Outrageous! Trump enforces immigration law

U.S. authorities announced that they had arrested more than 680 illegal immigrants in several raids conducted last week. The news brought a predictable outcry from immigration activists groups who had become accustomed to Barack Obama’s increasingly limited enforcement policy on illegal immigration — they called the actions a “campaign of terror.” Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, wailed, “This is a new day. This is the deportation force that [Donald Trump] has been threatening since the campaign.” She should settle down while we look at the facts.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly pushed back against the outrage machine, framing the raids as being both in keeping with the agency’s standard operating procedures and focused on criminal illegal aliens. Kelly said, “President Trump has been clear in affirming the critical mission of DHS in protecting the nation and directed our department to focus on removing illegal aliens who have violated our immigration laws, with a specific focus on those who pose a threat to public safety, have been charged with criminal offenses, have committed immigration violations or have been deported and re-entered the country illegally.”

While the leftist narrative is that Trump has enacted a new draconian anti-immigrant policy, the reality is that he has simply removed the overly restrictive limits Obama imposed upon the Department of Homeland Security. “Trump really is, so far, just a return to normalcy in immigration enforcement,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It was Obama that was the radical break.”

Not surprisingly though, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded answers for the raids. In a letter, he wrote, “Targeting law-abiding innocent immigrant families whose only wrongdoing was crossing the border to give their children a better life, instead of focusing on removing those who have been convicted of violent crimes is a waste of limited resources and undermines law enforcement in communities across the country. ICE must come clean.” It is true that most illegal immigrants are not guilty of violent crime, but by definition they are guilty of committing a criminal act. Yet Schumer seemingly has little respect for the laws of our nation.

There are an estimated 11.1 million illegal immigrants living within the U.S. A week of raids netting 680 of them — aliens who were targeted by ICE officials specifically for engaging in criminal activity beyond their illegal resident status — was enough cause for the Left to engage in hyperbolic and dishonest rhetoric. But what else is new?

We should mention that in fiscal 2013 alone the Obama administration deported a record 438,421 illegal aliens. Yet Obama released tens of thousands of criminal aliens, while sanctuary cities protected them. So what’s the deal with the over-the top outrage coming from his constituents now?

Two reasons.

1) Trump Derangement Syndrome. Democrats and the Left are still so incensed by Trump’s shocking election victory they have made it their mission to resist and obstruct him at every opportunity. That includes creating outrage over any potentially controversial issue, irrespective of its merits, so as to destroy Trump.

2) Political strategy. Democrats have pretty much given up on winning back white middle America and have instead set their sights on creating a new voting block out of the nation’s fastest growing and largest minority group — Hispanics. If they can build a large enough coalition of minority groups, they can then afford to ignore white middle America, a group they despise anyway. This is nothing more than identity politics — supporting illegal immigration, especially if it leads to some form of “comprehensive reform” — and it plays well with Hispanics. After all, the same thing worked with blacks. Why not try again?

The right to live and work in the U.S. is reserved only for those who are citizens of our nation. It is a privilege for foreigners. Any attempt to unlawfully apply this right beyond the clearly defined law of the land, no matter how emotionally justified, is to do violence to Rule of Law and to the rights of all citizens. And those politicians who willfully promote and advocate those who break the law should be held to account. Unfortunately, the problem has gone on for so long with little being done to address it that when someone like Trump comes along to simply enforce the law, he is deemed extreme. Thankfully, Trump is serious about fixing the problem and has been sticking to his guns on the issue.

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A late word on the electoral college

Steven Burton

The electoral college is not the reason Hillary lost. If there would have been no electoral college before the election Hillary would still have lost.

How can that be you ask? I am crazy you say? She got 2 million more votes Steven you lunatic!

You don't live in NY or California if that is what you're thinking.

The states of NY and California, combined population of around 58 million people, were going to Clinton. Clinton was going to win those states. The most optimistic Trump fan in the world would have conceded that prior to the election.

So what?

Those states are also winner take all states. A huge chunk of Republicans in those states don't bother with voting in the general election. They know their votes don't count so they don't bother showing up. I can count on one hand how many of my rabid conservative friends in NY even bothered to vote. Virtually all my liberal friends voted.

(I didn't vote because I didn't find either candidate appealing)

No electoral college and a lot more Republicans in these two huge states would have voted. We know what Hillary's ceiling was, we don't know what Trump's could have been without an electoral college

Side note about Texas:

From CBS News Exit Polls: How Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency:

Many political observers thought a significant number of Republicans would either vote for Clinton, one of the third party candidates, or stay home rather than casting their votes for Trump. According to the exit polls, Republicans stayed loyal to their presidential candidate. Some 89 percent of self-described Republicans voted for Trump; 91 percent of white Republicans did.

In contrast, only 84 percent of white Democrats voted for Clinton. She did win 86 percent of white Democratic women, but only 81 percent of white men.

So I don't think Texas would have made a difference for Hillary like California and and NY would have for Trump.

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Why Trump's Probe of Voter Fraud Is Long Overdue

President Trump has announced that his administration will be launching a major investigation of voter fraud, including those who are registered in more than one state, “those who are illegal” and those voters who are dead but still registered. This followed a media firestorm in which The New York Times and others called Trump’s assertion a “lie.”

But just last week, President Obama told a whopper at his last news conference that went almost completely unnoticed, much less criticized.

He promised he would continue to fight voter-ID laws and other measures designed to improve voting integrity. The U.S. is “the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote,” he claimed.

This is demonstrably false. All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting.

Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption.

The real problem in our election system is that we don’t really know to what extent President Trump’s claim is true because we have an election system that is based on the honor system.

What we do know, despite assertions to the contrary, is that voter fraud is a problem, and both sides of the political aisle should welcome a real investigation into it — especially since the Obama administration tried so hard for eight years to obfuscate the issue and prevent a real assessment.

Former Justice Department attorney Christian Adams testified under oath that he attended a Nov. 2009 meeting at which then-deputy assistant attorney general Julie Fernandes told DOJ prosecutors that the administration would not be enforcing the federal law that requires local officials to purge illegitimate names from their voter rolls.

This refusal to enforce the law came despite a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or a duplicate. About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection.

The Obama administration did everything it could to avoid complying with requests from states to verify voter registration records against federal records of legal noncitizens and illegal immigrants who have been detained by law enforcement to find noncitizens who have illegally registered and voted.

The Justice Department has also opposed every effort by states — such as Kansas, Arizona, Alabama and Georgia — to implement laws that require individuals registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship. This despite evidence that noncitizens are indeed registering and casting ballots.

In 2015 one Kansas county began offering voter registration at naturalization ceremonies. Election officials soon discovered about a dozen new Americans who were already registered — and who had voted as noncitizens in multiple elections.

These blatant attempts to prevent states from learning if they have a real problem with illegal votes makes it impossible to learn if significant numbers of noncitizens and others are indeed voting illegally, perhaps enough to make up the margin in some close elections.

There is no question that there are dishonorable people who willing to exploit the loopholes in our honor system.

An undercover video released in October by the citizen-journalist group Project Veritas shows a Democratic election commissioner in New York City saying, “I think there is a lot of voter fraud.”

A 2013 sting operation by official New York City investigators found they could vote in someone else’s name 97 percent of the time without detection.

A second O'Keefe video showed two Democratic operatives mulling how it would be possible to get away with voter fraud.

They were both fired.

How common is this? If only we knew. Political correctness has squelched probes of noncitizen voting, so most cases are discovered accidentally instead of through a systematic review of election records.

The danger looms large in states such as California, which provides driver’s licenses to noncitizens, including those here illegally, and which also does nothing to verify citizenship during voter registration.

MORE HERE

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