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)

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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)

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. . .Take immigration, for example. As the Central American migrants storm the U.S.-Mexico border, the line of argument has shifted within the left from “they are never going to come” to “they are only poor refugees.”

Reihan Salam pointed out in the latest National Review podcast that migrants, who had to pay thousands of dollars to human traffickers in the past, can now have the relative safety and comfort of travelling in caravans, with food and blankets being provided by activists and NGOs, helping their every move. This is almost a copybook replication of the European migrant movement, with NGOs and activists with immense funding acting hand in hand with human traffickers.

It is also unsustainable, as the majority of the migrants in this scenario are military-aged men (just like Europe), brandishing their own countries’ flags, chanting worker’s solidarity slogans supported by socialists, and pelting stones at U.S. service personnel. Regardless of what some in the rational left still think of mass migration, this optics will eventually force them to choose between taking a stance of de facto open borders, or use of force and deterrence to stop this precedent. . .

The second fault line is identity politics. Post-2016, the Democrats have not found a way to move forward and are even divided in their diagnosis of what the problem is. The progressive wing of the left wanted a free hand and got one in the recent midterms, but the results were not kind to them.

Two key races, for example, showed the limitations of identity as a factor. In the gubernatorial race in Georgia, the far-left Stacey Abrams is refusing to concede in a manner now prevalent on the left. Abrams was a darling of the media, ticking all the intersectional boxes, which somehow led her to believe in her inevitability of winning and she is now disputing reality. (Read more from “The Democratic Party’s Fault Lines Are Immigration and Identity Politics” HERE)

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