Category: Immigration

Sanctuary Mayors Cry Uncle; No Más Migrantes

By Joe Guzzardi

Sanctuary cities are once again in the headlines. But this time, sanctuary cities, the bane of immigration law enforcement advocates, have a different spin. Since five-time deported illegal immigrant Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate murdered Kate Steinle in July 2015 on Pier 14 in San Francisco, state and city governments have persisted in welcoming illegal aliens and protecting them from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. San Francisco is a sanctuary city in the sanctuary state of California.

Despite a federal immigration detention request to hold Garcia-Zarate so immigration officials could take him into custody, San Francisco authorities freed the seven-time convicted felon just three months before he killed Steinle. Eventually, Garcia-Zarate was acquitted and sentenced to time served on an illegal firearms possession charge.

Between January 2014 and September 2015, the Center for Immigration Studies reported that sanctuary jurisdictions rejected 17,000 ICE detainer requests – 17,000 individuals who should have been deported but remained to potentially pose criminal risk to U.S. citizens. Claiming that migrants are fleeing poverty and persecution, local leaders have been willing to spend their constituents’ taxpayer dollars on affirmative benefits for the newly arrived illegal immigrants.

Suddenly, however, with President Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas opening the Southwest border to foreign nationals from 150 countries and clandestinely flying them to faraway cities, attitudes are less welcoming. New York Mayor Eric Adams said that busing migrants from Texas to mid-town Manhattan, as Gov. Gregg Abbott has done, is “cruel.” About 4,000 unlawfully present migrants have entered New York’s shelter facilities since May, an ”unprecedented surge,” said Adams, who has unsuccessfully called on the federal government to intervene.

Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has made the same complaints as Adams, labeling the migrant flood “critical,” issuing identical rejected pleas for federal intervention. Since April, Gov. Abbott has sent more than 6,800 illegal immigrants to Washington. Bowser has begged for the National Guard to intervene “to help prevent a prolonged humanitarian crisis in our nation’s capital resulting from the daily arrival of migrants in need of assistance.” McAllen, Texas, Mayor Javier Villalobos mocked Adams and Bowser. Villalobos said: “The city of McAllen was able to deal with thousands of immigrants a day; I think they can handle a few hundred.”

Adams and Bowser should have known that pleading with the feds, especially Mayorkas, would be futile. At the January U.S. Conference of Mayors, Mayorkas tried to sell the assembled mayors on his new, mostly gutted ICE. But the attendees wanted to hear about border enforcement, a subject Mayorkas studiously avoided.

While it may be overly optimistic to hope for a change now that prominent Democratic mayors are experiencing first-hand the fiscal burden and public safety risks that sanctuary policies create, a shift is in the wind.

The mere existence of sanctuary cities is illegal. Local laws that protect illegal immigrants prevent routine cooperation among municipal, state and federal law enforcement agencies. President Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch realized the importance of keeping law enforcement apprised about any individual’s immigration status. Lynch warned sanctuary cities that they would not receive Justice Department funding in the 2017 fiscal year if they did not comply with 8 USC Section 1373, which prohibits any agency from restraining “in any way” the exchange of information among federal, state and local agencies regarding foreign nationals’ immigration status. Despite saber-rattling from Lynch, and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, funding continued.

With millions of border crossers already released into the U.S. interior, and millions more anticipated during Biden’s remaining two and a half years in office, sanctuary cities will come under increasing pressure to provide for their unlawfully present alien residents, an untenable situation for the already underfunded, overcrowded municipalities.

Sanctuary Mayors Cry Uncle

Biden DHS To Distribute Illegals To Stop Bad Optics

By Joe Guzzardi

Just five months before mid-term elections, the Biden White House is concerned that ugly border optics may cost Democrats both congressional chambers. Border shelters in Texas and Arizona are bulging at the seams. Customs and Border Protection lack other options to address the border crisis and are releasing illegal aliens onto city streets. With this situation, the Department of Homeland Security is preparing, at taxpayer cost, to transport migrants deep into the interior.

The latest DHS plan comes during a record illegal immigrant surge that includes 234,088 aliens in April alone, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Religious and nongovernmental organizations at the border, which typically house illegal immigrants after CBP releases them, are overwhelmed.

In El Paso, for example, CBP recently freed dozens of migrants, penniless non-English speakers, who then sat on street corners. The El Paso Times reported that the city’s resources to help have been depleted. Agents release more than 1,000 immigrants a day despite El Paso only having enough room to house 1,700. Neither the DHS nor any other federal agency contacted El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser to warn that, because of the border surge, large numbers of aliens were on the way. The Biden administration’s policy is to operate arbitrarily, and let the local communities fend for themselves.

Sources with knowledge of the DHS plan said that taxpayer dollars would be allocated to reroute aliens to shelters around the country. The first city DHS targeted is Los Angeles. Then, future migrants will be sent to Albuquerque, Houston, Dallas and other cities. The effort to relocate migrants involves the Southwest Border Coordination Center, which comprises officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, CBP and other agencies.

Despite the assembled experience that the multiple federal agencies assumably have, their decision to initiate the program in Los Angeles is baffling. No city in the nation is less prepared to accept mostly poor, mostly unskilled illegal immigrants than Los Angeles with its 20 percent poverty rate. The city and Los Angeles County’s populations are, respectively, four million and 10 million. Both the city and county struggle with a homelessness crisis that the aliens will exacerbate. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s latest numbers, which were gathered in 2020 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, show that the county’s homeless population increased by 12.7 percent to 66,436 over the previous year, while Los Angeles’ homeless population spiked 16.1 percent to 41,290.

Within the general Los Angeles homeless population, a Hispanic subset revealed their dashed hopes about coming to California to find a job, only to eventually be left without shelter. KQED, Northern California’s NPR and PBS member station, spoke with homeless illegal immigrants about their lives post-border crossing. Jobs were lost, illnesses occurred, rents increased to unaffordable levels and connections with family back home grew infrequent. A day laborer, who goes by “Alonso,” said that if conditions in Los Angeles don’t improve, he’ll return to Mexico.

For all the other Alonsos located in California, Albuquerque, Houston and Dallas, Mayorkas is ensuring that their lives will remain unfulfilled. In Albuquerque, the poverty rate is 18 percent, and homelessness is rising, quadrupling since 2013. In Dallas, which has a 22 percent poverty rate, shelters are full every night. And in Houston, with its 21.2 percent poverty rate, homelessness is up 5.8 percent in 2022 in year-over-year counts.

For those who point out that the administration has broken virtually every border and interior enforcement immigration law, and by so doing jeopardized a sovereign America, Biden has the audacity to equate patriots with domestic violent extremists.

Since terrorists with murder on their minds can enter the U.S. effortlessly, Biden’s insult is laden with irony. An alleged ISIS operative, Shihab Ahmed Shihab, already inside the U.S., plotted to smuggle fellow terrorists through the open border. Once safely across, the terrorists planned to surveil former President George W. Bush’s home and his institution to develop an assassination plot. Despite Mayorkas’ claim that the border is secure, the FBI warrant application indicated that Shihab claimed to have smuggled two individuals associated with Hezbollah into the U.S. for a fee of $50,000 each. Shahib, an Iraqi national, had an asylum application pending.

Biden’s immigration agenda, after 18 months as president, includes dismantling immigration law, opening the border and importing poor, limited-skilled individuals, relocating them to communities that can barely keep afloat. As well, the agenda includes disregarding terrorist plots to assassinate former presidents and encouraging fraudulent asylum claims. Little wonder the White House is apprehensive about the upcoming elections.

Biden DHS To Distribute Illegals To Stop Bad Optics

Border Admissions Staggering Mayorkas Admits

By Joe Guzzardi

For immigration lawyers, these are heady times! Since January 2021, when the Biden regime moved into the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has, by Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ own shameless admission, released 836,000 illegal aliens into the interior. The staggering total includes 398,861 let go since October 1, the fiscal year’s start, and also counts 80,116 admitted in March alone. Excluded are the got-aways; estimates vary, but several hundred thousand fall into that category. This astounding admissions’ total exceeds the population of each of the cities of San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Boston and Washington, D.C., and each of the states of Wyoming and Vermont.

Imagine the eager anticipation the immigration lawyer community must have when thinking of the fees those aliens might generate! At some firms, $1,000 an hour buys only a preliminary consultation. And the good times will keep on rolling! Once Biden removes Title 42, as he’s determined to do, an estimated 18,000 aliens are likely to cross into the United States daily, most in need of legal counsel.

Enterprising immigration lawyers could make a handsome living from Haitian alien applicants alone. Most Haitians, like others eagerly awaiting their post-Title 42 admissions, will apply for asylum. But a considerable percentage of Haitians who will file claims have already been granted asylum from South American nations like Chile, and have been long-time residents of those countries. But for the Haitians/Chileans, Biden’s lure to foreign nationals to live in America is irresistible. On their trip north, after reaching the bridge at Del Rio, Texas, the duplicitous Haitians/Chileans ditched their asylum documents into the river. The low-risk, but nevertheless fraudulent effort to eliminate any clue that they had already been granted asylum by a democratic, stable country may pay off one day with U.S. citizenship.

Unbeknownst to the general public, asylum fraud is one of the biggest hoaxes in a U.S. immigration system where almost anything goes. The simple words “credible fear” spoken to an immigration official can be the first step to life in the U.S. Few, however, are fleeing true persecution or life-threatening violence. They’ve been coached, often by the smugglers to whom they’ve paid thousands of dollars, to say the magic words that will bring them, figuratively speaking, the keys to the U.S. kingdom.

The harsh reality is that among the thousands assembled at the border, and the thousands more on the way, few legally qualify for asylum. They are economic migrants seeking to improve their lives, and not as the Refugee Act of 1980 spelled out, persons with a well-established fear of persecution “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Under the current administration, as voters head to the mid-term polling places, knowing the difference between refugees and legitimate asylum seekers is important. Refugees are – or were until Biden allowed admissions to mostly unscreened Afghans and Ukrainians – screened in depth before coming to the U.S. If found wanting, they can be denied refugee status before they step foot into this country. On the other hand, aliens who enter illegally and falsely claim “credible fear” have not been vetted or have been only superficially screened before physically entering the U.S. The current process is easily vulnerable to fraud and abuse. Fraudulent asylum cases, in addition to generous benefits given to those who may not deserve them, undermine and delay processing legitimate appeals from individuals who truly have credible fear.

The soaring numbers of migrants whether they’ve legally or illegally entered the country is a preliminary total. Once inside the U.S., chain migration – immigration’s major source – will increase the number by at least a factor of three. In 2018, The New York Times published a remarkable, but unexaggerated, story about one-single Indian immigrant who arrived in 1968 at age 23, and 50 years later, counts 90 family members who have joined him. Consider too that many of the resettled migrants will either add to their existing families or begin new ones.

Since citizens fund every penny of the migrants’ multiple and costly resettlement expenses, Americans justifiably wonder why, assuming border enforcement, they’re forced to underwrite their gradual but inevitable displacement.

PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.

Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law

By Joe Guzzardi

Twenty years ago, journalist Michelle Malkin wrote a column titled, “The Deportation Abyss: It Ain’t over ‘til the Alien Wins.” Written post-9/11, the nation yearned as it still does for a strict deportation strategy and for vigorous immigration law enforcement.

At the beginning of her commentary, Malkin quoted the late Barbara Jordan, a Texas Democrat who served in the U.S. House of Representatives and chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration reform from 1993 to 1996. Jordan said, “The credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, get in; people who should not enter are kept out; and people who are judged deportable should be required to leave.”

Jordan’s sensible immigration guidelines were ignored. Too many loopholes in the immigration system, too many squishy congressional representatives, too many lax immigration judges and too many spineless Board of Immigration Appeals’judges undermined legitimate deportations of criminals, including convicted murderers, sex predators, drunken drivers and aggravated felons, subverting Jordan’s sound solutions. Information on how to dodge immigration enforcement was readily available. The soup-to-nuts legal directory that advises aliens who “got trouble” is still operating 20 years later, doubtlessly thriving, and dispensing advice on how to avoid deportation.

In her worst nightmare, Jordan could not have imagined that a U.S. president would not only be inviting millions of illegal aliens from all around the world to come to American, but then rewarding them with air transportation, housing, food, mobile phones and, eventually, one of the most coveted documents that migrants seek from the instant they depart their homeland, employment authorization cards.

Biden is determined to undermine American workers with his reckless abandonment of border security, and his messaging to foreign nationals from around the globe that, despite DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ protestations to the contrary, the border is open. The odds are extremely high that foreign nationals who get to the border will gain entrance. Parole may await them. At least, it’s the administration’s coveted goal to illegally grant parole to foreign nationals that don’t qualify for what should be a rarely approved immigration status.

Since the mainstream media tosses the word parole around loosely, knowing exactly who merits the status is important to understanding the administration’s deport-no-one intentions. Writing for the Center for Immigration Studies where he’s a Senior Legal Fellow, former DHS Deputy General Counsel George Fishman, in an article “The Pernicious Perversion of Parole: the 70-year battle between Congress and the President,” explained parole’s proper place in immigration law. As Fishman’s title suggests, the decades-long battle has been mostly a lost cause for Congress and immigration restrictionists.

Parole’s history dates back to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which contained a provision that allowed discretionary power to the Attorney General to parole into the U.S. temporarily under such conditions as the AG may prescribe for emergent reasons or for reasons deemed strictly in the public interest any alien applying for admission to the U. S. All parole grantees are issued on a case-by-case basis, and cannot be granted en masse. (Emphasis added.)

In 1956, Republican Dwight Eisenhower became the first president to violate parole regulations when he permitted Hungarian refugees to enter en masse. Prior to 1956, parole authority had been used only to benefit individual aliens. But as Professors Adam Cox of the University of Chicago Law School and Cristina Rodriguez of New York University correctly concluded, presidents have used powers expressly delegated to them by Congress to advance their own immigration agenda in a manner that accomplished personal objectives Congress almost certainly did not intend and expanding or repurposing Congress’s original design.(Emphasis added.)

Parole should be granted only under the five following conditions: 1) for a medical emergency, 2) for organ donation to a family member, 3) to visit a family member whose death is imminent, 4) for an alien who has assisted U.S. law enforcement and whose presence is needed by the government or whose life is threatened or 5) for criminal prosecution.

Biden’s flagrant use of parole to admit thousands of aliens into the U.S. proves that Malkin’s thesis – the alien always wins – is truer today than ever. Many thousands more aliens remain gathered at or on the way to the border, confident that parole will be their easy ticket into the U.S.

PFIR analyst Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org

Biden Immigration Parole Circumvents The Law