Still, foreigners persist in the fantasy that they can simply move to the US and get a raft of freebies from the unwilling taxpayer: just pronounce the magic word “Asylum” and the keys to the kingdom are handed over to all diverse peoples who claim to be Victims. Alien-transporting cartels spread this lie as part of their marketing plan and use it themselves.
As a result, some unlawful foreigners display extreme entitlement in their attitude:
ILLEGAL ALIEN/ASYLUM CLAIMER: “The only place I want to be is the United States. I never thought I would be returned here to Juarez. I’m waiting to go to the United States with my baby to get the best life for my son.”
Most asylum claimants are economic moochers, period. Before easy travel and cell phones, hispanics south of the border fought revolutions for their freedom and a better life, but later it became easier just to head north.
At least until recently, when President Trump tightened up the rules.
Spare Audio:
]]>FOX HOST: It’s been almost a year since Washington sent asylum seekers back to Mexico. So far less than one percent have been granted asylum through this controversial program. We have William la Jeunesse joining us from the west coast bureau with more on the story.
WILLIAM LA JEUNESSE: From the president’s point of view the Remain in Mexico plan is working. Out of 24,000 migrants claiming asylum at the border, judges allowed just over 100 to stay in the US — that’s less than one percent, compared to 20 percent in previous years, according to the Syracuse University study. Another 32,000 wait in Mexico, waiting for judges to hear their case. . .
Depending on your politics, those numbers spell success or failure. The administration credits the program in cutting illegal immigration by getting rid of the incentives to make a claim, get released and disappear. The low acceptance rate exposes the scam, they say, that most claims are not based on persecution, but a better job. (Continues)
Nevertheless, Tuesday’s diversity-loving Los Angeles Times included a story about Spanish-speaking domestic workers who apparently didn’t understand enough English to grasp the desperate fire danger developing in their employers’ neighborhoods.
Here’s a tweet from the Times reporter who wrote the article:
A thread: Getty fire: Housekeepers, gardener go to work despite the flames – Los Angeles Times https://t.co/G6UZm8bkdD
— Brittny Mejia (@brittny_mejia) October 28, 2019
There’s not a great facial depiction in the photo above, but it’s better than another photo used in the story that didn’t show the face at all. Could it be that some of the diligent workers slogging through the smoky air are illegal aliens? Inquiring minds want to know…
The Times never forgets about diverse foreigners, no matter how dire the suffering of American citizens.
]]>Getty fire: Housekeepers, gardener go to work despite the flames, By Brittny Mejia, Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2019
Ana Martinez walks through a neighborhood that was evacuated in the Getty fire on Monday, Oct. 28, 2019. (Brittny Mejia/Los Angeles Times/TNS)
LOS ANGELES – When she left her house about 6 a.m., Carmen Solano didn’t know a brush fire had erupted near the neighborhood where she worked. So she left for her job, with coffee and pan in hand.
She’d filled her red backpack with tortillas, bananas, water and lunch for the day before heading to a home she cleaned weekly on Robinwood Drive. When Solano arrived, via a taxi shared with other housekeepers, the hillside neighborhood lined with multimillion-dollar homes was already choked with debris from the Getty fire.
“There’s a lot of smoke,” the driver observed, as he dropped off the Guatemalan immigrant. Normally, Solano works at the home on Wednesday, but the owner needed to switch and asked her to come on Monday.
Dressed in a pink sweater and pink sweatpants, she rang the doorbell over and over, hoping someone was inside. By her feet, a jack-o’-lantern grinned. As she waited at the front door, she realized she’d either left her phone on her dresser at home or in the taxi.
She was stranded. Ash rained down on her, speckling her braided hair white.
I was the one who informed her that the neighborhood was under a mandatory evacuation and offered her a ride. Before we left, I pressed the doorbell, part of a smart home system that connected to the resident’s cellphone. Solano hadn’t known what it was.
“Esta quemando todo,” the owner said in halting Spanish to Solano through the ringer. “Everything is burning.”
Police had ordered them to evacuate at 3 a.m., he told her.
The streets were mostly empty throughout the neighborhood. Outside homes, residents had decorated with graves, pumpkins and fake spiders for Halloween. Cobwebs decorated manicured lawns. Garage doors were left open as residents hurried to leave. Luxury cars – a black Porsche, a red Mercedes Benz and a Tesla – were left behind.
Solano asked her employer what she should do.
“I’m scared to be alone,” she said, ash smudged above an eyebrow.
He asked if she had a ride home, and I explained to him that I had offered to help: I would drive her to a main intersection and order an Uber to take her home. He thanked me and said to Solano: “Lo siento, gracias por venir” (I’m sorry, thanks for coming.) (Continues)
The pictures are reflected in a report published earlier this month finding that L.A.’s homelessness is [...]]]>
The pictures are reflected in a report published earlier this month finding that L.A.’s homelessness is the second worst in the nation, with New York scoring the number one spot.
I reported two years ago about the increasing hispanic homelessness as noted in the Los Angeles Times. So importing millions of unskilled unemployable foreigners has added to the homeless problem as well.
Tucker alluded to excessive immigration in his observations on Los Angeles homelessness.
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: The footage on your screen, the picture you’re looking at right there was shot by one of our producers last week. We were out in California all week in Los Angeles, supposedly one of the richest cities in the world, and in some ways it is.
But the video you are watching shows something else — Californian’s poor, meandering trash-filled streets, right in the middle of the city, right in downtown. Block after block, homeless encampments along the sidewalks and blanketing downtown L.A.
The footage you are watching starts at Fifth Street and San Pedro and goes west — again, block after block, tent after tent. This is how the poor spend Easter Sunday in California. They weren’t clustered on one side of a single road either, it wasn’t just like skid row: it was like many skid rows. He drove down three completely different blocks and the camps just continued. It was like Tegucigalpa or Port-au-Prince but it’s not; it’s America’s second-largest city.
The encampments begin just two blocks away from Little Tokyo, one of L.A.’s major tourist destinations. Nearby apartments rent for 3500 bucks a month.
You might be wondering, with so many people priced out of local housing, few people are literally living in RVs, miles of RVs parked along the street that you are watching here. They are in tents. Why wouldn’t local leaders want to slow or stop the flow of new arrivals to get prices under control, to open up new housing?
They are doing the opposite. L.A. is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state. Every politician there with any ambition will denounce our border as an atrocity and immigration enforcement as an abomination. The poor in California are an afterthought, one of the reasons why they are multiplying. That’s why when California Governor Gavin Newsom tried to fight poverty last week, he flew to another country to do it, El Salvador. The same people who want no limits on people moving here can’t even house the people who already live here. It tells you a lot.
The initial subject is Mexican Lupe Avalos who joined up with the local volunteer fire department in a Oklahoma panhandle town. Guymon (population 11,545) has been rapidly [...]]]>
The initial subject is Mexican Lupe Avalos who joined up with the local volunteer fire department in a Oklahoma panhandle town. Guymon (population 11,545) has been rapidly hispanicized since the opening of a meat-packing plant in 1996. Avalos’ friends can’t understand why he wants to spend time with white Americans at the firehouse, so it seems the principle of assimilation to the values and culture of the United States looks pretty much dead.
As usual, the great majority of foreigners come for the money and free stuff, period.
The American town has flipped to become majority hispanic in just two decades, and not all of the foreign residents are legal. The Post thinks the locals are not sufficiently embracing the secular religion of Diversity, and the paper characterized the cultural shift as “fraught.”
Fire chiefs look to growing Latino population to rescue the languishing small-town firehouse, Herald-News (Joliet, Illinois), By Tim Craig, The Washington Post, June 6, 2018
GUYMON, Okla. – Three months into the job, Lupe Avalos still hears from the skeptics.
His twin brother and Latino friends wonder why a 20-year-old man born in Mexico decided to volunteer for one of the oldest, clubbiest small-town traditions – the American firehouse.
“They are like, ‘Oh, you are over there being white again with your firefighter friends,’ ” said Avalos, who was born in Mexico and brought to the United States by his parents when he was 4 years old. “But I like it, and I’m learning a lot of new things by getting involved in the community.”
This town in the center of Oklahoma’s panhandle has seen a huge demographic shift, flipping from majority-white to majority-Hispanic in the span of two decades. It’s a transformation reflected across many parts of America, one that is reshaping core community institutions, including those that provide the most critical services.
The traditional firehouse is feeling particularly pressured as the population of young white men it typically relied on for staffing declines and it struggles to connect with a burgeoning immigrant community. The dynamic has left firehouses short-staffed and Latino communities underserved.
From 1984 through 2015, the number of volunteer firefighters dipped nearly 10 percent to about 815,000, even as calls to fire departments nearly tripled, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
Now, community leaders across the country are rethinking firehouse cultures as they try to recruit more first- and second-generation immigrants.
“Communities that need help, they are reaching out to their neighbors, and their neighbors are changing,” said Rob Leonard of the Firemen’s Association of the State of New York.
The cultural shift has been fraught at times.
Following is a little story of illegal alien values: the mother of an unlawful family died when she received no medical attention after a heart attack because the family feared being deported.
Wait, weren’t we told that Mexicans have family values in abundance? Apparently not, which brings into question whether admitting millions of Third Worlder aliens is good idea, when some won’t even protect a mother.
]]>Jesus Uribe, a career firefighter in Guymon of Mexican descent, recalls when a Hispanic neighbor knocked on his door late one September night.
“Can you come help? My wife died,” the man said.
Uribe rushed next door and discovered the woman had suffered an apparent heart attack hours earlier. Her four children – two of whom were teenagers with cellphones – had been home at the time but never called for help. They worried it would trigger a response from immigration officials, Uribe said.
“He came to me,” said Uribe, 29, “but only because . . . if someone found his wife dead at his house, he feared he was going to get deported and all of his kids were going to be in the system.”
The 2010 Census put the island’s population at over 3.7 million, but the departures for the United States have been accelerating since the hurricane: more than 168,000 have left for Florida according to a Nov. 18 New York Times article which also noted, “An additional 100,000 are booked on flights to Orlando through Dec. 31” plus more going to other cities.
Such a major transfer of Puerto Ricans may have severe electoral implications. Like other hispanics, the islanders vote largely Democrat, and when they (as American citizens) relocate to the mainland, they can vote for the presidential candidates, unlike back home. (It’s a weird situation, that derives from the United States having territories where most of the residents are US citizens — Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands all have US citizenship, but American Samoa does not. Go figure.)
By law, Puerto Ricans are American citizens (!) but culturally they are foreigners from the Caribbean colonized by Spain.
More than a million Puerto Ricans already reside in Florida, and the miserable conditions on the home island will surely convince many more to relocate to the US. Who can blame them? The lights don’t work and no water comes from the tap.
Look to see Democrats work to turn Florida dependably blue by working the expanding Puerto Rican vote. In 2016, 4,617,886 Floridians voted for candidate Trump, while 4,504,975 chose Hillary Clinton — a difference of only a little over 100,000 votes.
Below, a few years ago, Puerto Ricans held Spanish-language signs demanding US statehood for the island — a really bad idea that is popular among pandering politicians.
Puerto Rico is officially a bilingual territory. Spanish is the more widely used language on the island, with English being second by a wide margin. A US Census fact sheet showed the question asking “Language other than English spoken at home, percent of persons aged 5 years+ 2011-2015” gave the answer “94.7%.” So a huge influx of Puerto Ricans will bring a bigger push for America to become bilingual — if not officially, then in practice as the US is increasingly becoming hispanicized because of extreme immigration.
Fox News reported (Nov. 17) on the influx of Puerto Ricans and the resulting strain on local resources:
]]>STEVE HARRIGAN: They are coming to Florida each week by the thousands. Florida officials say 160,000 now have arrived here in this state since the storm, settling around the Orlando area. . .
Of course the influx of tens of thousands is putting a strain on some communities here. Osceola County has now 2,500 new students. The superintendent says that is simply a massive amount to handle: she said on a typical day they might have 70 brand new students who simply show up at the door, often not speaking English and not with any transcripts. Here’s what she had to say:
DR. DEBRA PACE, OCEOLA SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT: And it’s adding like like two elementary schools to our population that we were unable to plan for and project.
HARRIGAN: Suddenly two brand new schools to deal with and those schools are expensive as well: $28,000 per student that’s a $70 million dollar unbudgeted expense. The county is asking for help from state and federal agencies.
Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times front-paged the story, under photos of the catastrophic California wildfires.
Who can blame them for skedaddling en masse when the [...]]]>
Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times front-paged the story, under photos of the catastrophic California wildfires.
Who can blame them for skedaddling en masse when the lights don’t turn on? What’s perplexing is how an island of hispanics with no cultural similarity or connection to the United States whatsoever got to be citizens. Interestingly, a March poll found that only 47 percent of Americans believed that residents of Puerto Rico are actually US citizens. Those 47 percenters must have missed the sentence in their high school history book where the US took possession of the island in 1898 following the Spanish-American War.
Say, perhaps Spain would like to have the island back. . . they could at least talk to each other. The US Census found that 95 percent Puerto Ricans do not speak English at home.
A Wikipedia article titled Puerto Rican Citizenship states, “On March 2, 1917, the Jones–Shafroth Act was signed, collectively making Puerto Ricans United States citizens without rescinding their Puerto Rican citizenship.”
So if this curious statement is accurate, the United States could divorce Puerto Rico without any harm to the residents because they are already bi-national and have a spare citizenship, so they wouldn’t be stateless. Puerto Rican independence would work out fine on the citizenship front and might be the only way to keep the whole bunch from moving here.
]]>Puerto Ricans fleeing their hurricane-ravaged island are pouring into the U.S. mainland, Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2017
More than 700,000 Puerto Ricans had migrated to the mainland between 2006 and 2015.
When Sinthia Colon’s sister-in-law called from Orlando offering plane tickets to flee Puerto Rico, she did not hesitate. Hurricane Maria had destroyed her small farm, wrecked the local power grid and spurred her town of San Lorenzo to impose a curfew to combat looting.
In a few hours, she was bound for Florida.
“It was, like, all of a sudden … I’m going,” Colon, 42, said shortly after arriving at a disaster relief center at Orlando International Airport with her daughter, son and mother-in-law. “I didn’t have time to make plans.”
Two weeks after the storm devastated Puerto Rico, tens of thousands of hurricane evacuees are packing scheduled flights and charter jets in what officials there and in states across the U.S. fear is the beginning of a mass exodus of historic proportions.
The mainland had already been absorbing record numbers of Puerto Ricans fleeing economic decline and a mounting debt crisis, with more than 700,000 migrating between 2006 and 2015. Some people also moved back over that time, but after decades of population growth, the island saw the total number of residents drop from about 3.8 million to 3.4 million — or more than 10%.
The majority of those who moved were of working age, compounding the economic damage.
Now that cycle is poised to accelerate in a migration that could have profound implications for the rebuilding of the island and for U.S. politics.
“This has no historical precedent for the United States,” said Jesse Keenan, a Harvard professor who specializes in climate adaptation and resilience.
“If just 10% of people leave, it’s going to have a huge impact, both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland,” he said. “If as many as 20% left, which wouldn’t surprise me, it would completely collapse the island’s economy and burden jurisdictions across the United States.”
As U.S. citizens, the evacuees have a legal right to move anywhere in the country. Many are bound for Florida, which is already home to more than a million Puerto Ricans, or nearly a fifth of the 5.4 million living in the 50 states.
(Continues)
Certainly a string of really bad luck can put some people on the streets, but the exploding numbers of a [...]]]>
Certainly a string of really bad luck can put some people on the streets, but the exploding numbers of a certain demographic group indicate years of open borders are showing up in homelessness. When nearly 58,000 persons are homeless in Los Angeles County, the prevalence of illegal alien Latinos in the population should be a hint to the problem.
Naturally, the anything-goes diversity beliefs of the LA Times show up in the way it doesn’t say straight out that illegal immigration is fueling yet another social problem. Apparently there aren’t enough jobs Americans won’t do to put tortillas and rent on the table for a growing number of foreign residents.
The United States is a job-creating machine compared to a lot of places, but it cannot supply employment for the moochers of the world.
]]>Surge in Latino homeless population ‘a whole new phenomenon’ for Los Angeles, Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2017
Timoteo Arevalos never imagined he’d end up here, loitering for hours on a bench at Hollenbeck Park in Boyle Heights, using his backpack as his pillow.
He used to have a government job, but the recession hit and he was laid off. He then tried to scrape by as a dishwasher, but last fall his hours were cut and he couldn’t pay his rent.
Now, he is part of a rising number of Latinos who are living homeless in Los Angeles. Recent figures released by the county show that Latino homelessness shot up by 63% in the past year, a staggering number in a county that saw its overall homeless population soar by 23%, despite increasing efforts to get people off the street.
Nearly every demographic, including youth, families and veterans, showed increases in homelessness, but Latinos delivered one of the sharpest rises, adding more than 7,000 people to the surge.
“I would say it’s a whole new phenomenon,” said County Supervisor Hilda Solis, whose district saw Latino homelessness go up by 84%. “We have to put it on the radar and really think outside the box when we consider how to help this population.”
Homeless officials and outreach groups say Los Angeles’ rising rents and stale wages are the main drivers pushing many out of their homes.
According to a study released by the Homeless Services Authority, renters living in Los Angeles are the most cost-burdened nationwide. More than 2 million households in L.A. and Orange counties have housing costs that exceed 30% of their income.
Latinos are particularly at risk, with many working up to two to three low-paying jobs to make ends meet. Those lacking legal status are more vulnerable these days as they struggle to find work and avoid public assistance, which they fear could flag them for eventual deportation.
“It’s like they live with one foot on a banana peel and the other one step from homelessness,” said Rose Rios, who runs Cover the Homeless Ministry, a South Los Angeles non-profit that feeds people in the streets, many of them Latino.
After Arevalos lost his government job, he lived off his $70,000 savings. When that dried up, he struggled to find a good-paying job. Eventually he settled for a dish washing gig, but when the restaurant cut back his hours last fall, he lost his Pico Rivera studio apartment.
Now, he receives $900 in unemployment, enough for food and clothes, but not quite to cover rent and bills. Most days, he sleeps in a secluded alley in Pico Rivera, not far from the roar of passing trains and cargo trucks. To bathe, he goes to Roosevelt High School’s public pool.
“I’m frustrated and sad,” Arevalos said. “Having to go up and down and starting over takes a lot out of you.”
Countywide, an estimated 20% of Latinos live below the poverty level. Their average household income is about $47,000.
“This is a population that’s already living under very difficult circumstances,” said USC sociology professor Manuel Pastor. “When you increase rents, you really start to see a bigger impact.”
In 2016, Latinos made up 27% of the county’s homeless population; that number has rocketed to 35% in the last year. Latinos make up about 48% of the county’s overall population. The percentage of white homeless people declined 2% in that time.
African Americans saw a slight increase in the number of homeless, but while they make up 9% of L.A. County’s overall population, they still represent a disproportionate 40% of the county’s homeless.
This year’s homeless count, conducted in January, showed significant increases in the newly homeless, homeless youth and homeless living in cars. These figures seem to support the idea that the surge in Latino homelessness is made up of working poor who might have been priced out by the market, Pastor said.
Solis has noticed the difference as she drives around her district in East Los Angeles and parts of the San Gabriel Valley. She has seen more Latinos who apparently live in the riverbeds and freeway underpasses.
The supervisor said she hopes that the needs of homeless Latinos are taken into account as funds from Proposition HHH and Measure H are allocated over the next decade. The ballot measures approved by Los Angeles voters in November are expected to provide several billion dollars in housing, rent subsidies and services to the homeless.
“A lot of Latinos tend to come from tight-knit communities and don’t like talking about how they’re struggling,” Solis said.
Many tend to not seek help from shelters and homeless outreach centers, such as the ones located in downtown L.A.’s skid row. They try to subsist, relying on relatives, friends, churches, clinics, all while living out of their car or in the street.
“We need service providers who reflect the community, who provide competent, culturally sensitive information in Spanish,” Solis said.
At a church east of the Los Angeles River on a recent evening, nearly three dozen men sat around the courtyard, waiting for a warm meal and a place to spend the night. Most sleep in cots that line the church temple, near the altar and by the doors.
The men, all Latinos and some of them lacking legal status, have been coming here for nearly 30 years to seek emergency shelter.
Among them was Mario Martinez, 48, from Guatemala. He came to the U.S. when he was 17 years old.
He worked in factories and construction sites, eventually landing a job as a manager of a fabric and textile warehouse. He made $18 an hour.
Martinez and his girlfriend and their two children, ages 4 and 10, used to rent an apartment in Montebello for $1,400 a month.
“I had started from the bottom and worked my way up,” he said.
But life took a turn and he and his girlfriend separated. Five years ago, he lost his job.
Work since then has been tough to come by and it’s paid much less. When Martinez depleted his $15,000 in savings a few months ago, he ended up in the street.
He hopes part-time work through an employment agency will help him get back into an apartment soon.
“I’m the kind of person who takes life as it comes,” Martinez said. “As long as you’re healthy and able to work and get sleep, you’re able to get back up.”
The church also provides similar assistance to Latinas.
In other parts of the city, several districts that have experienced gentrification saw Latino homelessness rise. That includes Councilman Gil Cedillo’s 1st District, where there was a 79% increase.
District 1 includes densely populated neighborhoods such as Pico-Union and Westlake, where many poor families crowd into high-rise apartments. The area’s proximity to downtown has made it enticing for developers in recent years, pushing rents up for many people.
At the center of Westlake, MacArthur Park has become a go-to destination for homeless from across the region. Their tents are spread across the 32-acre park, creating an endless cycle that doesn’t ease despite weekly outreach efforts conducted by Cedillo’s office and numerous organizations.
“The problem is a lack of sufficient housing stock,” Cedillo said. “People are very compassionate and concerned about the homeless, but what we need to do is get out of the developers’ way and begin to create a process so people can build and neighbors need to embrace this.”
In Highland Park, another area represented by Cedillo, gentrification has vastly spiked housing prices. Two-bedroom homes sell for more than $600,000.
In 2009, Rebecca Prine founded Recycled Resources for the Homeless, a nonprofit outreach group that connects the homeless to housing and provides basic services, such as free laundry on Wednesday nights.
In the winters, the organization opens a shelter, the only one in the neighborhood. This past year, Prine said the shelter was filled mostly with Latinos. Many of them held down full-time jobs. But they couldn’t afford the rents. Others were older residents with fixed incomes.
“From one year to the next,” Prine said, “the face of homelessness changed for us.”
The second panel included two parents of young people killed by illegals who should have been deported, the Santa Maria CA Police Chief Ralph Martin and one open borders enthusiast.
Illegal alien criminals keep coming because even murderers get to stay.
Chairman Jason Chaffetz was still exasperated when he appeared on Fox with Greta van Susteren later in the day:
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: The Obama administration under fire at a House hearing. The Department of Homeland Security has released thousands of illegal immigrants who have committed crimes on US soil, including some behind more than 200 murders.
(Hearing clip) CHAIRMAN JASON CHAFFETZ: You have somebody who commits homicide? Yes, we want them deported. That’s the law.
ICE DIRECTOR SARAH SALDANA: Then put it in the statute, sir.
CHAFFETZ: There’s a whole list of categories there that are a harm to public safety, including those that commit homicide that you went ahead and released anyway. And so that law is crystal clear. You are making these discretionary choices in releasing these people out in the public and they’re committing more crimes, and I don’t understand why you don’t deport them.
SALDANA: To sit there and say that those proud women and men of law enforcement in ICE are choosing to release criminals is absolutely unforgivable. I am very proud of representing those men and women. Many of them are former police officers, sheriff’s department members, and they do not go around trying to put criminals on the streets. (End hearing clip)
VAN SUSTEREN: House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman who led today’s hearing Congressman Jason Chaffetz goes on the record. Very good evening sir. Okay, there are some people who are released who are criminals from prison, right?
CHAFFETZ: Eight-six thousand of them over a three-year period.
VAN SUSTEREN: Okay, who makes the decision to release and how do they pick and choose?
CHAFFETZ: Well it seems to be random, but everything from homicide to DUIs to assault to sexual battery to — I mean you name the violent crime — they have released them back out to the public, rather than either detaining them, or even better yet, deporting them
VAN SUSTEREN: These people have been arrested for these crimes and gotten sentences?
CHAFFETZ: They are here illegally, they committed a crime, they were convicted of that crime, they either served that time or they just released them back out in the public instead of actually saying, now that you’ve served your senior sentence your debt to the United States, we’re gonna send you back to the country from which you came — they don’t do that.
VAN SUSTEREN: Why don’t they do that?
CHAFFETZ: It’s ridiculous; there’s no acceptable answer. They tried to reprogram over $100,000,000 that the congress had, allocated for these deportations they wanted to get that money back rather than do it. There’s a minimum of 34,000 beds for these types of people. Yet the department only wants to house about 30,000, and what they’ve done is they’ve released them out on the streets. And more than 200 of those people that were in our detention, that had committed a crime were released back into the public and committed homicide.
VAN SUSTEREN: Somebody obviously makes a decision: okay we’re going to release you and we’re gonna release you on the street we’re not going to deport — who does that?
CHAFFETZ: The Department of Homeland Security.
VAN SUSTEREN: Who is that? Is that like one person who’s got the job, some nameless faceless bureaucrat in the government who gets to make that decision?
CHAFFETZ: You look at Jeh Johnson who’s the secretary, then you look at the director who was with us today, it was the director of Immigration Customs Enforcement and they’re not doing it. Some of them get deported but when you release 86,000 people over three years into the public that have already committed crimes…
VAN SUSTEREN: But all you have to do is look at their crimes — if you stole pack of gum from the grocery store, that’s very different,
CHAFFETZ: More than 12,000 of these were DUIs, and I think that’s a fairly serious crime.
VAN SUSTEREN: It’s a very serious crime.
CHAFFETZ: But everything from sexual assault to robbery to homicide. The 86,000 represents three years, so basically divide it by three. Not even one is acceptable. We heard witnesses today whose family members were killed, and how do you look those people in the eye? They should be out of the country. One of the excuses is, well those countries won’t take them back.
VAN SUSTEREN: Just drop them off.
CHAFFETZ: Don’t give them any more foreign aid and do what the law says, and that is make sure that the Secretary of State does not give those countries any more visas so more people can come to this country. Get their attention.
One of the more shocking facts underlined in the hearing was the fact that the government has plenty of capacity for holding criminals, but releases them anyway.
]]>Illegal immigrant criminals released into U.S. despite thousands of vacant detention beds, By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, Thursday, April 28, 2016
Homeland Security is leaving thousands of detention beds empty even as it voluntarily releases thousands of murderers, kidnappers and other criminals, the chief of deportations admitted to Congress on Thursday as she faced families of those killed by freed illegal immigrant convicts.
“We strive for perfect, but we are human and we fall short sometimes,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Sarah R. Saldana told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Ms. Saldana said the agency now has 2,000 beds vacant out of the 34,000 it is supposed to have available on the average day.
Government statistics show that in 2015, ICE averaged 28,168 detainees — meaning some 5,800 beds left unused, even as the agency released dangerous convicts back into the community to await the outcomes of their immigration proceedings.
One of those people released last year was Jean Jacques, a Haitian who served time for attempted murder and whom ICE tried to deport, but whom Haiti refused to take back. ICE released him, and he would go on to stab a young woman, Casey Chadwick, in her Connecticut apartment.
“If ICE and Homeland Security had done their job, Casey would not have died,” her mother, Wendy Hartling, told lawmakers just minutes after Ms. Saldana testified.
Both Democrats and Republicans were inclined to agree, demanding answers about why officials let Haiti stymie Jacques’ deportation last year.
Ms. Saldana blamed the State Department, saying it’s that agency’s call on how much pressure to use on other governments. But lawmakers weren’t satisfied, pointing to the law that says it’s up to the immigration service to start the process by reporting other countries’ bad behavior.
Ms. Saldana insisted she’s made those reports, but couldn’t remember which countries she’d cited. Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz demanded she provide all of those letters within a week — and he warned her not to try to hide behind secrecy.
“Let’s know and understand which countries are not taking back the criminals that came here illegally,” he said.
In 2015 ICE released 19,723 criminals back into communities while they were awaiting their immigration trials.
Some 10,175 of those were released on bond by an immigration judge — Ms. Saldana couldn’t say how often her officers object to that bond — and 2,166 others were released because they’d been held the maximum amount of time allowed under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling.
But while 89 criminals were released because their countries wouldn’t take them back — the situation Jacques was in — another 7,293 were released at ICE’s own discretion. It’s that last category that has Congress furious, particularly with more than 5,800 detention beds that went empty last year.
“We just keep pouring more and more money into your agency, and we keep getting less and less,” Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., Tennessee Republican, told Ms. Saldana. “Are you embarrassed in any way?”
Ms. Saldana blamed Congress, saying the law only requires ICE to hold some criminals. She said if lawmakers want her to detain all murderers, they’ll need to write it into the law.
She also said about two-thirds of the releases last year were pursuant to court orders or to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, so her office is only responsible for about 7,000 of the criminals put on the streets.
“To sit there and say that the proud women and men of law enforcement and ICE are choosing to release criminals is absolutely unforgivable,” she said. “They do not go around trying to put criminals on the streets.”
Thursday’s hearing was the latest in a string of difficult appearances before Congress.
Last year, testifying to the same committee, she threw her support behind legislation that would have cracked down on sanctuary cities — then, within a day, she renounced her comments after feeling tremendous pressure from immigrant rights groups.
At another hearing she gave a grossly inflated estimate of the number of illegal immigrants to Congress, saying it could be as high as 15 million. On Thursday she gave a different number of 11.2 million — much closer to the estimates of most experts.
On Thursday she stepped off on a wrong foot from the start of her testimony by criticizing the committee’s inquiry into criminal releases as “political banter.” She later said she didn’t intend to target Republicans with that attack.
A couple of particularly affecting pro-gun statements come from the European immigrant who lived in Nazi-occupied Greece and the older black woman who bought a gun to keep [...]]]>
A couple of particularly affecting pro-gun statements come from the European immigrant who lived in Nazi-occupied Greece and the older black woman who bought a gun to keep safe in her gang-infested apartment complex.
The most recent is from Benghazi defender, Mark “Oz” Geist. It’s inspiring to hear a genuine hero talk about American courage:
Transcript
I know the truth about Benghazi.
I was there, fighting alongside five Americans, who were all raised to believe that if you have a chance to save someone’s life and you don’t try, that’s more criminal than anything else. So we fought for 13 hours, and we saved lives. But we are not unique.
We are no different than the Americans who ran back into those crumbling New York towers, or the Americans who tackled the armed terrorists on that French train, or the many faceless, nameless Americans who every day risk their lives for perfect strangers trapped in burning cars or dangerous waters—because if they didn’t, no one would.
Where was that courage among the politicians who had the power to make a difference during those 13 hours in Benghazi?
I am the National Rifle Association of America, and I am Freedom’s Safest Place.
People who care about the Second Amendment should pay attention to immigration-fueled demographic change in this country, because hispanics are gun grabbers at heart, as Pew pollsters discovered in a 2014 survey:
Pew Hispanic: Gun Rights and Restrictions
An early 2014 Pew Research Center survey asked U.S. adults what is more important — protecting the right of Americans to own guns or controlling gun ownership (Pew Research Center, 2014d). Hispanic registered voters nationally say they prefer gun control over the rights of owners by a margin of 62%-to-36%, as do black registered voters by a margin of 71%-to-26%, according to the survey. By contrast, white registered voters choose gun owners’ rights over gun control by a margin of 59%-to-39%.
Included in the roughly six-in-ten Hispanic registered voters who say they prefer gun control are 44% who say that most Americans should be able to own guns if certain limits are in place and 18% who say only law enforcement and security personnel should be able to own guns. Also included among the 36% of Hispanic registered voters who think protecting gun rights is a bigger priority are 27% who favor some restrictions on gun ownership and just 9% who favor no such restrictions.
Looking across all Hispanics regardless of their voter registration status or eligibility, 82% of foreign-born Hispanics think controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting gun ownership rights, compared with 59% of Hispanics born in the U.S. who say the same.
A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that two-in-ten Hispanics say they have a gun, rifle or pistol in their home (Morin, 2014). This is similar to the share of blacks who say this (19%), but whites are twice as likely (41%) to say they have a gun in their home. According to a Pew Research analysis of crime rates in the U.S., 17% of gun homicide victims were Hispanic, proportionate to their 16% share of the U.S. population in 2010. By contrast, blacks make up 55% of gun homicide victims, but just 13% of the U.S. population, while whites make up 25% of victims and 65% of the population (Cohn et. al., 2013).
The gun grabber thing is of a piece with hispanic culture that comes from the national backgrounds of many, where quite a few of their home countries are at least semi-socialist: they like their government to be big, not limited. We shouldn’t be surprised, since hispanics come for the dollars, not liberty.
Unfortunately for America, their anti-gun beliefs remain unfazed by living in a free nation, because they do not understand — or care — how guns are a foundational part of freedom here.
]]>It’s a loser strategy for American kids. English has a huge vocabulary and wasting time learning Spanish (a popular second language) means less time to practice their English, a language capable of great precision and expression because of its complexity and multiple linguistic roots.
One approach to dual language learning is to alternate the what is spoken every other day.
Bilingual enthusiasts have claimed for years that learning two languages makes the kiddies smarter — or at least that they score better on standardized tests. There is never a comparison with the advantage of say, studying chess strategy or computer coding. Certainly it’s always better to keep the mind active with stimulating pursuits rather than use it merely as a passive entertainment receptacle. But bilingualists never analyze whether learning a spare language really does something special to the brain that other challenging studies do not.
So you have to conclude that bilingualism remains a political project to increase diversity and decrease the social unifier of having one language in America.
]]>ARTHEL NEVILLE: Several states across the country are stepping up their schools dual language programs, this after a recent study found that students enrolled in these programs perform better than their peers on state testing. Bryan Llenas is here and he’s live in our newsroom to tell us more about these programs.
BRYAN LLENAS: What was once hundreds of kids just a year ago is now thousands learning a language other than their own. That’s what educators say about a trend in schools across the nation giving the next generation a competitive edge on the global stage before they’re even out of the sandbox. Dual language learning programs teach elementary through high school kids all the standard subjects but do so immersed in a second language. The goal: having students fluent in two languages before they don a cap and gown.
PARENT STACEY HALLMARK: In the future, in the job market, like being, that’s it’s a huge benefit, right? Opens up more doors, and I think it’s a good opportunity for them to just be exposed to other cultures and understand that there’s more than what they see in their neighborhood.
LLENAS: New York City now has 182 dual language programs in its schools, 39 new or expanded this school year, 28,000 grade schoolers in Utah and 10% of all K -12 students in Portland Oregon are enrolled. Students at Los Puentes Elementary in Manhattan change the language they speak every other day. Mondays they’ll be learning their ABCs in English, Tuesdays in Spanish, the lessons in the subjects though stay the same. Now according to a federally funded randomized study by the think tank the Rand Corporation which found students who enter immersion programs in kindergarten exceeded reading by the fifth grade and do at least as well as their peers in math and science.