, just like they deny the illegal alien crime wave. Aside from the absurdity of suggesting that a significant number of naturalized citizens would offer such documentation, they are missing the more important point. The fact that someone who is applying for the ultimate right of a citizen can merely rely on his driver’s license, which was issued upon a showing of immigrant documentation, is in itself a threat to our franchise. How have we come so far that not only is proof of citizenship not required for voter registration, but individuals can offer documents that prima facie indicate they are not citizens, yet still successfully register to vote without showing that they became naturalized citizens? Sure, a minority of them might have later become naturalized, but the fact that we have an “honor system” for voting is insane.

Moreover, the bigger problem is that the same liberals who deny the extent of the problem of non-citizens voting also oppose any effort not just to combat it but to even uncover data exposing it. Harris County, by far the biggest county in Texas, which contains a large foreign-born population, has refused to publicize the data that would allow outside groups to compare driver’s licenses against voter registration records to identify potential non-citizens. “This shows why Harris county must release the alien voting records we have sought for a year,” Public Interest Legal Foundation general counsel and President J. Christian Adams said in a statement. “We all know they exist. We all know aliens are voting in our elections. It’s time Harris and other [counties] stop hiding the documents.”

Adams’ group has filed a lawsuit against Harris and other major trouble spots in the country that refuse to comply with the National Voter Registration Act’s (NVRA) mandate to cleanse voter rolls of fraudulent voters and to allow public access to maintained records.

Here’s the problem that nobody is effectively combatting on the national level. Despite liberal grousing to the contrast, it is now easier to vote than ever. Between technology and a number of social services practically begging you to sign up to vote, it’s almost impossible not to register. Some states are now automatically registering anyone with a driver’s license. At the same time, there is no effective front-end or back-end check against non-citizens voting, and the courts have outright blocked states from requiring proof of citizenship, even though the federal registration form established by motor voter laws has a box asking if the applicant is a citizen!

With a record number of foreign nationals in this country – both legal and illegal – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a number of non-citizens will be seamlessly shunted into the voter registration system, often even without intent to violate the law. Worst of all, photo ID laws (the ones still standing after judicial nullification) don’t help for this form of voter fraud because these individuals have driver’s licenses with legitimate names and addresses.

Consider the fact that Texas doesn’t even automatically register voters, and you see how bad the problem is. Can you imagine what California looks like? A dozen states hand out driver’s licenses to illegal aliens – more than a million in California alone – and other states are being forced to do so by the courts.

Republicans had two years to fix this travesty, whether it’s requiring proof of citizenship, blocking the courts from interfering with photo ID laws, or discounting illegals in the Census. Now Democrats are seeking to make the problem worse. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on a bill that, among other things, would force automatic voter registration on the states, mandate that they accept same-day registration on Election Day, and strip them even of the existing avenues to clean their voter rolls. It’s no surprise why this bill is named “H.R. 1,” because Democrats prioritize any effort to get more votes, even if it comes at the expense of our sovereignty. Republicans, on the other hand, never prioritized protecting our franchise from fraud. The more this goes on, the less likely that they will ever get that opportunity again, because they will permanently be in the minority. (For more from the author of “Non-Citizens Voting in Our Elections Is a Huge Problem” please click HERE)

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Why Don’t We Deport the 2 MILLION Known Criminal Aliens?

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Do we really need to shelter millions of dangerous criminals from other countries?

In fiscal year 2013, the DHS estimated, based on ICE programs in local jails, that there were 1.9 million criminal aliens in this country and that 900,000 aliens were arrested every year. Chillingly, the report noted that “550,000 criminal aliens convicted of crimes exit law enforcement custody every year” and that “this population of criminal aliens poses a major threat to public safety.”

That was before the massive surge of immigration from Central America and the gang and drug crisis engendered by the flow of young males pouring over our border since 2014. Also, that data was from the Secure Communities Program, which matches fingerprints to federal databases, and from information provided by ICE officers working in local jails. Over the past five years, many of the biggest criminal alien cities refuse to cooperate with ICE. Thus, the number of criminal aliens is likely exponentially higher.

Why is it that, amid this monthlong shutdown over immigration, we are not having a discussion on how to deport at least those illegal aliens who commit other crimes as expeditiously as possible and without judicial intervention? How could anyone oppose ridding ourselves of other countries’ criminals when we have so many of our own?

In 2014, when defending his illegal executive amnesty, President Obama touted the need to focus on criminals. “Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day.”

Four years later, why are so few of these people deported and why are the courts permitted to violate our statutes and grant so many reprieves to even the worst criminals who have no right to be here to begin with?

The answer is because Republicans have failed to forcefully educate the public on the severity of the criminal alien problem and have shielded Democrats from taking tough votes on sanctuary cities. For that matter, sanctuary cities haven’t even been a subject of the current debate, and Republicans failed to act on them when they had full control for two years, even as the courts were declaring sanctuary policies. Needless murder and mayhem are continuing because we refuse to deport the criminal aliens we already know about.

The astounding amount of avoidable crime by illegal aliens

What do Connie Koontz, 56, Sophia Renken, 74, Gerald David, 81, and his wife, Sharon David, 80, all have in common? They were American lives cut short between January 10 and January 16 when an illegal alien allegedly broke into their homes in the Carson City/Reno region of Nevada and murdered them. Wilbur Martinez Guzman is an illegal alien who was able to enter thanks to the lack of a defensible barrier at our border. He has now been arrested and is suspected of murdering the four victims. According to the Reno Gazette, he is turning 20 years old. In other words, before last week, he would have been considered the quintessential “dreamer” who came here from Central America sometime after the 2014 wave.

How many more young violent males from other countries are in this country and already have criminal records, yet have still not been apprehended and deported? Think of the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens arrested every year for DUI, assault, drug trafficking and other offenses that our weak criminal justice system considers low-level. So many of them live in sanctuary cities, where they will not be turned over to ICE…

You can imagine how many more were arrested but never convicted and never turned over to ICE. California, the biggest sanctuary of all, is home to one-third of the nation’s illegal immigrants. Thanks to the state’s new bail laws, authorities will immediately release many low- to mid-level offenders without requiring them to post bail. The feds have been trying to ramp up apprehensions on their own, without the state’s cooperation, but they are clearly missing thousands of these criminals.

Why is it too much to ask that we follow the laws and deport foreign criminals? Every day that we fail to immediately deport these two million known criminal aliens is a day that more Americans will be murdered, raped, sexually assaulted, robbed, or killed by a drunk driver. It’s not that these crimes are worse when they are perpetrated by an illegal than by an American. It’s just that they are more preventable and are rooted in the failure of the federal government to protect us from external threats.

Here’s an important point many in the media miss about the number of illegal alien homicides and how avoidable they are. Basic criminology teaches that most murderers first build up a prior rap sheet before committing the ultimate offense. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 70 percent of violent felons from 1990 to 2002 had a prior arrest record, and 57 percent had at least one prior arrest for a felony. In other words, murderers are generally those who have repeat histories of DUI, burglary, weapons charges, drug trafficking, gang activities, etc. Those crimes are particularly prevalent among illegal aliens, yet are treated as low-level, and they are often released. Only a relatively small percentage of them are deported; many more aren’t even detected or tracked by ICE.

Illegal aliens should be immediately deported upon arrest. Thus they should never be allowed to remain in this country long enough to continue their criminal careers and graduate to violent felonies. Not all murderers have prior records, especially the very young ones, as we saw in the Nevada case, but most do. That means, by definition, most violent crimes committed by illegal aliens are not only avoidable because they should never have been in the country in the first place, but also because they should have been deported after their first arrest for other crimes.

According to BJS, 83.4 percent of all prisoners released in 2005 re-offended within nine years, and 40 percent of the new offenses were violent crime. We deported 5.6 million illegal aliens between 1998 and 2016. ICE reports from most years show that the majority of them (recently, the overwhelming majority) had prior criminal convictions.

The symbiotic importance of border and interior enforcement

The importance of deportation and the need to keep out criminals also ties back into the debate over the wall at the border. Many of these criminals, even the ones we wind up deporting, come right back over the border, smuggled in by the cartels. I’m particularly skeptical about the efficacy of the wall in stopping the general migration if we continue to allow this bogus asylum, because they will just come over the fence and surrender themselves to the agents. But there is no doubt that the wall will always work, other policies notwithstanding, against criminal aliens, because they do not want to see a border agent.

Matt Pinsker, former federal special prosecutor on the border, explained the problem of criminal aliens and an open border best in an interview with Townhall. He recounted how, as a young prosecutor, he was “struck” by “just how many persons illegally entering the United States have criminal records. … They enter illegally because they cannot enter legally, and the reason why they cannot enter legally is because they have criminal records.”

They are able to get the cartels to smuggle them in while the border agents are tied up with the hundreds of bogus asylum seekers. The wall will definitely help slow down those who don’t want to get caught.

Just this week, Hector Montez, a Honduran illegal was arrested for raping and impregnating a minor in Kings County, California, after being deported twice before. In another part of the state, Macario Cerda, an illegal alien from Mexico, was just sentenced on numerous rape and child sexual assault charges, including impregnating one of his victims. He was able to come back into the country and commit all these crimes after being deported. The prosecutor argued that he should be locked up for life and “never grant him any possibility at being deported because he has crawled his way back into the States illegally way too many times.”

I totally agree with that sentiment in this particular case, but the ultimate goal should be to deport all these people once arrested for lesser crimes to prevent bigger ones. At the same time, we need the wall so that they can’t come back once they are deported. The problem of criminal aliens sits at the nexus of border and interior enforcement and demonstrates why we need to focus on both of them with full force. Many terrible people are able to continue committing heinous crimes because we refuse to either deport them, secure our border, or both.

Trump had the perfect opportunity to harness the biggest bully pulpit of all time with a unique State of the Union address next week from an unannounced location. He could have looked the American people in the eye and promised to be the president to finally protect America from the millions of foreign criminals who should never be in the country. Now we may have to wait until it’s too late. (For more from the author of “Why Don’t We Deport the 2 MILLION Known Criminal Aliens?” please click HERE)

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Suspect in ‘Brutal’ Murder Spree Is an Illegal Alien

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By The Blaze. Police say that a tip led them to arrest an illegal alien as a suspect in four murders in Nevada that have stunned the community.

Wilbur Ernesto Martinez Guzman was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of burglary, possession of stolen property and immigration law violations, but police say they are confident that he is connected to the murders.

The first two victims were found in their homes shot to death within four days of each other. The two women were 56 year-old Connie Koontz and 74 year-old Sophia Renken.

Two other victims were found killed in a similar fashion, and both aged 81 years old. They were identified as Gerald David and Sharon David.

(Read more from “Suspect in ‘Brutal’ Murder Spree Is an Illegal Alien” HERE)

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Suspect Jailed in Connection With String of 4 Killings in Northern Nevada That Put Residents on Edge

By The Nevada Independent. Authorities say they have arrested a man they believe is connected to four killings that have shaken Northern Nevada and put residents on edge over the past two weeks.

Washoe County Sheriff Darin Balaam says Wilbur Ernesto Martinez Guzman, a Carson City resident who is either 19 or 20, was taken into custody Saturday afternoon on suspicion of burglary, possession of stolen property and immigration law violations. He’s being held in the Carson City Detention Center under 24-hour watch from medical and mental health personnel. . .

The killings began in Gardnerville, the Douglas County community about 50 miles from Reno, when two women, Connie Koontz, 56, and Sophia Renken, 74, were killed inside their homes earlier this month only miles apart. The two victims were found Jan. 10 and Jan. 13 — within four days of each other.

They later learned from immigration officials that Martinez Guzman was likely in the country illegally and could be detained on those grounds. Furlong said activities that raised concern for public safety prompted immigration officials and Carson City deputies to take him into custody Saturday afternoon a few blocks south of the state capitol. (Read more from “Suspect Jailed in Connection With String of 4 Killings in Northern Nevada That Put Residents on Edge” HERE)

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Conservatives Should Be Wary About Dangling Amnesty for Partial Wall Funding

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Conservatives need to be very cautious when contemplating the president’s offer to Democrats, which includes amnesty in exchange for mere border funding and no critical policy changes. The president might have one intention or strategy in mind, but the majority of Senate Republicans love amnesty in its own right, even without anything in return. Consequently, any rush to begin negotiating down can lead to a slippery slope into the abyss of open borders.

Senators have spent the past month doing nothing. They could have forced Democrats to hold the floor and continuously force procedural votes on numerous bills placing them in vulnerable positions. They could have voted on legislation cutting off funding to sanctuary cities, ending the border loopholes, and ending welfare for illegal aliens. But no. They did nothing. Now they plan to bring an amnesty bill to the floor, at the behest of President Trump.

On Saturday, Trump offered Democrats the following in return for $5.7 billion in border funding and some funding for technology, more border agents, and immigration judges:

A three-year extension of work permits for Obama’s illegal DACA amnesty affecting roughly 700,000 illegal aliens.

A three-year extension of TPS amnesty for roughly 300,000 illegals who abused the TPS system from Guatemala, Honduras, and Haiti.

There is nothing so permanent as a temporary amnesty. Trump promised to end these amnesties, and this is the last stop on the train. Nobody can say with a straight face that once this is extended for three years, it won’t become permanent.

Trump is already negotiating with himself in public:

There are plenty of people both in the White House and in the Senate who are desperate to end the shutdown and are desperate for DACA amnesty. Conservatives must hold the right flank and ensure that this doesn’t spiral out of control.

I’ve already explained why, as a matter of policy, such a deal is worse than nothing. Amnesty for the gradual construction of a partial border wall and more agents and immigration judges to manage the invasion, not block it, is no deal at all. Trump himself rightfully said this last year:

The border wall is like a bandage, while the asylum, UAC, Flores, and other judicial magnets are the actual wound. It’s shocking that those universally understood flaws in our system were never even put on the table for this negotiation. Absent the closing of those loopholes, a partial wall is worthless.

The problem with an amnesty-driven negotiation

Some have suggested that Trump understands Democrats would never take this deal, and therefore he is just exposing their radical position. Fine. But then once they reject it, this should be the end of amnesty discussions. Trump needs to go back to talking only about the harms of illegal immigration and how DACA caused this border crisis. DACA is not the solution; it’s the problem.

The concern is that once Trump officially blesses the idea of amnesty in this context, Senate Republicans will run with this. They will allow Democrats to negotiate down further, and we’ll be left with a few billion dollars, no policy changes to fix a policy problem, and a new amnesty.

Here’s how this would look.

McConnell is bringing this proposal to the Senate floor this week. Of course, he is also adding on $12 billion more in disaster aid, after we’ve already spent close to $100 billion in extra disaster aid over the past year. No legislative proposal is complete without more spending.

It’s still unclear whether enough Democrats would vote for this proposal. If they vote it down, then Trump should go nuclear on them, back off all amnesty, and threaten to use his lawful powers to deploy the military and build bases, infrastructure, and walls in support of a more robust military operation that we need at our border anyway.

But here is the concern if conservatives are not cautious in setting red lines on this deal. Schumer might possibly allow seven or so Democrats to vote the bill out of the Senate. Then, Pelosi, with a simple majority, adds a more robust amnesty that is more palatable to all Democrats (quietly knowing that most Senate Republicans want it too). Then it passes the Senate again. Democrats know that Trump so badly wants “the wall” that he might take amnesty and no policy changes so long as he can say he got wall funding. Then we will be left with 230 miles of gradually constructed wall in exchange for immediate amnesty.

House Republicans already voted for a bare-bones DACA extension last year, but that was in return for a Christmas tree of everything conservatives want on immigration: end of all border and interior magnets, stepped-up deportations, end to sanctuaries, abolishing chain migration, and much more. Any amnesty for a few billion dollars in the context of a policy problem is a terrible trade.

The worst of all worlds

This is the opening bid, so we know it will get much worse. But even if this plan got enacted as is, it would be worse than nothing. Not a single policy that is currently inducing this wave of family units would be changed. The tide would only grow, because now there is the perception that more people will get amnesty if they successfully make their way here and obtain the benefits of catch-and-release. Moreover, the fact that more money will go into a border wall will create an even greater rush to benefit from the widening of the “child magnet” before the window of the border wall closes.

But since this is not the full border wall, the cartels will still harness the catch-and-release policies to get around the new construction. Jaeson Jones, who served for over two decades in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division, fears this half-baked approach will further empower the cartels. “The belief that a partial wall will stop human smuggling and the trafficking crisis at our southwest border is wrong,” said the retired captain and expert on drug cartels. “It is another example of our government underestimating the capabilities of the Mexican cartels. The cartels will simply build infrastructure on the Mexico side to reach areas where the wall is not present.”

Jones noted that there is precedent for this. Walls definitely work, but they must come as part of a holistic approach of de-magnetizing the border. “In 1993, El Paso, Texas, created Operation Hold the Line, where they utilized a wall and agents to make apprehensions of anyone who attempted to climb over. As a result, apprehensions were reduced by over 70 percent. However, the areas where I worked as a Texas Highway Patrolman outside the boundaries of the wall, all the smuggling occurred. The areas became crime-ridden. Later, the wall would be extended, reaching well beyond the city limits of El Paso, once again pushing human smuggling and trafficking further out into the nearby county of Hudspeth County, Texas, as we see it today.”

In other words, doing half construction with even bigger incentives for amnesty is the worst of all worlds. We need to build the full wall and close the lawfare loopholes giving the cartels these clients to begin with. It’s better to do nothing and live to fight another day than to gradually construct a partial fence in this legal environment at the border. This is why we are seeing hundreds of people come to open areas in the fencing to surrender themselves. The courts are even giving standing to people to sue for entry from outside of the country, even where there is a wall blocking them.

Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that walls worked great during the Mexican wave of migration because Mexicans didn’t want to get caught by Border Patrol. Thus, a wall slows them down and makes it almost impossible for them to get over undetected, even if they have the wherewithal to scale the wall. The problem with the current Central American wave driven by lawfare is that they want to get caught so they can surrender themselves to agents. This is why we are now seeing the cartels help drop kids over border fences, including the much vaunted 18-foot fence in Yuma.

Already in November, we saw this growing trend of family units coming over the fence. At the time, I spoke with Sheriff Leon Wilmot of Yuma County, and he was frustrated that everyone is missing the point about the lawfare. “We already have a fence here, and it worked fine during Operation Streamline last decade, when we prosecuted 100 percent of the border crossers rather than processing them. But now they are just hanging off the fence and surrendering themselves to border agents.” He told me about women “dropping babies off the fence” and breaking limbs. His sheriff’s deputies must deal with the medical emergencies. “None of these folks are being prosecuted. My deputies are the ones who have to take those rape and robbery reports because the feds refuse to do their jobs.”

Wilmot and other border sheriffs strongly back the president’s call for a border wall, but the wall must be backed by a deterrent not to enter the country. Doubling down on amnesty without closing loopholes and ramping up prosecutions will only encourage the cartels to create more infrastructure for the lawfare to supersede the wall. A wall can stop a physical invasion, but it can’t stop a judicial invitation to come here with kids and get amnesty. (For more from the author of “Conservatives Should Be Wary About Dangling Amnesty for Partial Wall Funding” please click HERE)

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Retired Border Patrol Agent Sets the Record Straight on MSM Claims About Illegal Immigration

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Americans across the country have continually debated whether or not illegal immigration is an issue that severely impacts our nation. Hector Regalado, a recently retired Border Patrol agent, decided to help set the record straight.

Mr. Regalado spent 23 years with the Border Patrol. He’s been stationed in Imperial Beach, California; Naco, Arizona; Nogales, Arizona; Grand Forks, Minnesota; and Spokane, Washington. He’s held various positions, including Senior Patrol Agent, Resident Agent, Supervisor for the Resident Agent Program, Special Operations Supervisor, Special Projects Supervisor and Public Affairs Supervisor. . .

Most Americans fail to realize the number of Border Patrol agents that are stationed in the northern part of the United States. The program, called the Resident Agent Program, puts one to three agents (and in some places, up to five) in small communities to gather relevant intelligence. These agents work with local law enforcement and officials to help in cases they’re undermanned/unequipped to handle. . .

One of the biggest misconceptions and misrepresentations the mainstream media has pushed though, is the idea that President Donald Trump violated humanitarian laws through his various immigration policies, including child separation. It’s something Regalado said is simply untrue. . .

Most people don’t know that the process of asylum is grueling and long. And there are officers who do nothing but process asylum requests. Border Patrol agents and Customs officers take basic biographical information about where the person is from as well as running background checks for criminal history. But then the case is turned over to the Asylum Officer. (Read more from “Retired Border Patrol Agent Sets the Record Straight on MSM Claims About Illegal Immigration” HERE)

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Large Group of Migrants Tunnels Under Arizona Border Wall

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Border patrol agents in Arizona this week were overwhelmed after the largest caravan of migrants ever to cross into the United States tunneled beneath the border wall near San Luis, Arizona. According to ABC News, the migrants immediately turned themselves into Customs and Border Protection.

“Migrants can be seen marching toward Border Patrol agents by the hundreds,” reports ABC News. “Smugglers dug a series of seven holes, only a few feet long beneath the steel border fence, with hundreds going beneath the wall and a smaller number clambering over it.”

The migrant group included 376 people, 179 of which were reportedly children, 30 of whom were unaccompanied minors. While the number of illegal crossings has dropped significantly since its peak in 2001, Customs and Border Protection says the demographics of today’s migrants have noticeably changed due to the overwhelming number of parents crossing with children.

“Parents with children now comprise over 80 percent of the total apprehensions of those crossing the 2,000-mile long border with Mexico,” reports ABC News. “The vast majority of them, like the group near Yuma Monday, surrender immediately or seek out Border Patrol agents in order to begin the asylum process.”

One particular case highlighted by ABC News was a man who paid coyotes $5,000 to lead him and his 12-year-old daughter up from Guatemala to the U.S. border, leaving behind his wife and two daughters. The case recalls that of the crying girl in the famous Time photo whose mother also took her from her family via coyotes. (Read more from “Large Group of Migrants Tunnels Under Arizona Border Wall” HERE)

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Judge Creates Right for Illegal Alien to Block Deportation… So She Can Sue Law Enforcement

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We are told everything illegal aliens want to do in our country is completely legal and they are entitled to all citizen rights, including citizenship for children. On the other hand, everything our law enforcement wants to do to enforce the law against them is somehow held illegal.

We are having a national debate over the effectiveness of a border wall, but we should first have a debate over whether we have a border at all. Judges are creating new constitutional rights for illegal immigrants to invade at breakneck speed, rendering our constitutional protections essentially binding on the entire globe. Nothing should surprise us any more, but the latest story of an El Salvadoran illegal immigrant from Frederick, Maryland, should jolt us all out of our slumber.

Roxana Orellana Santos is an illegal alien from El Salvador who had no right to come to this country in 2005 and no right to remain in this country against the will of the people as expressed through long-standing statute. Pursuant to our laws, Santos was detained by Border Patrol when she broke into our country in Texas and then failed to appear for an immigration hearing. In 2007, an immigration judge issued an order to deport her.

A year into her fugitive life, Frederick cops informally questioned her outside a restaurant on October 7, 2008, after they thought she was running away from them. Upon receiving information from ICE through dispatch that she was here illegally, and then acting on an outstanding immigration warrant from ICE, Frederick sheriff’s deputies arrested Santos as part of their lawful cooperation with the federal government to help apprehend illegal aliens through the 287(g) program, under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g). It’s part of a law that passed the Senate unanimously in 1996. Frederick is one of the few jurisdictions in Maryland that participates in this program. It has experienced a growth of MS-13 and other criminal activity in this once-serene small city in picturesque western Maryland.

In a sane country, this would have been the end of the story. Santos should have been deported, pursuant to every statute on the books. But Santos, backed by an army of lawyers from the organization CASA de Maryland, sued the Frederick sheriff for what she felt was an illegal search and seizure and the county commissioners for agreeing to operate under 287(g). After endless motions while remained in the country, the district court rebuffed her claim in 2012, but the arch-liberal Fourth Circuit sided with her a year later. The court created a new right for illegals not to be apprehended by local law enforcement because of their immigration status. Last September, District Judge Catherine Blake ruled that Sheriff Jenkins could be held liable in a civil suit for the acts of his deputies. This allows Santos to proceed with a suit for civil damages. Her attorneys are seeking to milk this small county for $1 million in damages! None of us can sue her for sucking up our resources.

It’s bad enough that illegal immigrants get to break into our country, steal American citizenship from us for their kids (Santos has three American-born kids, erroneously regarded as Americans), and sue law enforcement for following our sovereignty laws. But at least she can now be deported, right?

Well, ICE did apprehend her, but Judge Catherine Blake issued a temporary restraining order against her deportation. The rationale? Santos is now entitled to finish out her lawsuit against our own sheriff’s deputies, thereby blocking her deportation.

As a Maryland resident, I must say it’s an outrage that someone can break into my state, sue those who protect us for following all the immigration and criminal justice statutes, and then use that lawsuit to nullify the most foundational federal immigration law to remain here illegally!

Santos has been allowed to remain in the country for a decade of endless litigation, and now there is no doubt the courts will delay the deportation indefinitely with other lawsuits. It’s bad enough that, in our litigious culture, American criminals get away with crime because of the broken legal profession. Are we really going to extend this legal circus to illegal aliens?

As Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, who has studied 287(g) arrests for years, lamented, “This woman originally was arrested more than a decade ago after she fled from sheriff’s deputies, knowing that she was a fugitive from immigration authorities and knowing that she had flagrantly broken our immigration laws and shown contempt for the generous due process she was given.”

Yet she is now able to use the lawsuit game to buy herself even more time.

As Justice Thomas said in Arizona v. U.S. (2010), “States, as sovereigns, have inherent authority to conduct arrests for violations of federal law, unless and until Congress removes that authority.” There is nothing in federal statute that prohibits local law enforcement from inquiring about immigration status. Indeed, it is preposterous for anyone to assert that local law enforcement can’t arrest someone who must be deported by federal law. Quite the contrary: 8 U. S. C. §1644 unambiguously says that “no State or local government entity may be prohibited, or in any way restricted, from sending to or receiving from” federal immigration officials “information regarding the immigration status” of a foreign national. And of course, §1373(c) says that ICE “shall respond to an inquiry by a Federal, State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency.”

That is exactly what both Frederick officials and ICE did here. Yet, 10 years later, the law has been flipped upside-down and inside-out. States can’t enforce the law, feds can’t enforce the law, and judges can nullify any law.

“Even if her original arrest was unlawful (it wasn’t), she is still deportable because she has absolutely no basis to remain in the United States,” noted Vaughan. “Because the extra time here that she bought herself with the earlier lawsuit is now up, Roxana and her legal team are now suing the good sheriff’s office and ICE just to buy more time. If she ever wants to be a legal immigrant, what she ought to do is return home and wait her turn to try to qualify as a parent of a U.S. citizen born here during the long stay we allowed her. Predatory lawsuits like this damage our system by rewarding improper behavior and they inevitably lead to more baseless lawsuits.”

And who are these people agitating lawsuits and rallies? Groups like CASA de Maryland, which get Maryland taxpayer funding. Their advocacy for illegal aliens has crossed over into aiding and abetting, inducing illegal immigration, and transporting illegal aliens, all violations of various subsections of §1324. But it is we and our police officers who are violating the law, according to these fake judges.

If your blood is not already boiling, the final disgrace to ponder here is the fact that the more illegal aliens are illegally given standing to sue our governments and illegally remain in the country, the more time they have to have babies and further allow “crime to pay.” This woman now has several U.S.-born children. Not only is the Constitution clear, contrary to administrative fiat, that one must be here with permission of the government to enjoy citizenship, our laws are clear that she should have been deported 10 years ago. Now, her husband came here illegally and is, of course, seeking asylum.

We the people have no say in who comes here, contrary to our laws. It is the ultimate violation of the foundational principle of governance by the consent of the governed, as established in the Declaration of Independence.

As we continue to debate the wall, let’s not forget that no wall can save us from this national suicide of judicial lawfare. Our laws aren’t broken. They are written properly. The case law for over 100 years was abundantly clear. Our contemporary judges and politicians are broken. The politicians are allowing unelected judges and lawless groups that abet fugitives to accomplish a degree of judicial amnesty that liberals have failed to accomplish in the legislature for two generations.

Sadly, there is no way to better construct laws that will be clearer than they already are if we are going to allow judges to destroy us from within the confines of our border – wall around it or not. And if the judicial amnesty doesn’t stop, with the intensifying flow of people coming to take advantage of us, we will not have a country left. (For more from the author of “Judge Creates Right for Illegal Alien to Block Deportation… So She Can Sue Law Enforcement” please click HERE)

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