Tag Archives: immigration

A District Judge Gets One Right

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Senior Federal District Court Judge for the District of Maryland Roger Titus has ruled that President Donald Trump’s wind-down of DACA was entirely legal and proper.  While that’s an outcome agreeable to me, my interest is in his reasoning for upholding Trump’s withdrawal of the Obama DHS Memorandum creating DACA.

As disheartening or inappropriate as the president’s occasionally disparaging remarks may be, they are not relevant to the larger issues governing the DACA rescission. The DACA Rescission Memo is clear as to its purpose and reasoning, and its decision is rationally supported by the administrative record.

And

This court does not like the outcome of this case, but is constrained by its constitutionally limited role to the result that it has reached. Hopefully, the Congress and the president will finally get their job done.
…
An overwhelming percentage of Americans support protections for ‘Dreamers,’ yet it is not the province of the judiciary to provide legislative or executive actions when those entrusted with those responsibilities fail to act.

Imagine that.  A judge ruling on the merits of the matter and not bringing in irrelevancies.  A California and a New York Federal trial judge could stand to read Titus’ ruling and learn from it.

Titus’ ruling can be read here.

 

h/t Power Line

A Mayor and Violent Illegal Aliens

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Some numbers are in following an ICE raids in northern California last week that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned her illegal alien constituents was coming before the raids went in [emphasis added].

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials announced this week that the four-day raid led to the arrest of 232 illegal immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Of those 232, 180 “were either convicted criminals, had been issued a final order of removal and failed to depart the United States, or had been previously removed” from the country and had come back illegally.

Another 115 “had prior felony convictions for serious or violent offenses, such as child sex crimes, weapons charges and assault, or had past convictions for significant or multiple misdemeanors.”

Acting ICE Director Tom Homan said that, as a result of Schaaf’s heads up [FoxNews‘ paraphrase],

there are roughly 800 illegal immigrants they were unable to locate.

Including how many more with prior felony convictions for serious or violent offenses, such as child sex crimes, weapons charges and assault a reader might wonder.

Schaaf is proud of herself, too.

I did what I believe was right for my community as well as to protect public safety[.]

Especially the safety of her illegal alien community members.

Now we know where the mayor stands on gun control.  And on protecting the children of any of her constituents.  On the safety of any of her legal constituents, come to that.

A Party’s Failure on Immigration

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The Party in question isn’t the Republican Party.  Those folks always have had a very stringent position on immigration, and they’ve not hidden their view from the public’s eye.  No, the failing party is the Progressive-Democratic Party.  Those folks have long claimed—a claim we now know to be a cynical pretense, a pretense consistent with the underlying philosophy of the party of Jim Crow and of racist and sexist affirmative action—to be champions of immigrants and of DACA children.  But last week, they voted against every bill, Republican-offered and “bipartisan,” that was brought up.  The Progressive-Democrats wouldn’t even vote for cloture so the bills could be openly debated on the Senate floor.

Many Republicans voted against the bills, too, it’s true enough.  But as I said, they’ve had a sterner view of immigration all along.  It’s the Progressive-Democrats who voted against their avowals, who welched on their public commitments to DACA children and to immigrants and immigrant wannabes.

The Progressive-Democratic Party has shown with last week’s display that they don’t give a damn about DACA children or about immigration reform generally.  They only want the issue for campaigning for their political gain.

DACA children aren’t human children.  Prospective immigrants—including the illegal aliens already present—aren’t adult humans.  They’re just shovels for digging up votes.

This is how the Progressive-Democratic Party so shamefully has said they view these people.  This is what all of us need to remember in the fall.

Immigration, Progressive-Democrats, and Votes

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President Donald Trump has an immigration bill on offer before the Congress, the Republicans have one, and a bipartisan group of two Senators have one.  Trump’s bill includes legalization and an eventual possibility of citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers (1.2 million, or so, beyond ex-President Barack Obama’s (D) illegal DACA program Dreamers), funding for a border wall, and changes to our visa programs.  The Republicans’ offer centers on DACA protections and a border wall.  The “bipartisan” bill has only DACA protections, not even border security.

The Progressive-Democrats in Congress oppose both of the first two, and all three bills don’t look promising for passage, with that third a non-starter for its lack of protections for our nation.

This is what we see from the Progressive-Democrats.  They’ll vote against a bill that provides protections for the Dreamers protected under DACA.  They’ll vote against a bill that provides protections and legal status for three times the number of Dreamers than were protected under Obama’s DACA.

This is the conclusion that follows.  The Progressive-Democratic Party and its Congressional members don’t see DACA Dreamers—and especially the added Dreamers under Trump’s offer—as human beings.  Not at all.  These people are just a mechanical commodity, a tool to be used politically as a campaign issue on which to raise money and get votes.

The Progressive-Democrats claim that Trump’s offer would reduce overall immigration through the visa changes, and it likely would.  That, though, is just a broader, immigrants-as-commodity for Party political gain, argument.  Immigrants generally aren’t human beings in the eyes of Progressive-Democrats; the mass of immigrants is just a tool.

Of course, the Progressive-Democrats could prove me wrong.  They could stop playing politics with human lives and support Trump’s bill.  Or they could stop playing politics with human lives and support the Republicans’ DACA plus border security bill.

If they don’t, remember their attitude toward men and women and children this fall.

Mid-Term Elections

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At their retreat last week, Republicans indicated that they intend to run heavily on the tax reform they got through at the end of last year.  It’s good to have something positive on which to run, especially since, at least for the near term, the Progressive-Democratic Party has nothing on which to campaign other than its #NeverTrump and #NothingRepublicanNoWay platform and its standard disparagement of ordinary Americans like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA) claim that the tax reform’s aftermath of bonuses and pay raises are just crumbs.

As an aside, it must be good to be as rich as Pelosi, that a $1,000 bonus or an increase in take-home pay of some $2,000 per year is just chump change.  President Donald Trump is stinking rich, Vstly more so than Pelosi, and he doesn’t think this added money is trivial.  I’m not stinking rich; I’m not even as rich as Pelosi—not by a long shot—those $1,000 matter to me, as do the added $2,000/yr take-home.

Back to my point.  Republicans can’t only run on their tax reform, though.  They need to add three things to their campaign.  The first addresses, preemptively, the fact that the personal income tax rate cuts—that increase in take-home—expire in about eight years.  Republicans need to emphasize that the only way that rate cut expiration actually would occur would be if Progressive-Democrats in Congress (especially in the Senate where they can filibuster) block those cuts from being extended or made permanent.

The second thing is to go on the offensive regarding DACA.  Most Americans, and it’s pretty much evenly spread across party and independent lines, want the children who were brought by their parents into the US illegally dealt with compassionately and with finality: no more doubt hanging over these folks’ heads.  A couple of Republican proposals for achieving this are on offer. The Republicans currently in office need to push heavily and loudly one or the other or both of them this year, even though—even because—it’s an election year.  Demonstrate that they’re not the ones too timid to do something major and concrete in an election year.

Republicans also need to hammer on Progressive-Democrat Congressmen constantly saying “No.”  Republicans need to be asking loudly, both in their own districts, in their neighboring Progressive-Democrat incumbents’ districts, and in neighboring open districts why Progressive-Democrats so vociferously oppose any plan on offer that takes care of the DACA children—and that does so largely on Progressive-Democrat terms.  Or do the Progressive-Democrats see these folks only as a talking point and not as a group of human beings?

It would have been good if President Donald Trump, during his SOTU speech last week, had pointed to the Dreamers (not the same group as DACA, but there’s tremendous overlap) in the gallery as guests of Progressive-Democrat Congressmen and said to them, “I have a proposal put before Congress that addresses your needs, including a path to citizenship.  Why are the Democrats so opposed to that?”  But that’s water under the bridge, and he still has time to ask that.  Often.

The third thing Republicans need to add to their campaign is their plan for the future.  What do these guys want to do to make American lives better, and how—concretely, an aspect Republicans never have done well—will those things actually make our lives better?