A couple in Austin, Texas has decided to use Christmas to make their feelings about President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. A native scene is set up in Katie Naranjo’s yard except it’s not your traditional nativity scene. Jesus is show in inside of an immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) “detainment box” with Joseph and Mary outside of the cage.

This is what Christmas has come to in America. pic.twitter.com/KkNagVBDp3

— Beth Baumann (@eb454) December 25, 2018

According to the Naranjos, this is their way of protesting children separated from their families at the United States-Mexico Border, KUVE-TV reported.

“We’re living in extraordinary times. During the holidays, people spend time with their family. Right now, there are children who can’t spend time with their parents this holiday season,” Naranjo explained. “We decided to show baby Jesus in a cage because he was a refugee himself.” . . .

“People are having a hard time having discussions about issues, and so we have been taking our political beliefs and putting them into our holiday displays as a way to start those conversations with people who would otherwise not be interested or listen,” Naranjo explained. “If anyone is offended by our display, please know that we want to start this dialogue and have people thinking about why children are in cages.”

This same couple had a political display last year as well: pic.twitter.com/WhNHaJjqO7

— Beth Baumann (@eb454) December 25, 2018

. . .

It’s no surprise though, that the Naranjos decide to show their political preferences this way though. A simple Google and Facebook search shows that Katie served as President of the College Democrats of America from 2008 to 2010. She’s worked on a number of Democratic campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign.

At it again. If you’re offended by our display, you better be offended by President Trump’s policy to separate families and place children in cages under the guise of approval of the American people. https://t.co/ICtyKkwGTZ

— Katie Naranjo (@KatieNaranjo) December 22, 2018

(Read more from “Nothing Says ‘Merry Christmas’ Like a Nativity Scene Featuring Baby Jesus in an ICE Detainment Cage” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

A caravan a day makes our sovereignty go away.

If you want to see what a real government shutdown looks like, look at what is going on at our border. And it’s a much bigger problem than the news-covered caravan parked south of San Diego. It’s the equivalent of a caravan quietly crossing our border every day. Because Pelosi and Schumer refuse to end catch-and-release policies, the drug cartels are using our border agents to complete the criminal conspiracy killing our citizens.

On Tuesday, Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, testified before the Senate that 3,029 illegals were apprehended at the border on December 3, the biggest single-day number in years. That would be a pace of over 1.1 million a year. The Arizona Republic is reporting that record numbers of Guatemalan families are crossing in the Yuma sector just west of San Luis where the Colorado River has dried up. There are no pedestrian fences in that part of the Yuma sector, and they are coming right over the dried-up river to surrender themselves to agents.

“We are seeing an increase in these large groups that are coming in a larger frequency,” Yuma Sector spokesman Jose Garibay told the Arizona paper. Even in areas with fencing, some of them are coming over to surrender themselves, increasingly in large numbers. “Groups sometimes numbering more than 80 migrants continue scaling the 18-foot-tall fence to enter the country illegally. They even risk serious injuries, avoiding repeated calls from U.S. border officials to cross or present their claims legally at ports of entry,” the Republic reports.

But as I’ve mentioned before, even more disturbing than who we catch is who we don’t catch. The broken asylum policies driven by the courts and supported by the Left are creating an entire economy for the drug cartels.

Why illegals are coming in urban sectors and what that means

In order to understand the latest trends at the border, we need to remember that all border migration is controlled by the cartels that have dominion over their given region. They take across people who want to come here illegally for jobs or family reunification and use them to smuggle in their drugs or criminals. Given that our insane asylum policies allow economic migrants to come and surrender themselves to agents, it is easier for them and for the cartels if they just cross out in the open, which allows the cartels to use the diversion to bring in their drugs undetected.

In a freewheeling interview with CR, Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Council, explained the latest trend at the border that is exasperating his colleagues as a result of congressional inaction. “Unlike previous years, what we’re seeing now is that a large number of illegal aliens aren’t even trying to get away from us,” said the veteran border agent. “Instead, they’re running straight to us. Due to the asylum loopholes, they understand that apprehension is as good as, if not better, than getting away. This is why they’re once again crossing in metropolitan areas like El Paso and San Diego, areas that haven’t been very busy since the late 1990s. There is no need to cross through harsh rural terrain and risk dehydration and other dangers when you can illegally cross the border in major metropolitan areas, give yourself up, claim asylum, and get released just to disappear into the ‘shadows’ of society. Cartels coach illegal border crossers on exactly what they need to say when they claim asylum, allowing them to game the system.”

This trend is reflected in the latest border numbers. El Paso, which was dormant for many years, is now the second biggest trafficking area of the nine border sectors. Whereas total border apprehensions of family units are up 303 percent this fiscal year relative to the first two months of FY 2018, those numbers are up in San Diego and El Paso by 601 percent and 1866 percent respectively.

Then what happens in the rural areas out of sight of the agents? Judd continued:

“To be clear, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t criminals and drug runners coming in through the rural areas – there are, but given that the entire of flow of aliens is orchestrated by the cartels, they’re using ‘asylum seekers’ as pawns to create gaps in the border by tying up Border Patrol resources. The cartels flood the metropolitan areas with more family units than we have resources to deal with, causing us to move resources from rural areas, thereby creating the gaps that allow them to move more valuable products like illicit narcotics and criminal aliens. It’s sort of like a game of football. Offenses will use misdirection in hopes the defense will bite. When the defense bites, the good offenses exploit the weaknesses or gaps for large gains.”

Judd made it clear that President Trump, by pushing for a wall and an end to the asylum loophole, “is one of the very few people trying to stop this trend and provide lasting border security for the American public.”

However, until Congress acts to stop the court-driven policies, these politicians are quite literally complicit in an evil conspiracy to smuggle drugs and humans. “The American public needs to understand that it is Pelosi and Schumer policies that are allowing the cartels to exploit our vulnerabilities and cross deadly drugs into the country that are killing thousands of our citizens.”

What the current border trend tells us about policy solutions

Consistently, I’ve heard three major themes about the state of play at the border from federal law enforcement and local sheriffs:

1) Migrants are now coming in large numbers, as groups of 100 or more, in addition to single individuals.

2) Migrants are coming out in the open in urban areas where they are more likely to be caught, opposite to trends of previous decades. They are even willing to climb the existing fences in the urban areas, many of which are insufficient, to get over.

3) There is a record flow of drugs, both opioids and non-opioids, pouring over the border facilitated by this flow, but Border Patrol is powerless to stop it because resources are stretched thin and our federal policies play into the scheme of the cartels.

In other words, our national sovereignty and security are shut down because of policies supported by Schumer and Pelosi and their allies in the courts. This is why, according to DEA, the size of the Mexican poppy fields more than tripled in 2013-2016, right around the time the Central American migration surged, driven by asylum, DACA, and catch-and-release. Over the same time, deaths from heroin and meth tripled, and fatalities from fentanyl skyrocketed ninefold. If Schumer and Pelosi have their way, we will likely find out in the coming years how the 2018 border surge led to an even worse drug epidemic. If Pelosi thinks it’s “immoral” to build the border wall, she might want to check her sense of morality at the door.

Why we need both a fixed border wall and the elimination of magnets

This is important to understanding why we need both the border wall and a fix to all the magnets, such as bogus asylum. The wall is clearly effective in serving as a force multiplier for blocking those who want to avoid detection. It can keep out criminals and drugs. Just ask Israel.

On the other hand, those seeking entry into this country for economic reasons but exploiting asylum will continue to come over the fence deliberately seeking detection, which is why we must get rid of the magnets and end phony asylum. Once we begin prosecuting phony asylum-seekers again rather than releasing them, they will no longer want to be detected by border agents and will be deterred by an effective wall. The proposed wall is much harder to climb than existing fencing, and it would take migrants too long to get over before risk of detection. By that time, they would be scared of getting caught.

Moreover, while the wall will help between the points of entry, migrants are increasingly coming to the points of entry themselves, and all of them would do the same if we had an impenetrable wall between the points of entry. Many more are coming to the northern border. While channeling the flow to the points of entry with the wall is certainly better than empowering the drug cartels between the points of entry, it still drains our culture and economy to invite potentially millions of people to come based on bogus asylum claims.

This is why the president and the Freedom Caucus are right to make the budget fight about both the wall and the asylum loophole.

This is also why the president is right to dismiss the concern of a government slowdown. Let’s not forget that the military, Social Security, and health care programs are already funded for the remainder of the fiscal year. The only major security-related department not funded is DHS. But it’s circular logic for Democrats to complain about a shutdown, since DHS is not stopping the flood of illegal immigrants every day. What’s the point in funding DHS without fixing this problem if our agents will just be used to facilitate the most evil human and drug smuggling?

Madison explained the arrangement of federalism best in Federalist #45 as keeping the powers of the federal government “few and defined,” applied “principally on external objects.” Most other functions of life and economy are supposed to be handled by state governments. There is no greater purpose to the federal government than protecting us from the ultimate external threat of migration, drugs, gangs, and terrorists at the border. As Iranian president Hassan Rouhani warned a few days ago, Iran will flood the West with “a deluge of drugs, asylum seekers, bombs and terrorism.”

Now is the most critical time for Trump to stand his ground, finally reopen our government, and unshackle our border agents so we can close our border. (For more from the author of “Border Reality: A Caravan Crosses Every Day” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Customs and Border Protection has just reported that November set a new record for family units invading our border.

It feels like it was just last week when I wrote about the record border numbers from September and just yesterday when I wrote that the October numbers blew out the previous record. Now we have blown out the October numbers.

Overall, in November, 51,856 individuals were apprehended at the southern border between points of entry, while another 10,600 were apprehended at the points of entry. Those overall monthly numbers were only surpassed four times during the Obama administration. But the real kicker is the continued skyrocketing number of people coming with children, which demonstrates this is all about gaming the system and not legitimate asylum. A total of 30,154 family units were apprehended, 25,172 between points of entry and 4,982 at the points of entry. One can only imagine how many bad guys were able to slip in without being interdicted because border agents were busy apprehending these families.

While the number of unaccompanied teenagers has remained relatively steady after the initial rise last year, the number of family units apprehended between points of entry skyrocketed by almost 2,151 percent since the rock-bottom numbers of the Trump effect in the spring of 2017. The numbers tripled just since the early summer, when the entire political class engaged in public virtue-signaling over “separating families.” Now they can all hang their heads in shame knowing that they are responsible not just for the immeasurable public charge and public safety concern to Americans but all of the hardships that are endured by these kids at the hands of the cartels. Virtue-signaling without any facts is no virtue at all.

More specifically, there was an 1866 percent increase in family units coming to the El Paso sector in fiscal year 2019 so far over FY 2018. This is a very disturbing trend given that the violent Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) and several warring factions operate there. El Paso used to be less of a human smuggling corridor than San Diego and Tucson; now it has become the number-two route behind the Rio Grande sector in the far east of Texas.

Worse, Middle Eastern immigrants have been known to cross this part of the border, and the influx of bogus asylum-seekers that is now occupying the Border Patrol in the region will strategically distract BP from interdicting some of the more problematic migrants. CJNG was designated by the Justice Department as a top transnational organized crime threat in October because it is “one of the largest, most dangerous drug cartels currently operating in Mexico” that is “responsible for trafficking many tons of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl-laced heroin into the United States, as well as for violence and significant loss of life in Mexico.”

There is still some speculation that CJNG, or a rival cartel attempting to frame CJNG, might have been responsible for a grenade attack on the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara. CJNG vehemently denied the attack, which makes sense because they don’t want our government to finally turn our military might against the cartels, as we should have been doing for years rather than getting involved in tribal wars in the Middle East. These cartels have their agents and enforcers in every major city in our country thanks to our disregard for our own border. They are fueling a lot of the violence in Chicago.

You can imagine that with an 1866 percent increase in migration of family units through this territory, it has tied down border agents and opened up a clear avenue for CJNG or other cartels to bring in record numbers of drugs, criminals, and possibly terrorists through the gaps created by our “compassion.” As Brandon Judd, president of the Border Patrol Council, explained to me, “Taking agents out of the field creates artificial gaps in our coverage and allows cartels to smuggle [in] their higher-value contraband, such as opioids and criminal aliens or persons from special-interest countries, through the gaps.”

If you want to know why we have a drug crisis, the catch-and-release magnet bringing in bogus asylum seekers and empowering these cartels through cash flow, tactical logistics, and serving as their drug mules is the single biggest reason.

Which brings us back to our political leaders. During his inaugural address, President Trump lamented, “We’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own.” December 21, when the newest continuing resolution expires, will be his time for choosing – his time for fulfilling his promise.

When deciding whether to veto the final budget bill, Trump must contemplate whether he wants to be the president who finally stopped the invasion at our border or the president who oversees an even larger invasion than Obama did. He must decide whether he will be the man to finally put the drug cartels out of business or the man to pave the way for these cartels to send even more impoverished Central Americans over our borders while killing our people with drugs and flooding our urban areas with the most violent transnational criminal gangs. (For more from the author of “Immigration Flood Numbers Still Rising. Will Trump Be the President to Stop It?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

What does it really mean to have a government shutdown? It means that the federal government does not perform its first duty of securing our nation. Our government shutdown continues as the unelected federal judiciary continues its bloodless coup against our national sovereignty, history, and tradition, and the legislative and executive branches do nothing to stop it.

Any federal court can now declare that freedom of speech and religion don’t exist for Americans, yet there is a First Amendment right to immigrate and to help other people illegally violate our sovereignty. Any federal court can say that states and even the federal government can’t ban sanctuary cities, but they are free to clamp down on gun rights of Americans. Our Constitution is twisted beyond recognition, yet we are told this is the law of the land. How much longer can we survive under the Orwellian legal profession? Moreover, if we keep agreeing to such a system, then even a border wall won’t help, because judges are erasing the recognition of the border altogether.

Because illegals are now considered a special protected class, courts are violating settled law by granting them citizen constitutional rights and even super-rights that citizens don’t have. Here’s the latest example.

Just days after the Ninth Circuit denied the government’s motion to overturn Judge Tigar’s unprecedented injunction on our border admission policies, the lawless circuit ruled that a statute prosecuting anyone who knowingly “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States,” is unconstitutional because it “criminalizes a substantial amount of constitutionally protected expression.”

This ruling violates our long-standing laws of criminalizing such behavior and opens the door for lawyers and agitation groups to continue thumbing their noses at our most foundational sovereignty laws.

Evelyn Sineneng-Smith, a naturalized immigrant from the Philippines, operated a boutique immigration consulting business in San Jose with several other branches across the country to help illegal aliens obtain visas in the U.S. She was convicted in 2013 in the Northern District of California of two felony counts of violating immigration law in addition to two non-immigration counts of mail fraud for knowingly advising her illegal immigrant clients to take advantage of worker programs for which they weren’t eligible. In 2015, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

The 1952 INA (8 U.S.C. § 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)) calls for felony prosecution for anyone who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law.” At the trial, the Department of Justice under Obama presented significant evidence from five separate cases where Sineneng-Smith knowingly worked with unscrupulous employers to try to get work visas for those who overstayed their tourist visas and were living here illegally. Not only did she subvert our sovereignty by encouraging illegals to remain here illegally, she defrauded the illegal immigrants themselves by taking thousands of dollars to give them the impression she was working on obtaining their visas and even green cards. She then engaged in mail fraud to send them letters hoodwinking them into thinking they had earned legal status to remain here and were on a path to a green card. District Judge Ronald Whyte ultimately upheld the charges in two cases, a decision that was reversed yesterday in the Ninth Circuit.

Judge Wallace Tashima, writing for the panel of three Democrat-appointed judges at the Ninth Circuit, ruled that this entire statute is unconstitutional because it would criminalize “pure advocacy on a hotly debated issue in our society.”

This is utterly scandalous, because the law clearly refers to engaging in subversive and fraudulent activities to encourage or enable actual individual aliens to remain in the country, not mere political advocacy for liberal immigration policies in the abstract. It’s like saying that someone who hates high taxes and advocates against them is the same as a person who charges money to assist tax cheats and give them the impression that their activity is legal.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, told me that this ruling is “absurd” because “the key issue is not her speech, but the fact that she did it for financial gain, and this is spelled out in the statute.”

“This woman’s main business was assisting and covering for an illegal activity that is harmful to our society and harms Americans and legal immigrants,” wrote Vaughan in an email. “She was basically a white-collar alien smuggler, helping illegal aliens launder their immigration status through fraud. How can this be above the law?”

Judges can’t veto laws; they can merely grant or deny relief to individual plaintiffs. Even if the judge were correct that this law, in general, could possibly rope in mere advocacy and speech for criminal prosecution, that concern doesn’t apply to this case. Judges rule on cases, not on laws. To believe otherwise is to concoct an entirely new level of judicial veto that our Founders explicitly rejected. This is the difference between judicial review and judicial supremacy.

This is also part of a growing trend of judges tossing out not only long-standing immigration enforcement policies, but even long-standing immigration statutes for the first time in our history. This law had been on the books in some form since 1891. Section 3 of the 1891 Immigration Act made it a felony to “assist or encourage the importation or migration of any alien by promise of employment” through advertisements. Any alien who came in due to such advertisements was deemed inadmissible, and that law was designed to prevent people from encouraging them.

Disturbingly, modern judges have no concept of the power of the federal government to protect our sovereignty. The courts would never interfere with federal law if lawyers set up businesses to actively thwart our tax or health care laws, but illegal immigration has become a civil rights issue in their minds, thereby allowing them to create new First Amendment rights to break the laws. As Vaughan observed, despite the clear distinction in this case between speech and criminal activity, “to the Ninth Circuit, apparently all that matters is that illegal aliens were involved, so the criminal behavior must be excused and the law Congress wrote must be nullified.”

It also demonstrates that the legal profession is engaging in civil disobedience against our sovereignty. Last week, another New York federal judge declared sanctuary policies in seven states because, evidently, there’s now a constitutional right for states to obtain federal law enforcement grants even when they subvert federal law enforcement. Using absurd pretense of state powers, Judge Edgardo Ramos declared section 1373 of the INA, which requires local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration enforcement, unconstitutional and applied his ruling in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Washington, Massachusetts, and Virginia, He ruled this from Newton, Massachusetts.

Not all judges disguise their agenda in the written fog of legalese, either. ICE is looking into an allegation that a state judge allowed a criminal alien to slip out the back of her courthouse to evade apprehension.

What do we do with a court system that no longer respects the most basic maxims of international law governing sovereign nation-states or our own history and traditions? Well, RINO Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker has shown us the way. He has defied multiple orders from state judges to restore the legitimate gun rights of citizens. Shouldn’t we be at least as aggressive when we have the law and the Constitution on our side in the face of judges concocting new rights for illegal aliens? (For more from the author of “Judges Are Now Openly Treating Illegal Immigration as the New Civil Rights Movement” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.