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When Gov. Greg Abbott announced that his first busload of 30 or so migrants, plucked from the streets of Texas, had reached the nations capital last year, he faced a wall of criticism.

Some on the right worried that he was wasting taxpayer money on illegal immigrants. The White House derided the busing as unhelpful and ineffective, and immigration rights advocates complained that it was a dirty trick that treated the migrants as political pawns.

A year on, those on the right are celebrating Mr. Abbotts decision as a watershed moment in the immigration debate. Leaders on the left have paid the governor the most sincere form of flattery by mounting their own busing campaigns.

Among them is New York City, one of the destinations for Mr. Abbotts buses. The city has begun paying for bus tickets to get migrants out of town and make them someone elses problem.

Mr. Abbott, a Republican, said his goal of busing was to share the pain, particularly with sanctuary cities that limited their cooperation with immigration authorities and pronounced themselves welcoming to those in the U.S. illegally. His state was facing an unprecedented crush of illegal immigrants under President Bidens policies.

It turned out that the sanctuaries welcome had limits, and Mr. Abbotts busing campaign found them.

Leaders in Chicago, New York and the District of Columbia all destinations for Mr. Abbotts buses were soon using words such as crisis to describe the trickle of newcomers.

Its pretty clear it had the desired effect, which was to light a fire under the Democrats to do something about the border, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Now, they havent done as much as Id like, but theres no question Democratic mayors complained to the White House and demanded some changes.

The first migrants arrived at Union Station in the District on April 13, a Wednesday.

The location was chosen because it was close to the Capitol, so members of Congress could get a close-up look at the situation. Congress happened to be on spring break, but members would get plenty of other chances to see migrants.

As of the latest public accounting, in mid-February, Mr. Abbotts office said more than 9,100 migrants had been bused to the District. Another 5,200 were sent to New York City, 1,500 to Chicago and 890 to Philadelphia.

The pace has slowed this year.

The governors office didnt respond to inquiries for this report, but one reason for the slowdown could be that fewer migrants are arriving in Texas.

The Biden administration announced a policy in early January to siphon some illegal border crossings into a more orderly process by appointment. Through the first two months of the year, it was working. Illegal immigrants are still showing up but in somewhat smaller numbers.

Analysts said Mr. Abbotts busing can take at least some credit for Mr. Bidens change.

Obviously, Abbott tapped into something and got a rise out of the administration, Mr. Krikorian said. Its been a rousing success, so long as you didnt think somehow the Biden administration was going to completely change its take on immigration.

Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said she had some compassion for Texas but warned officials not to forget about the migrants situations.

They are chiefly Venezuelans, but also Nicaraguans, Cubans, Haitians and others fleeing authoritarian governments or countries in chaos the sorts of folks who needed orderly welcomes. Instead, she said, they got disorder, with Texas sending them to other communities without any coordination for housing, job assistance or other accommodations.

Its not the mayor or the governor of that receiving place who feels the pain; its those individuals, who are already vulnerable, Ms. Murray said. If he had coordinated, that would be a different thing. This would be an important moment in the immigration debate. But to see already vulnerable folks then treated as political pawns is obviously no partys goal.

Maureen Meyer, vice president for programs at the Washington Office on Latin America, also homed in on Texas failure to cooperate with the busing destinations.

Increased coordination and additional federal support is needed for local communities receiving migrants and asylum seekers, but in the meantime, local governments, organizations and volunteers have stepped up independently to help these migrants resettle and obtain legal services to navigate their immigration cases, she said.

New York officials didnt respond to an inquiry for this report.

D.C. officials said they welcomed 66 total buses with 2,566 migrants. Most of them, nearly 88%, indicated they were heading to final destinations outside the District.

New York was the top designation, followed by New Jersey.

More than 1,300 were given temporary shelter, and 331 children were enrolled in schools. Ten babies among the new arrivals have been born.

Mayor Muriel Bowsers emergency declaration over the migrants has expired, though legislation establishing the welcoming office is in effect through August.

The White House initially mocked Mr. Abbott for wasting Texas taxpayers money by saying he was paying to transport people who wanted to leave the state anyway.

The administration eventually settled on the coordination critique and complained that moving migrants made it tougher for them to check in with the government.

Ken Oliver, senior director of Right on Immigration at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said Mr. Abbotts campaign brought the realities of the border chaos to places that usually didnt pay attention.

D.C. leaders claimed they didnt have the resources to handle the several thousand new arrivals and pleaded with the federal government for more money.

In Chicago, residents balked at a migrant camp in their neighborhood.

In New York, Mayor Eric Adams was stashing migrants in a giant tent in a flood zone until activists shamed him into shutting it down. They said the mayor was violating the citys right-to-shelter law.

Mr. Adams acknowledged this year that New York was offering bus tickets for migrants to travel north, taking a page out of Mr. Abbotts playbook. Mr. Adams was hoping they would cross the border into Canada.

As people see migrants housed in hotels that normal Americans would never get the government to pay their way to stay at, much less transportation around the country, its helped fuel a backlash, Mr. Oliver said.

He said some conservatives had trepidation about spending taxpayer money on illegal immigrants. As they looked into the issue, however, they figured the price for a bus seat was far lower than the states costs for education, public safety and health care for each new arrival.

There were skeptics early on, but then you saw validation of it, and even imitation of it by the governor of Florida taking it to another level, Mr. Oliver said.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey also started sending migrants to the nations capital. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew migrants from Texas to Marthas Vineyard, a playground for the countrys liberal elite.

Mr. Krikorian said those governors helped de-Trumpify immigration by refocusing the debate squarely on Mr. Bidens struggles and away from former President Donald Trump, who had a knack for poisoning policy positions for much of the public merely because he held them.

In all of this busing thing, Trump is not the story at all, Mr. Krikorian said.

Busing was just one part of Mr. Abbotts Operation Lone Star, begun in 2021 to fill gaps left by Mr. Bidens more lenient approach to illegal immigration.

He has started building border walls on state land, deployed the Texas National Guard and state troopers to the border to deter illegal crossings, and encouraged local prosecutors to bring charges when federal officials wont.

Prosecutors can charge smugglers and illegal immigrants with trespassing.

Last year, Mr. Abbott announced strict state safety inspections for commercial traffic crossing from Mexico. The goal was to pressure Mexico to do more to stop the flood of people and drugs. After a few days and massive delays at the border crossings, Mr. Abbott declared victory and relaxed the inspections with no long-term dent in the flow of people or drugs.

Wall construction has also been a slog, with just 1.7 miles constructed in 2022. Texas is considering another 14 miles of construction across two contracts this year.

The state Legislature is looking at more steps.

One pending bill would establish a force to track down and slap unauthorized migrants with stiffer state penalties, including a $10,000 fine.

The governor has always said that theres more to be done. This isnt the last movie. Operation Lone Star continues to add new initiatives, and thats happening as we speak in the Texas Legislature, Mr. Oliver said.

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One year later: Greg Abbott's migrant buses succeeded in rewriting ... - Washington Times

There are lots of ways for employers of aliens to break the immigration law and for the government to detect such behavior; two relatively large employers made news this month by abusing the law in different ways and then getting caught. Neither used the garden-variety approach of simply hiring illegal aliens.

In one case, filed in South Carolina, major Indian labor broker, Larsen & Toubro employed (as it should not have done) large numbers of aliens presumably mostly from India who were in the U.S. on tourist visas; if the jobs were to go to aliens, these workers should have been on H-1B visas. This plot was upset, by the way, through the use of the Civil-War-era False Claims Act, which was triggered by an about-to-be-rich whistle-blower.

Somewhat similarly, an auto parts manufacturer, SMART, is said to have used the NAFTA visa (somewhat akin to the H-1B visa) to bring in factory production workers when it should have used the H-2B system, or better yet, domestic workers.

In the Larsen & Toubro case, the employer managed for years to skirt both the numerical ceilings of the H-1B program and also the much higher fees for that program as compared to the tourist fees. It was the second of these dubious achievements that led to their downfall. The H-1B fees would have been $4,000 to $6,000 each, compared to the tourist visa fees of $200 to $300.

The difference between the two fee levels caused a substantial loss in income to the federal government, thus opening the way for a whistle-blower to sue under the ancient False Claims Act (a qui tam suit), which was written to reward informants against Civil War profiteers. In this case, that person, one Michael Harmon, is due to get a share of the $9,928,000 settlement.

The settlement also reminds us that the qui tam route can be used by non-government players to help enforce this fairly obscure kind of immigration fraud, if not other employer violations, as we have written in the past.

Although we have seen a number of instances of the illegal employment of tourists in the past, the other case of interest involves a novel I think misuse of the NAFTA visas. These visas, created by the North American Free Trade Agreement, allow people from Mexico and Canada (under somewhat different rules) to work in America in H-1B-type jobs. Again, the attraction of these visas is that they allow the employer to bypass the ceilings, the expense, and the nuisance of the H-1B program.

In the instant case, that of Alabama-based SMART, the employer, according to a Law360 report, was accused of using the NAFTA visas not to bring in high-skilled workers but to import factory workers, overstating the workers qualifications in order to them admitted.

The latter case, filed in Georgias federal courts, is just getting started, while the older South Carolina dispute is in the settlement stage.

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Employers of Alien Workers Caught in Different (and Intricate) Visa ... - Immigration Blog

TUNIS, April 13 (Xinhua) -- Tunisian National Guard said on Thursday that the number of bodies of illegal immigrants retrieved off the country's southeastern coast rose to 25 with the recovery of 15 more bodies.

"By carrying out the necessary technical examinations, it was discovered that one of the bodies belonged to a 20-year-old Tunisian, and the rest belonged to people from sub-Saharan African countries, including six women," Tunisian National Guard's Spokesman Houcemeddine Jbabli said in a statement.

On Tuesday, the Tunisian guard units rescued 72 people and retrieved 10 bodies of illegal immigrants off the Louata coast in the Sfax province.

Hatem Cherif, the regional director of health of the Sfax province, recently told media that the number of bodies of illegal immigrants from sub-Saharan African countries, currently deposited in the morgue of the University Hospital Center Habib Bourguiba, exceeded its capacity.

Located in the central Mediterranean, Tunisia is one of the most popular transit points for illegal immigrants seeking to reach Europe.

The number of undocumented immigrants attempting to reach Italy via Tunisia has been on the rise, despite the strict measures taken by the Tunisian authorities to tackle illegal immigration. Enditem

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15 more bodies of immigrants retrieved off Tunisia's SE coast_china ... - China.org

13 April 2023, 01:47 BST

Image source, Moussa family

Christian Ally Moussa did not tell anyone that he had decided to get in a small boat to make the 350km (220-mile) trip across a treacherous stretch of the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and the French island of Mayotte.

He was desperate and he had made the risky crossing twice before.

He needed to return to the place from where he was deported a few weeks earlier as he was supposed to appear at a hearing about his application for French citizenship.

After years of saving to pay his legal fees, the 42-year-old hoped he would finally be able to claim the European passport that was his birth right.

He had the right to a passport as his father was a French citizen from Mayotte, a French overseas territory, 8,000km (5,000 miles) away from Paris. In almost every respect it is supposed to be treated like any part of mainland France.

But because Mr Moussa was born and raised in Madagascar, an island to the south of Mayotte, he had struggled to gain recognition as a French citizen.

He had been living and working in Mayotte on and off since 2004 without the correct paperwork, while, like many others, supporting his wife and children in Madagascar.

But a French passport would allow him to become a legal resident giving him greater opportunities.

Famous for its stunning coral reefs and lagoon, Mayotte is home to an estimated 300,000 people.

It is the poorest part of France yet wealthy compared to the neighbouring islands of Madagascar and Comoros, off the south-east coast of Africa.

Image source, Getty Images

The beaches, the sea and the coral reef offer an idyllic view of Mayotte

With only weeks to go until his citizenship hearing, Mr Moussa was unexpectedly arrested by French immigration police and deported to Madagascar.

"[The police] barged in and wanted to take Christian away," his relative, who we are not naming for security reasons, says.

"He asked me to go and get his shoes but by the time I came back with them, they had already taken him."

Mr Moussa was tracked down to the only detention centre in the main city, Mamoudzou.

"We spoke on the phone. He was crying a lot and said he didn't want to go back to Madagascar," the relative says.

The family then contacted a lawyer who launched an emergency appeal to stop the deportation.

Mr Moussa was set to appear in front of a judge at 11:00 the next day but by this time he was already on a flight to Madagascar, less than 48 hours after being detained.

But it was the court hearing on his bid to become a French citizen that he did not want to miss. That was when he hatched the risky plan to return to Mayotte on a small fishing boat, known locally as a "kwassa kwassa".

"I didn't know he wanted to make the trip back to Mayotte," the relative says.

"He didn't say anything to me or his friends. He just asked for money as he said he was sick and needed medicine because they had no drinking water in the village."

That was the last the relative ever heard from him.

"When the authorities called to tell me he had been found dead, I told them: 'No it's not him. It can't be him'. They then sent photos and I recognised his face."

Mr Moussa died with at least 34 others - all discovered drowned off the coast of Madagascar on 12 March.

What happened to Mr Moussa was not unusual.

"The lagoon around the island is an open-air graveyard," says Daniel Gros, from the Human Rights League NGO in Mayotte.

But, he adds, there is no official attempt to find out how many perish on the journey from either Madagascar or the Comoros.

"When I [started working here] in 2012, the authorities used to say that about 10,000 people were estimated to have died there [since 2002]. And today, they give the same figure."

Mayotte has been in the headlines for riots and unrest, with islanders experiencing rising poverty.

They complain about an increase in immigration mainly from the Comoros, which has put pressure on public services.

The French government says one in two people living on the island are "foreign" and has vowed to crack down on illegal immigration. It has stepped up its presence at sea as well as aerial surveillance and currently deports 24,000 people a year.

As part of a plan to tackle the migration, the French government is planning a major demolition operation, known as Operation Wuambushu, to get rid of what it says are illegal dwellings or shanty towns.

It has also boosted the police and paramilitary presence on the island to 1,300 officers.

North of Mamoudzou, in a shanty town called Majikavo, officials are already marking some of the corrugated iron dwellings for destruction.

The police believe most of the residents in this poor area are there illegally, but regardless of their status many are getting caught up in the operation.

"We live under constant threat," says Fatima, who has lived there for 15 years. "They said: 'Whether you accept it or not, this place will be destroyed'."

Some homes in Majikavo have been tagged, making residents fear that they will be demolished

Fatima, not her real name, is originally from the Comoros but holds a residency permit which allows her to remain on the island, though not travel to mainland France.

Under French law, the government has to offer "suitable alternative accommodation" to those whose homes are set to be destroyed. But up until now, no clear relocation plan has been released though some residents have been offered emergency accommodation for six months.

French member of parliament for Mayotte, Estelle Youssouffa, who asked for the operation to take place, says it is urgent that the state regain control of these areas.

She is one of two representatives that the island sends to Paris.

"It is about destroying an illegal habitat that shelters a population that is mostly foreign or recently regularised," she tells the BBC.

"These shanty towns are built on private or public land that has been stolen because it is illegally occupied. The shanty towns are dangerous areas for the safety and health of those who live there. They are also environmental hazards: destroying them is an emergency for the return of republican order and the security and health of all."

She has also called on Paris to take a tougher stance with the Comoros islands and wants the national navy to set up a permanent base on the island, solely dedicated to fighting clandestine immigration.

"There is no point in carrying out such large-scale slum-demolition operations if the borders are not closed."

But the Comorian government, which claims the island of Mayotte as an integral part of the Comoros, has called out the danger of such an operation and asked the French authorities not to proceed with it.

In a statement this week it said that "the electoral promises made in Mayotte of 'spectacular action' to destroy shanty towns and expel their inhabitants, judged to be in an irregular situation, must not lead to the destabilisation of an entire region".

With Mayotte being majority Muslim, the operation is set to start straight after Ramadan at the end of next week.

Human-rights activist Daniel Gros is highly critical of what he describes as the "heavy-handed actions" of the French state.

"If you chase people away, you shouldn't be surprised that they come back. We deport hundreds of people a day yet we have boats arriving with a similar number of people at the same time."

The tragedy for Mr Moussa was that he was entitled to be French all along, but his desperation to get the citizenship cost him his life.

"His dad was French, his grand-parents were French. Why did he have to die in the sea?," his relative asks.

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France's plan to crack down on Indian Ocean migration - BBC

OPINION:

Congress, as the American peoples elected representatives, should decide where taxpayer dollars go not boards populated by agenda-driven charities seeking to line the pockets of a vast network of open borders non-governmental organizations.

The latter is exactly what is happening with government funds at the Department of Homeland Security specifically, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. DHS is using FEMA to make an end-run around the traditional appropriations process, to facilitate the worst border crisis in American history.

In a recent bombshell report, the DHS Inspector General revealed that NGOs receiving money provided by the American Rescue Plan of 2021 through FEMAs Emergency Food and Shelter Program (EFSP) abused at least $7.4 million, more than half of an audited $12.9 million provided through the program. The organizations in question failed to adhere to the law, submit receipts, and keep the required documentation. The audit found that these NGOs spent money on those who crossed the border illegally and are not lawfully present in the United States.

Its also worth noting that the $7.4 million in misused funds reported by the audit is only a small portion of the funds doled out in 2021. The audit reviewed $12.9 million of $80.6 million that was awarded out of a total of $110 million. Its safe to say the total fraud is far worse.

In the last 2 years, nearly $1 billion has been appropriated to the EFSP, whose National Board distributes humanitarian funds to local social service organizations assisting individuals and families encountered by the Department of Homeland Security. The program received $150 million in FY22. Of the $785 million appropriated for the EFSP in the FY23 Omnibus, $350 million has been awarded thus far by the National Board comprised of representatives from the American Red Cross, United Way Worldwide, and four religious charitable organizations.

The recent uncovering of funding abuse is not a standalone event but the latest example in a pattern of the federal government funneling exorbitant amounts of money to NGOs operating at the border with little to no accountability.

This practice is continually becoming more widespread at DHS, and the agency is always looking to expand it in other arenas. For example, the recently created Case Management Pilot Program (CMPP), which is overseen by Church World Service, an NGO that has advocated for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, provides taxpayer-funded aid to illegal aliens facing deportation.

This controversial pilot program, which the Biden administration is seeking to expand with additional funding from Congress, makes funds available to local governments and/or nonprofits to provide case management to noncitizens in immigration removal proceedings who affirmatively volunteer to participate in the program. CMPP funds are awarded to eligible sub-recipients through the Board. The Board is charged with awarding funds to eligible local governments and nonprofit organizations and managing the pilot program.

The plethora of funding allotted to DHS grant programs operated by prominent charities, NGOs, and sub-recipients cannot be overstated.

In the FEMA case, the DHS Inspector Generals recommendations for the agency to merely resolve the $7.4 million in questioned costs and ensure the EFSP National Board implements oversight measures in the future should raise red flags for every member of Congress.

Such measures are useless against the backdrop of the current border crisis. They do nothing to address the root of the problem. The solution to eliminating humanitarian relief fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars is to pass meaningful legislation securing the border and to defund the NGOs doing the Biden administrations dirty work of illegal alien processing, human smuggling, and incentivizing mass migration.

Lets be clear: Congress is supposed to control the purse strings. Appropriators must not fall into the trap of process reforms and instead need to eliminate the entire existence of these corrupt funding streams.

Its time for those on Capitol Hill to demand accountability from DHS and defund these open-borders operations, instead of abdicating their responsibility to use American taxpayer dollars responsibly and lawfully.

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Congress should stop funding the Biden administration's open-borders - Washington Times