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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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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

(WIBC) One in 4 Indiana Republicans say that stopping the flow of illegal immigrants into the state is the most important issue for the governor and state legislature to focus on.

Thats according to a recent poll from Indy Politics and Crossroads Public Affairs.

In a survey of 500 likely Republican primary voters, the data says stopping the flow of illegal immigrants is their most important issue to 31% of respondents; 18% said tackling inflation was their top issue; 14% said creating jobs and attracting and retaining businesses, and 11% said fighting violent crime and drugs.

Immigration is a major issue all around the country and Indiana is no exception, said pollster Andrew Weissert. Itll be front and center in the presidential election this fall and its an issue very important to Republican voters right now.

You may recall the legal battle between the state and now-former Senate candidate John Rust. He sued the state over its election laws that state you have to have voted in the previous two primaries of the party you are running as in order to run for statewide office; 61% of Republicans surveyed say they agree with that law.

On the subject of legalizing pot in Indiana, 67% support some type of legalization, with 33% indicating support for recreational use and 34% supporting medicinal use only.

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Illegal Immigration, Legal Pot Top Of Mind For Hoosiers - WISH TV Indianapolis, IN