Quotes of the day
posted at 10:41 pm on July 21, 2014 by Allahpundit
The man-in-the-know nursed a late-morning beer at a bar near the Suchiate River that separates Guatemala from Mexico, and answered a question about his human smuggling business with a question: “Do you think a coyote is going to say he’s a coyote?”
Dressed as a migrant in shorts and sandals but speaking like an entrepreneur, he then described shipments of tens of thousands of dollars in human cargo from the slums of Honduras and highlands of Guatemala to cities across the United States.
“It’s business,” he said, agreeing to speak to a reporter only if guaranteed anonymity. “Sometimes, business is very good.”
*** The U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee approved a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 that includes $5.508 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations. Included in that amount is more than $87 million for the transportation of illegal immigrants–most often via plane–from the U.S.-Mexico border to federal facilities around the nation…
A DHS request for “escort services for unaccompanied alien children,” posted online in January, claimed that 50 percent of transported foreign minors are brought to interior U.S. cities via commercial planes. The others are transported via local ground transport and ICE charter air crafts.
Many U.S. citizens remain outraged that instead of turning illegal immigrants away at the border, tax dollars are being used to relocate foreigners to cities all around the nation.
*** The federal government is so overwhelmed by the current tide of migrants crossing the border it can’t provide basic medical screening to all of the children before transporting them – often by air – to longer-term holding facilities across the country, ABC News has learned…
“Preliminary reports indicate that several unaccompanied minors in the shelter had become ill with what appears to be pneumonia and influenza,” according to a statement from the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services.
HHS told ABC News the children were supposed to be screened for sickness before leaving the Border Patrol screening centers…
But, according to the memo ABC News reviewed, “Curi Kim [the HHS director of the Division of Refugee Health] has identified a breakdown of the medical screening processes at the Nogales, Arizona, facility. The [unaccompanied children] were initially screened and cleared upon entry into that facility with no fever or significant symptoms. They were not however re-screened and cleared for travel and placement at a temporary shelter.”
*** The administration’s frivolous approach to the deluge is clear from a recent request for an extra $3.7 billion to address it. The majority of funds would go not to enforcement but to efforts at resettling the illegal aliens in the United States.
The response of the administration and its supporters to the breakdown of the border in South Texas seems to have finally gotten a large share of the public to see what’s happening. Even the White House’s use of illegal-alien children as human shields for its anti-sovereignty policies has not managed to allay the increasing sense of alarm across the country…
Perhaps one particular decision by the White House highlights how concerned the administration is about public reaction: As of now, not a single illegal-alien detainee seems to have been sent to Louisiana or Arkansas, the states bordering Texas that are closest to the site of the border deluge. This is no accident. Those two states have Democratic senators up for re-election who are vulnerable enough to lose, but who might still be able to prevail. The White House appears to have decided not to send any illegals there to avoid the potential for political damage.
*** “We are not going to stop sending people, and you guys are not going to be able to stop them from getting in,” said Lt. Col. Reyes Garcia, one of the officers leading the bus station operation. “You cannot focus on just one reason that people want to leave for the United States.”…
“Do you know why people migrate there? Do you know? Because there is no work here. There is no work,” said Ana Patricia Mejia, 39, who had tried to make the trip with her kids and her neighbor’s son but was deported from Mexico. “Of course I am going again. I have to have a house. I do not have a place to live. If I want to or not, if the gringos like it or not, I am coming.”…
“Many people are saying the U.S. has approved a law to receive children,” [Waldina Lizeth Amaya] said. “The U.S. is an advanced country, and I want my children to study there. I want them to have a better life. That’s the main reason.”
*** Honduran President Juan Hernandez blamed U.S. drug policy for sparking violence in Central American countries and driving a surge of migration to the United States, according to an interview published on Monday…
“Honduras has been living in an emergency for a decade,” Hernandez told Mexican daily newspaper Excelsior. “The root cause is that the United States and Colombia carried out big operations in the fight against drugs. Then Mexico did it.”
Those operations pushed drug traffickers into Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, he suggested, adding: “This is creating a serious problem for us that sparked this migration.”
*** How did the region become a killing field? His diagnosis is that big profits from the illicit drug trade have been used to corrupt public institutions in these fragile democracies, thereby destroying the rule of law. In a “culture of impunity” the state loses its legitimacy and sovereignty is undermined. Criminals have the financial power to overwhelm the law “due to the insatiable U.S. demand for drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin and now methamphetamines, all produced in Latin America and smuggled into the U.S.”
Gen. Kelly agrees that not all violence in the region is linked to the drug trade with the U.S., but “perhaps 80% of it is.”…
That migrant children are drawn to the U.S. when they decide to flee may very well have to do with the fact that they believe they will be able to stay because of an asylum law for children passed in 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush. But refugees from the Northern Triangle are seeking other havens as well. According to Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, from 2008-13 Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadoran applications for asylum in neighboring countries—mostly Mexico and Costa Rica—are up 712%.
*** On Saturday, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) said President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was a “down payment” to the Hispanic community before more grants of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Speaking at the National Council of La Raza conference in Los Angeles, Gutierrez said that Obama assured him during a White House meeting with Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus last week that he would be as “generous and broad” as he can to “stop the deportation of our people each and every day.”
“You gave us a down payment when you freed 600,000 DREAMers from deportation,” Gutierrez said. “Now it is time for the president in the United States… [to] free the Mom and Dads of the DREAMers. And to go further. Be broad and expansive and generous.”
*** Make no mistake: President Obama has instigated this crisis — a two-fer that advances the project of remaking the country while crowding the IRS, the VA, Benghazi, Bergdahl, the Taliban, ISIS, Hamas, the EPA, Obamacare, Ukraine, and other debacles out of the public’s finite attention span. The invasion was invited by a systematic campaign to gut the immigration laws.
As Faithless Execution relates, that campaign has included punishing states that attempt to police illegal immigration. Obama’s Justice Department unabashedly contended in court that it was immaterial whether state enforcement practices conformed to congressional statutes; what mattered was whether the state was in violation of Obama’s immigration policy — i.e., the policy of non-enforcement. If not, state self-defense measures had to be invalidated…
[I]f a renegade United States government is not going to secure the borders of the United States, the states must secure their borders or surrender. As the Supreme Court recognized in 1837, each state has a sovereign right and duty of self-defense — one that is never “more appropriately exercised” than in preventing her citizens from being “exposed to the evil of thousands of foreign emigrants arriving there, and the consequent danger of her citizens being subjected to a heavy charge in the maintenance of those who are poor. It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens from this evil.”
*** “Our citizens are under siege.”
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