Category Archives: immigration

Border Wall Funding

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) is continuing to insist—brag, really—that there aren’t the votes in the House or the Senate for funding for a border wall.  Presently, he’s focused on the Senate:

Schumer maintained that Trump does not have the votes for a wall, at least in the Senate.

Schumer’s prior remarks might have been right about the House; the Republican caucus there has been as unfocused and undisciplined and dither-ridden as they’ve been for the last several years regarding border security.  Thursday, though, President Donald Trump injected some backbone into the caucus and sharpened its focus: he told Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and other Republicans present in a mid-day meeting—in no uncertain terms—that he would veto the CR that the Senate had so cravenly passed because it had no border wall money in it.  Thursday evening, the House responded, passing 217-185 (with 8 Republicans voting with the Progressive-Democrats) an amended CR with $5.7 billion in it for a border wall.  That bill has been passed to the Senate.

However, the reason President Donald Trump doesn’t have the votes in the Senate is because Schumer actively, proudly, blocks such a thing, even as he claims the Republicans control the Senate—as though in his fantasy world 60 is less than 51 (or next year, 53).  Of course, Schumer knows better, he’s just proud of his obstructionism.  He’s also proud of his hypocrisy, having supported several more billions of dollars than just five for a border wall—the 2006 Secure Fence Act, for instance—and as recently as last January, after which he welched on an agreement that involved solutions for 1.8 million DACA people (more than the 800 thousand for whom Progressive-Democrats had been seeking help) along with a parallel $25 billion for the wall.

Prepare to greet the Schumer Shutdown redux.

Pay the Vig

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…or else.  The truth will out, at least for a significant fraction of the “caravan.”

One group of a hundred, under the alleged leadership of Honduran Alfonso Guerreo Ulloa, has gone to the US Consulate in Tijuana with an extortion demand: give us $50,000—per each, which works out to $5 million in all, if my third grade arithmetic doesn’t fail me—to go home and start a small business (we promise), or we’ll storm your border and break in forcibly.

Wait—I thought one of the major reasons these folks left Honduras was to escape the gangs’ extortion of small business owners/operators.  So now they want 50 large to go back and…pay off those gangs?

Questions arise.  Under alleged leadership: who’s really running this group?  What’s the real motive for this gang at the consulate?  Who’ll really get those $5 million when they get back home?

“Impose Boundaries on Immigration Law”

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That’s the title of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s op-ed in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.  In it, he decried the lack of uniformity of our immigration laws and associated judicial rulings on those laws.

…US immigration law is far from uniform. Inconsistent rulings by the 12 federal appellate courts have created a hodgepodge of jurisprudence, in which the applicable legal precedents depend on the location of the immigration court that heard a case.

He proposed a solution.

Congress can and should restore uniformity and promote efficiency by consolidating all immigration appeals in a specialized court of immigration appeals.

Whatever the merits of Rosenstein’s proposal, though, before any immigration law—any law—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  Before any specialist court—any court—can have legitimate, and predictable, effect, boundaries have to be imposed on activist judges.  This is particularly critical given the judge-centric nature of his proposal.

Judges cannot be allowed to place their personal views of societal need or “fairness” above what the law they’re applying actually says.  Judges cannot be allowed to violate their oaths of office with their imposition of personal views in place of imposing the text of the law(s) before them in cases, including immigration cases.

Failure requires consequences, else judicial failure will continue, to the increasing detriment of our republic.  Those consequences must include, in the most egregious instances or when particular judges demonstrate an especial predilection for activism, removal from the bench.

Mexico Says It’s Not a Safe Country?

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President Donald Trump has said that the US and Mexico have reached an agreement—at least in principle (although Trump is his usual more definitive self)—that those seeking asylum in the US will remain in Mexico until their asylum cases have been heard and acted on by the US.  The Washington Post has claimed to quote incoming Interior Minister Olga Sanchez Cordero as saying so, too.

However, Sanchez Cordero says that she said no such thing to WaPo.  In fact, she says that no such deal, no Remain in Mexico program—”of any sort”—exists.  Given that newspaper’s record of honest reporting, I believe Sanchez Cordero.

What interests me about her statement, though, is this:

The future government does not consider […] that Mexico assumes the status of “safe third country” for Central American migrants, or from other countries, who are on Mexican territory or for those who will reach it in the future[.]

There are a few interpretations for this statement.  One is that Mexico doesn’t consider itself to be a “safe” country of any sort—a recognition that would be consistent with the corruption rampant in the Mexican police at all jurisdictional levels and with the broad power held by the several drug cartels that operate freely throughout Mexico.

Another is simply that Mexico doesn’t want the legal liability that would accrue from accepting that status.

A third is that rejecting the status is not the same as declining to make an exception for the current “caravan” of persons claiming to seek asylum in the US after having explicitly rejected Mexico’s offer of asylum.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Asylum

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Folks from the “caravan” have begun arriving in the Mexican border town of Tijuana preparatory to their effort to enter the US and ask for asylum.

These folks, claiming to flee government persecution and/or criminal assaults (which isn’t an asylum criterion, anyway), in their home countries, succeeded in escaping those things when they succeeded in entering Mexico—especially with Mexico having offered them asylum (and job opportunities) after that entry.

Now they need to say what they fear about their Mexican hosts that drives their need to flee Mexico and get asylum in the US. Since they haven’t experienced any of that in Mexico, and they have rejected Mexican asylum from their home countries, they should be denied entry into the US and those that do make it in need to be denied asylum here—their requests can only be shams.