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During a speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin, former President Donald Trump pointed to a chart on apprehensions of people trying to enter the U.S. illegally at the southwest border.

See the arrow on the bottom? That was my last week in office, Trump said. That was the lowest number in history. But Trump was wrong on both points.

In fact, the arrow is pointing to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. In his last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled from that pandemic low and were higher than the month he took office.

Also, April 2020 was not the lowest point in history. The lowest since 2000 came in April 2017, shortly after Trump took office and before an ensuing spike.

As we have written, apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trumps final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in.

During his speech in Green Bay on April 2, Trump claimed to have fixed the border when he was president.

When I came in, I built 571 miles of wall, we had 200 miles sitting there waiting to be erected, far more than I said I was going to build, Trump said.

Actually, a total of 458 miles of border wall system was built during the Trump administration, according to a Customs and Border Protection status report on Jan. 22, 2021. Most of that, 373 miles of it, was replacement for primary or secondary fencing that was dilapidated or outdated. In addition, 52 miles of new primary wall and 33 miles of secondary wall were built in locations where there were no barriers before. Including barriers that existed before Trump took office, there are now about 706 miles of barriers, covering about 36% of the total southwest border. That is far less than the 1,000-mile-long wall that Trump promised during the 2016 campaign.

Trump then had campaign aides put up a chart showing monthly border apprehensions going back to 2012. You can see the chart in the background of the C-SPAN video, but here it is:

See that low spot, Trump said, pointing to the red arrow at the bottom of the chart. This is illegal migrants coming into our country. See the arrow on the bottom? That was my last week in office. That was the lowest number in history.

Had President Joe Biden just left everything alone, he might have gone down as a decent president, at least on the border, Trump said. But on the border, look at that number, that number is so much lower than anything else. And then look at the right of that number. Thats what happened after I left.It was an invasion of our country.

Its an amazing chart actually, Trump said. Its a Border Patrol chart. But look at that low number, got it down to practically nothing.

Trump repeated the claim in an April 4 interview with Hugh Hewitt, saying, We had the safest border in history, and you saw that chart that was released a couple days ago where literally the day I left office, we had the lowest number in history.

The data in the chart itself are accurate, but the Trump campaign editorial notes are not.

The red arrow at the bottom purports to correspond to the point that Trump leaves office and to be the lowest illegal immigration in recorded history! But the arrow actually points to April 2020, when there were 16,182 apprehensions at the southwest border.

April 2020 was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout that month, the U.S. was under Trump administration guidelines recommending people stay at home and away from one another to slow the spread of the disease.

Any complete reading of what took place at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2020 would have to note the emergence of a global pandemic that dramatically chilled mobility of all forms in its early phase, Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. That is not a factor listed on the chart below, best I can tell.

The pandemic was responsible for a near-complete halt to all forms of global mobility in 2020, due to a combination of border restrictions imposed by countries around the world (we recorded more than 43,000 travel measures taken by countries between January and May 2020 alone, lockdowns, and the shutdown of aviation and other transportation routes), Mittelstadt said.

As the chart shows, after apprehensions reached a pandemic low in April 2020, they rose every month after that. By the actual end of Trumps presidency, apprehensions of immigrants attempting to cross illegally had risen to 71,141 in December 2020 and to 75,316 in January 2021, Trumps last month in office.

In recent speeches, Trump has claimed he fixed the border so completely during his presidency, that it was no longer a campaign issue in 2020.

I was saying the other day that in 2016, one of the biggest issues was the border, Trump said during a speech in Ohio on March 16. And I sort of won on the border, I guess, maybe. And we fixed the border. We fixed it so good that I couldnt even use it in 2020, even though we got millions and millions more votes in 2020, but we couldnt even talk about it. Id say, I want to talk about the border. Tell them what a good job. They said, Sir, you fixed it. Nobody cares.

In reality, apprehensions at the border in Trumps final two months in office were substantially higher than in President Barack Obamas last two months in office. (Apprehensions were 43,251 in December 2016 and 31,576 in January 2017, the last two months of the Obama presidency, compared with 71,141 and 75,316 in Trumps last two months.) Indeed, there were more than 69,000 apprehensions in each of the last four months of the Trump administration, from October 2020 through January 2021. But the highest number of apprehensions under Obama was 67,342 in March 2009.

And as we wrote in Trumps Final Numbers, illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 14.7% higher in Trumps final year in office compared with the last full year of Obamas term.

Given that, had Obama fixed the border? Not according to Donald Trump in 2016. Then, he repeatedly called the border broken and made fixing it his primary campaign promise.

We have described the roller-coaster of illegal immigration during Trumps time in office. The number of apprehensions fluctuated wildly from a monthly low of 11,127 in April 2017 shortly after he took office to a high of 132,856 in May 2019.

The number of apprehensions peaked for Trump in mid-2019, and the year ended with the highest number of apprehensions since Fiscal Year 2007. In response to rising levels of apprehensions, Trump issued several policies to reduce immigration flows, including measures to restrict eligibility for asylum and return non-Mexican asylum seekers who cross the southwest border to Mexico while their claims work their way through immigration courts (the so-called Remain in Mexico program). Correspondingly, apprehensions dropped steadily through the second half of 2019 and into 2020.

And then, when the pandemic hit, apprehensions dropped even more dramatically in April and May 2020. In response to the pandemic, Trump put into place a series of policies aimed at blocking migration to the U.S., including one that allowed Border Patrol agents to quickly expel any illegal immigrants they stopped, without allowing them access to the asylum process. Nonetheless, apprehensions increased throughout the second half of 2020.

To be sure, illegal immigration soared after Biden took office, as the chart shows even without cherry-picking the pandemic low. According to our latest update to Bidens Numbers in late January, apprehensions for the 12 months ending in November were 296% higher than during Trumps last year in office.

We discussed some of the reasons for that dramatic increase, including not only high levels of migration around the world due to political and economic turmoil in other countries, but also the perception that Biden was more welcoming of migrants.

But illegal immigration was not down to practically nothing in the weeks or months before Trump left office. It was down to nearly nothing during the stay-at-home phase of the pandemic.

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Trumps Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration - FactCheck.org

Rep. Bruck: Whitmer admins dangerous policy offers housing subsidies to illegal immigrants

State Rep. Will Bruck today sounded the alarm about a dangerous policy put in place by the governor that is exacerbating the problems created by failing federal immigration policies.

The Newcomer Rental Subsidy Program offers benefits to people who enter the country illegally but later claim asylum after facing deportation. Various immigrant households can receive up to $500 a month in rental assistance for 12 months under the program. The criteria even allow individuals with a pending asylum application to receive support, including people who came into the United States illegally and then filed a defensive asylum application as a tactic in removal proceedings. Defensive claims comprised 97% of total asylum claims filed in fiscal year 2023, according to data from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Supporting illegal aliens with taxpayer dollars sends the wrong message that breaking the law is rewarded, said Bruck, R-Erie. Every dollar spent to incentivize illegal immigration is a disservice to those who immigrate lawfully and contribute to the prosperity of our state and our nation. Our tax dollars should be invested in opportunities that strengthen our communities, not programs that enable misuse of the system.

Last week, House Republicans sent a letter requesting data about benefit recipients, including how many defensive asylum seekers have received assistance. The letter also raised concerns about loopholes in the employment criteria that allow recipients to avoid the work requirements. Additionally, loopholes in the income criteria offer benefits to individuals earning more than the income caps if they reside in certain qualified census tracts, and applicants can avoid providing proof of income if theyre receiving cash payments, something that seems geared toward accommodating under-the-table work.

Identity verification requirements also contain concerning loopholes. An applicant must provide some form of photo ID, but the options include an alternate identification document and any government-issued identification document, even as some local governments, such as Kalamazoo County, issue IDs for illegal immigrants.

Bruck said bad actors with a pending asylum application could exploit the sweeping criteria in the subsidy program and divert funds from people in need, including refugees and other immigrants who came to the United States the right way.

Offering taxpayer-funded housing to those who exploit asylum laws undermines the integrity of our immigration system, disregarding the hardships faced by both law-abiding citizens and legitimate refugees who follow the proper immigration process, Bruck said.

Bruck said Whitmers program is contributing to the border security crisis perpetuated by the Biden administration. The crisis has reared its head in Michigan with two murders committed by illegal aliens in Kent County in the last year, including a brutal killing last month, and three illegal immigrants arrested in Shiawassee County this year for soliciting sex with minors.

The Newcomer Rental Subsidy program is administered by Whitmers Office of Global Michigan and the Michigan State Housing Development Authority. The agencies are using funds from the Housing and Community Development Fund (HCDF), which supports a variety of state housing programs. Last year, Democrats passed a controversial tax law along nearly party lines that will automatically deposit $50 million in tax revenues into the HCDF every year going forward.

After receiving the letter from House Republicans last week, Office of Global Michigan Director Poppy Sias-Hernandez replied that the office would provide answers by close of business on Monday, but lawmakers still have not received the promised response.

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Originally posted here:
Rep. Bruck: Whitmer admin's dangerous policy offers housing subsidies to illegal immigrants - Michigan House Republicans

By Joe Guzzardi Syndicated columnist

Weaponized immigration has come to America and is bringing low-skilled illegal aliens to the labor market. Since July 2018, the economy has created zero jobs for American-born workers.

Kelly Greenhill, a senior research scholar at MIT Center for International Studies and author of Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, wrote in her analysis that the U.S. has been a frequent weaponized immigration target dating back as long ago as President Dwight Eisenhowers administration and through George W. Bushs eight years in the early 21st century. Greenhill blamed Western governments Europe is also a migrant warfare target that dont understand how engineering the movement of foreign nationals across international borders exploits political divisions within the targeted countries. Unless policymakers confront the forces that enable weaponized migration it is unlikely to go away anytime soon, she concluded.

Since 1951, Greenhill has identified 81 worldwide cases, all of which achieved their weaponized immigration objectives. The targeted countries were disproportionately liberal democracies whose lax attitudes toward the threat determined the degree of success the subversive mission achieved. The Biden administration is a perfect fit for nations that want to implement weaponized migration to undermine the sovereign U.S. Not only has Biden demonstrated enthusiasm for the open border policy that he created and encouraged, but his administration has also promoted, at every turn, globalism at the expense of nationalism.

Nicaragua is a major weaponized immigration enabler. Motivated by his deep hatred of the U.S., President Daniel Ortega loosened visa requirements for Cubans in 2021, and then expanded his list to include Haiti, other Latin American countries and eventually several Asian and African nations that include Indians, Uzbekistanis, and nationals from Mauritania and Senegal. Travelers going through Nicaragua avoided the dangerous trek through the Darien Gap, and Ortega could not only subvert America, but he could also make big money at the same time. Nicaragua hired a private company to organize contracts with charter flight companies across Asia, Europe, and Africa. The flights pay landing fees, and travelers are assessed airport taxes that range from $100 to $200 per person. Transporting migrants from their home countries to Nicaragua is a multimillion-dollar business.

With weaponized migrants arriving at the U.S. border faster than officials could detain them, the Department of Homeland Security decided to process them into the U.S. rather than deport them. The strategy culminated in the May 2023 The Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Final Rule. The title summarizes the objective: for illegal immigrants, DHS created, without congressional approval, an entirely new set of administratively sanctioned methods of being processed into the U.S. DHS moved to expand safe and orderly pathways for migrants to lawfully enter the United States. Included are establishing country-specific and other available processes to seek parole for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit; expanding opportunities to enter for seasonal employment; putting in place a mechanism for migrants to schedule a time and place to arrive in a safe, orderly, and lawful manner at ports of entry via use of the CBP-One mobile app; and expanding refugee processing in the Western Hemisphere.

An earlier DHS document, the Los Angeles Declaration of Migration and Protection, which 21 countries endorsed in June 2022, resulted in the U.S. committing to resettle 20,000 so-called refugees from Central America during fiscal 2023 and 2024. In fiscal 2022, the federal government issued more than 19,000 H-2B visas to Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans, a 94% increase from the previous fiscal year. Not surprisingly the 21 endorsing countries were overwhelmingly potential migrant sending countries: Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Honduras and other economically failing nations.

As part of making their case to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the House Committee on Homeland Securitys Republicans identified more than a dozen parole programs which, they argue, Mayorkas illegally created to circumvent congressionally established immigration laws. Texas, Florida, and other states have sued over many of DHS programs that have allowed illegal border crossers to remain in the U.S., concurring with the committees chairman, U.S. Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., who led the impeachment charge.

Always a long shot in the Senate, the House has not yet sent impeachment articles to the upper chamber. Even though the Senate outcome is predetermined, enforcement-minded, patriotic Americans will be denied the cold comfort of a Mayorkas impeachment trial. Worse, the consequences of his brazen disregard for enforcement and protecting the homeland will continue to play out until January 2025, or until Mayorkas DHS releases about two million more illegal aliens into the interior, bringing the total to well over 10 million during his term as secretary.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has been writing about immigration for more than 30 years.

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Publisher's note: A free press is critical to having well-informed voters and citizens. While some news organizations opt for paid websites or costly paywalls, The Highland County Press has maintained a free newspaper and website for the last 25 years for our community. If you would like to contribute to this service, it would be greatly appreciated. Donations may be made to: The Highland County Press, P.O. Box 849, Hillsboro, Ohio 45133. Please include "for website" on the memo line.

Originally posted here:
Weaponized immigration wrecking sovereign America - The Highland County Press

What were they thinking? Did President Biden and the folks who put together his immigration policy imagine the voting public would celebrate policies that resulted in a record-high number of migration encounters more than three-quarters of a million in the usually low-immigration months of October, November and December 2023?

Did they think letting in hundreds of thousands of people they would classify preliminarily as asylum-seekers and telling them to report for hearings as late as 2031 would go unnoticed?

Did they think having the government fly illegal immigrants by night into sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago would go unnoticed?

Did they think Republican governors in border states wouldnt launch their own flights of illegal immigrants to New York City from Texas, or to Marthas Vineyard from Florida?

Did they ever contemplate that election-year pollsters would report that the issue brought up most often by voters would be immigration?

I must imagine the answer to these questions is no. Politicians do not lightly inflict political damage on themselves.

And anyone who has experienced, and presumably has some memory of, the voting publics dissatisfaction with illegal immigration surges in the 1980s, 1990s, and up through the housing market collapse in 2007 and 2008 a category that includes Mr. Biden and the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas should understand the negative political potential of unchecked illegal immigration.

So how to explain the Biden administrations adoption of immigration policies that amount to something difficult to distinguish from open borders?

One explanation, proffered by original and sometimes eccentric commentator Michael Lind, is that the Biden Democrats are trying to import better voters.

Letting in several million more illegal immigrants no one can be sure just how many will, in time, produce, either through loose voter qualification laws or citizen children of illegal immigrants, a rising number of Democratic voters.

These, the theory goes, will replace the descendants of Ellis Islander immigrants of 1892-1924 who fell away from Democratic allegiance in the 1970s and 80s.

The problem is that its not clear that people of color will turn out to be as unanimously Democratic as Black voters were in the years from Barry Goldwater to Barack Obama.

Theres increasing evidence, even in left-leaning California, that many Hispanic immigrants of 1982-2007 and their progeny are becoming Trump Republicans, just as many white ethnics became Reagan Republicans 40 years ago.

Another explanation is that Team Biden was misled by changing attitudes of their fellow Democratic voters that, as neighborhood signs say, no human is illegal.

Since 2007, support for increasing immigration levels has increased to 40 percent from 10 percent levels among Democrats while remaining around 10 percent among Republicans, according to General Social Survey.

Certainly, through his 50-plus-year political career, Mr. Biden has not veered far from the prevailing opinion in his party. And within the Democratic bubble, its natural to believe overturning any policy associated with President Trump is widely popular.

Its natural to believe as well that sympathetic press will try to cover up any unfavorable news, as most media has on illegal immigration during most of the Biden presidency.

Theres another factor operating here, one that helps to explain the increasing opposition to Israel and support for Palestinians among Democratic voters: the tendency, encouraged for two generations on college campuses, to see the world as separated between the oppressed and the oppressors.

In this paradigm, Mr. Trump and his America First followers are seen as the oppressors, and people illegally crossing the border are seen as the oppressed. And just as oppressors are always vicious, the oppressed are always virtuous.

In that background, eliminating border controls, as Mr. Biden did by multiple executive orders, wasnt politically dangerous. Mexican immigration has been low since 2007, and Vice President Harris could cure any ills that might prompt Central Americans to venture overland through Mexico to the Rio Grande.

It turns out, though, Biden-era illegal immigrants come from multiple places and often with malign motives. Theyre ready to pay off Mexican cartels to get a chance to game the system inside the United States. And theyve surely been coming in numbers much larger than Biden policymakers expected.

The huge number of illegal crossings in late 2023, together with poll numbers, had the Biden administration contemplating a policy reversal, but Politico reports thats now off.

The plan now is to blame Mr. Trump and House Republicans for opposing the bipartisan legislation of Senator Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma. Donald Trump broke the border, a Biden-Harris billboard proclaims.

This seems unconvincing. If theres anything Mr. Trump is known for, its denouncing illegal immigration, and there was and is nothing to stop Mr. Biden from issuing executive orders reversing the day-one executive orders that opened the floodgates.

Disorder works against incumbents, and its hard to see how the disorder produced by Mr. Bidens orange man bad immigration policies will be blamed, by anyone but partisan Democrats, on Republicans.

Creators.com

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Biden's Miscalculations When He Opened the Border to Unchecked Illegal Immigration - The New York Sun

STORY: Donald Trump called immigrants who were illegally in the United States "not human" in a speech in Michigan on Tuesday, as he intensified his focus on border issues with incendiary rhetoric on his campaign trail.

The Republican presidential candidate spoke in Grand Rapids, appearing with several law enforcement officers.

He focused on several criminal cases involving suspects who may have been in the country illegally and labelled them as sub-human.

"The 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia who was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal. The Democrats say, 'please don't call them animals, they're humans.' I said 'no, they're not humans, they're animals.'"

Trump also described meeting the family of Ruby Garcia, a local 25-year-old murdered last month.

Police say a suspect in the case was in the country illegally.

Garcia's sister denied the former president spoke with the family, according to local media reports, which also said she was angry about her sister's death being used as a political tool.

Trump titled his Michigan speech "Biden's border bloodbath" and warned that chaos would consume America if he did not win the election in November.

"This is country changing, it's country threatening and it's country wrecking. They have wrecked our country. But I stand before you today to declare that Joe Biden's border bloodbath, and that's what it is. It's a bloodbath.

... if we don't win in November 5th, I think our country is going to cease to exist."

Later on Tuesday, he gave a similar speech in Wisconsin, calling the 2024 election the nation's "final battle."

"...prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients, terrorists..."

Trump frequently claims that immigrants crossing the border with Mexico had escaped from prisons and asylums in their home countries and are fueling violent crime in the United States.

While available data on criminals' immigration status is sparse, researchers say the violent crime rate is not higher among those in the U.S. illegally than native-born Americans.

Some 38% of Republicans, and about one in five independents, say immigration is the country's top issue in a Reuters/Ipsos poll released late February.

Democratic President Joe Biden's campaign team said Trump is "engaging in extreme rhetoric that promotes division, hate and violence in our country."

Biden, who is Trump's rival in the November presidential election, also accused Trump of pushing Republican lawmakers to block bipartisan legislation that would have beefed up border security and brought in measures to reduce illegal immigration.

Michigan and Wisconsin are two swing states that could determine who returns to the White House next year.

Although both Trump and Biden have mathematically clinched their presidential nominations, they were still on their party's presidential primary ballots in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

Original post:
'Animals': Trump ups rhetoric on illegal immigration - Yahoo! Voices