While the policy is abhorrent, cruel, and destructive to the nation, I think the court got it right on the law. Essentially, one administration should be able to change discretionary policy that a previous administration made. This ruling will be important in 2025. Also, I agree with Kavanaugh in his consent opinion:
One final note: The larger policy story behind this case is the multi-decade inability of the political branches to provide DHS with sufficient facilities to detain noncitizens who seek to enter the United States pending their immigration proceedings. But this Court has authority to address only the legal issues before us. We do not have authority to end the legislative stalemate or to resolve the underlying policy problems
A bus from Texas arrived in Washington, D.C. Wednesday morning, transporting dozens of illegal immigrants as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s new plan to counter federal immigration policies during an ongoing border crisis.
Abbott announced last week that he was directing the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) to transport migrants released from federal custody in Texas to the nation’s capital and other locations outside his state.
The bus pulled up at approximately 8 a.m. local time, blocks away from the U.S. Capitol building. Fox News has learned that they came from the Del Rio sector in Texas, after coming to the U.S. from Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Upon the bus’s arrival in Washington, D.C., individuals disembarked one by one except for family units who exited together. They checked in with officials and had wristbands they were wearing cut off before being told they could go.
Despite setbacks, Biden in sheer numbers has made more changes than Trump to federal immigrationpolicy with many reversals to the way the U.S. enforces immigration law.
Biden issued 296 executive actions during his first year compared to 86 in Trump’s first year and 472 over his 4-year term, according to analysts from the non-partisan Migration PolicyInstitute.
[…]
Nonetheless, ICE arrests have been cut in half compared to the final year of the Trump presidency and the detained immigrant population is the lowest since 1999, according to MPI.
[…]
The year was marked with a historic level of unauthorized border crossing attempts which hit a peak of 213,000 in the month of July, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. More than a quarter of those encounters with immigration authorities involved repeat offenders.
[…]
Politically, views of Biden’s approach to immigration have dragged down his overall approval ratings over the past year. A Gallup poll released last November found just 31 percent of Americans approve of his handling of immigration issues.
The men assumed they had been detained by immigration officers for illegally crossing into the United States. They were wrong. Instead, they were arrested on charges of trespassing on a vast private ranch by highway patrol officers from the Texas state police.
For several months, Texas has been engaged in an effort to repurpose the tools of state law enforcement to stem the sudden increase of people crossing illegally into the country.
To do this, Texas officials led by Gov. Greg Abbott developed a way around the fact that immigration enforcement is a federal government job: State and local police departments partner with the owners of borderland ranches and use trespassing laws to arrest migrants who cross their land.
“That’s an effective way of sending a message,” Abbott said, flanked by nine other Republican governors, at a news conference along the border this fall. “If you come into the state of Texas illegally, you have a high likelihood of not getting caught and released, but instead, arrested and jailed.”
The new approach relies on the participation of local officials and, so far, it has been adopted in two of the state’s 32 border region counties: Kinney, which includes Brackettville, and Val Verde, its neighbor to the west.
[…]
Seated on the oak-shadowed patio of their ranch, a few head of cattle walking slowly nearby, Bill and Carolyn Conoly said the situation this year was the worst they could remember.
“We’re constantly repairing,” Conoly said, referring to ranch fences that are bent or cut. “We keep the doors locked, and I have a gun available.”
Motion-activated cameras on the ranch capture images of passing migrants, information that helps the state police locate them. Earlier that day, cameras had picked up a large group walking through the Conoly family ranch; police caught up with the migrants at night on an adjacent ranch — 14 men and one woman.
(Reuters) – The Biden administration will restart a controversial Trump-era border program that forces asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for U.S. immigration hearings, in keeping with a federal court order, U.S. and Mexican officials said on Thursday.
The United States will take steps to address Mexico’s humanitarian concerns with the program, the officials said, including offering vaccines to migrants and exempting more categories of people deemed vulnerable.
Migrants also will be asked if they have a fear of persecution or torture in Mexico before being enrolled in the program and have access to legal representation, U.S. officials said during a call with reporters on Thursday.
[…]
Exceptions will be made for migrants with health issues, the elderly and those at risk of discrimination in Mexico, particularly based on gender identity and sexual orientation, a different U.S. official said.
by Owen | 2150, 28 Feb 2121 | Politics | 2 Comments
True. Obama’s immigration policy is what drove swaths of people to support Trump.
A Democratic lawmaker representing a border district warned the Biden administration against easing up too much on unauthorized immigrants, citing their impact on his constituents, local hospitals and their potential to spread the coronavirus.
Why it matters: Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) told Axios he supports President Biden. But the moderate said he sees the downsides of efforts to placate pro-immigrant groups, an effort that threatens to blow up on the administration.
The Biden administration on Friday announced plans for tens of thousands of people who are seeking asylum and have been forced to wait in Mexico under a Trump-era policy to be allowed into the U.S. while their cases wind through immigration courts.
The first wave of an estimated 25,000 asylum-seekers with active cases in the ‘Remain in Mexico’ program will be allowed into the United States on February 19, authorities said.
On average, roughly 85 per cent of Central American asylum claims are rejected by U.S. courts.
LOS ANGELES — President Biden’s first immigration crisis has already begun as thousands of families have surged toward the southwestern border in recent weeks, propelled by expectations of a friendlier reception and by a change in Mexican policy that makes it harder for the United States to expel some of the migrants.
More than 1,000 people who had been detained after crossing have been released into the country in recent days in a swift reversal from the Trump administration’s near shutdown of the border. Many more people are gathering on the Mexican side, aggravating conditions there and testing America’s ability and willingness to admit migrants during a pandemic.
New families every day have been collecting in Mexican border towns, sleeping in the streets, under bridges and in dry ditches, according to lawyers and aid groups working along the border. On Thursday in Mexicali, across from Calexico, Calif., desperate migrants could be seen trying to scale a border fence. A migrant camp in Matamoros, Mexico, just across a bridge from Texas, has boomed to 1,000 people over the past few weeks.
I guess we aren’t worried about the virus anymore if we’re allowing thousands of illegal immigrants to stream across our border, eh?
by Owen | 2123, 25 Jun 1919 | Politics | 5 Comments
Our immigration laws need to be fixed before more potential immigrants die. Too bad the Democrats prefer to prioritize politics over… well… everything else.
On Monday, the bodies were discovered on the bank of the river near Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, Texas, and several hundred yards from where they had tried to cross, just a half-mile from an international bridge.
The southern U.S. border has seen a massive surge of illegal crossings in recent months, with more than 144,000 apprehensions in May alone.
Many of the migrants are from Central America, often in family units. Due to a patchwork of legal restrictions, Central Americans who cross the border illegally with children and request asylum are frequently quickly released into the interior to await a court hearing.
Mexico City (AFP) – Mexico said Wednesday that central American migrants will be given “regional visitor cards” near the Guatemalan border that restrict their movement to the south of the country, impeding their ability to reach the United States.
The restriction will be a blow to tens of thousands of migrants, fleeing the poverty and violence at home, who enter southern Mexico and travel across the country in so-called “caravans” in an attempt to seek asylum in the US.
The cards will be given out in the southeastern city of Tapachula, where Mexican media report there are around 5,000 would-be migrants planning to head to the US.
[…]
US President Donald Trump has warned of a raft of sanctions — including closing official border crossings — unless Mexico cracks down on migrants.
[…]
It is not clear what effect issuing regional visitor cards will have on the caravans given many of the migrants have entered Mexico illegally anyway.
The 26-year-old is also quoted in the interview as saying he was expelled from school in Atlanta aged about 12 or 13 for taking a gun to class.
“His whole public persona is false,” a CNN reporter quoted an ICE spokesman as saying.
Other reports quoted ICE as saying the rapper was being held in the state of Georgia for being unlawfully present in the US and for being a felon. He was convicted of drugs charges in 2014.
[…]
There are 10.6 million undocumented immigrants in the US, according to the Center for Migration Studies. That represents 3.25% of the US population.
I’m having a hard time mustering sympathy for the poor, oppressed, overweight woman in Nikes trying to illegally enter our country. I fail to understand why I should have to pay more taxes to support her choice to leave her own country.
I didn’t know that church sanctuary was still a thing. In any case, hats off to ICE for finally catching the scofflaw.
An immigrant who sought refuge from deportation in a North Carolina church, staying there for 11 months, was arrested on Friday after arriving at an appointment with immigration officials.
The arrest led to protests and the arrest of some supporters of Samuel Oliver-Bruno, the 47-year-old Mexican national who, according to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) news release, was detained at a Raleigh-area immigration office.
An advocacy group, Alerta Migratoria NC, said in a statement Oliver-Bruno went to have fingerprints taken so he could apply to stay in North Carolina with his wife and son.
He has been living in CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham since late 2017, to avoid the reach of immigration officers, who generally avoid making arrests at churches and other sensitive locations.
Ice said Oliver-Bruno, who has lived in North Carolina for two decades, had no legal basis to be in the US and had exhausted his “extensive” appeals. In 2014, according to court documents, Oliver-Bruno pleaded guilty to using false documents to try to re-enter the US in Texas.
Madison Police Chief Mike Koval and Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney have reiterated their commitment to the Madison and Dane County community and not to enforcing immigration law.
Koval said Friday that he was not informed that ICE would be in the area even though the MPD has a standing agreement with the agency to be notified when agents will be in the community. Koval has reiterated that enforcement of immigration laws remains primarily with the federal government.
In the same breath, Police Chief Koval says he will not cooperate with ICE and then whines about ICE not informing him that they will be doing their jobs. Cooperation goes both way.
To the story itself, the Capital Times, liberal rag that it is, doesn’t even bother to get another side of the story. It merely parrots the complaints of an activist group and their supporters. A better headline would have been, “ICE Does its Job.”
In an effort to whip up emotions for the midterm elections and drive racial divisions in America, the Democrats have allied themselves with the radical open borders fringe groups to call for the abolition of the Immigration and Customer Enforcement agency. While such a movement has very serious implications, it resulted in a comical exposition of hypocrisy and rank opportunism for a Wisconsin politician.
ICE is a massive federal agency with two central charters. The first is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws in the interior of the country. Customs and Border Protection is responsible for enforcing the nation’s borders, but once immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are inside, it is the responsibility of ICE to identify, apprehend and deport people who are illegally residing in the United States.
The second mission for ICE is to investigate activities that occur as a result of people illegally moving people and goods across America’s borders. This includes human trafficking, terrorism, drug smuggling, gang activities, cybercrimes, child exploitation, money laundering, the theft of intellectual property and the like.
When the Democrats talk about abolishing ICE, they are not talking about replacing it with another agency. They are talking about abandoning the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws and just allowing anyone who makes it past the gauntlet of the border to just stay in America. Unable to muster the political power to change our immigration laws, some Democrats are seeking to negate the law by abolishing the agency tasked with enforcing that law.
When one considers how much ICE does for our nation, one realizes that abolishing the agency and abandoning its missions would unleash a wave of mayhem. According to ICE’s 2017 figures, the agency arrested 4,818 gang members including 796 from the evil MS-13 gang, rescued 904 children from exploitation, rescued 518 human trafficking victims, seized 6,967 pounds of heroin and 2,370 pounds of fentanyl, made 32,958 criminal arrests, and so much more.
When it comes to deportations, ICE, on orders from President Donald Trump, focused its resources heavily on deporting illegal aliens who had committed crimes. More than 89 percent of all illegal aliens deported by ICE in 2017 had either been convicted of a crime or had criminal charges pending. The largest percentage of crimes committed by deportees included drunk driving, drugs and assault. If ICE had not enforced our laws, all of those criminals would still be in America and if there is one thing we know about criminals, it is that they rarely stop committing crimes of their own accord.
All of this brings us to the hilarious theatrics of Wisconsin’s Congressman Mark Pocan. Hailing from the comfortably safe liberal District centered on Dane County, Pocan authored a bill to fulfill the fantasies of the radicals and abolish ICE. Under Pocan’s plan, the criminal functions of ICE would move to other agencies, but the enforcement of immigration laws would cease. Pocan apparently forgot he could write bills to change the immigration laws and instead opted for the anarchy of laws without an enforcement arm instead.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, from the neighboring Wisconsin Congressional District, obliged Congressman Pocan’s effort and announced he would bring Pocan’s bill to abolish ICE to the floor. Despite the fact that Pocan is a member of the minority party, Ryan and the Republican leadership decided to call the vote and let the chips fall where they may.
As a member of the minority party in the Congress, Congressman Pocan intended his bill to be political posturing to feed the anger of the radical Left for the election. He never actually intended for it to be voted upon. Stoking the fires of hatred before an election is far more important to Pocan than serious immigration reform. With his bluff called and his shameless charade on display for the world to see, Pocan immediately called “foul” and said that he would vote against his own bill.
When people complain about the divisive state of political discourse in our nation, it is politicians like Congressman Pocan who is responsible. Instead of using the office entrusted to him by his constituents to work for rational immigration reforms, he chose to author a bill that even he would not support for the purpose of fueling rage before an election. Wisconsin, and the dedicated public servants of ICE, deserve better.
My column for the Washington County Daily News is online. You can find the entire thing by picking up a paper or buying an online subscription. Here’s a snippet.
When the Democrats talk about abolishing ICE, they are not talking about replacing it with another agency. They are talking about abandoning the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws and just allowing anyone who makes it past the gauntlet of the border to just stay in America. Unable to muster the political power to change our immigration laws, some Democrats are seeking to negate the law by abolishing the agency tasked with enforcing that law.
The participants were former state Rep. Kelda Roys; Mahlon Mitchell, head of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin; political activist Mike McCabe and state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout.
[…]
A question from Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights organization based in Milwaukee, asked if candidates would support a law that would allow undocumented immigrants access to driver’s’ licenses “no matter what their status or income.” All four candidates said yes, and pointed to a larger need to support immigrants.
But they do not support the kids of those illegal aliens having access to better schools through School Choice. Democrats are big on keeping people staying in their assigned place in society.
(Reuters) – A question about citizenship status will be included on the 2020 Census to help enforce the Voting Rights Act, federal officials said on Monday, but California sued to block the move arguing that it would discourage immigrants from participating.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided to add the question to the count after a Department of Justice request based on the desire for better enforcement of the voting law, the U.S. Department of Commerce said in a statement.
“Secretary Ross determined that obtaining complete and accurate information to meet this legitimate government purpose outweighed the limited potential adverse impacts,” it said.
The census, which is mandated under the U.S. Constitution and takes place every 10 years, counts every resident in the United States. It is used to determine the allocation to states of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and to distribute billions of dollars in federal funds to local communities.
While the census is used for a lot of things, it’s primary Constitutional function is to allocate representation for the citizens in the House and Senate. Illegal aliens are not citizens. They are not legally permitted to vote, and they should not have representation in a country they live illegally. By counting illegal aliens in the census, it shifts more representatives, and thus more power, to regions that are not entitled to it.
For example, Milwaukee and Albuquerque are about the same size in population. But if 30% of the population of Albuquerque are non-citizens, why should they get more representation in Congress (not to mention the state houses) than the citizens in Milwaukee? They shouldn’t.
If we had good border security, trying to tease out the number of illegals would be moot. But since we have allowed a massive illegal population to inhabit our nation, we need to take steps to ensure that our government is structured to represent citizens. If not, then what does citizenship really mean?
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A Mexican man who was deported twice and had a history of arrests was able to assume the identity of an American citizen and receive more than $360,000 in government benefits for nearly four decades, California court records show.
Andres Avelino Anduaga used a fake birth certificate starting in 1980 to develop a seemingly legitimate persona by applying for a California driver’s license, Social Security number and U.S. passport, according to documents obtained by the San Diego Union-Tribune . The official U.S. documents identified him as Abraham Riojos, born in Texas in 1958.
Anduaga, who’s actually 66 years old and a resident of Tijuana, Mexico, pleaded guilty last week in San Diego to theft of public property and being a previously removed unauthorized immigrant in the U.S., the newspaper reported Saturday.
