illegal immigration
Kamala Harris, Immigration Extremist
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/07/tvrd-cis-kamala-harris-image-2024-07-24.jpg)
From The Center for Immigration Studies
By Todd Bensman
AUSTIN, Texas — During the violent social justice upheavals of 2019-2020, Democratic primary candidate for President Sen. Kamala Harris told America exactly where she stood on illegal border immigration, no matter how she might spin it now that she is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president.
American voters should not forget the politically extreme positions she staked just a few years ago, as thousands of “Occupy ICE” hooligans were disrupting detention and deportation operations. “Abolish ICE” was the street chant as arson fires burned major cities and an AR-15-armed Antifa terrorist named Willem van Spronsen died in a fiery July 2019 attack on a Washington State ICE detention facility.
What American voters should remember about this period, now that they regard the border crisis as a top 2024 campaign issue, is that Harris went all-in with the most extreme agenda on border security in American history and has neither said nor acted once in any way contrary to those early positions, other than to tone down rhetoric while serving as vice president.
Taking Up the Extremist Cudgel
Just one week after ICE agents killed van Spronsen and found his manifesto demanding an end to corporate profiteering from private detention centers and their human suffering, Sen. Harris all but rewarded the attack with a tweet that mainstreamed the terrorist demand:
During a June 2019 televised primary debate, she reiterated that “I will get rid of the private detention centers.”
Harris was always at the forefront of Democratic primary contenders adopting the extreme immigration policy demands of a violent progressive movement high on the smoke of anti-police BLM arson, antifa attacks on Trump supporters, and Occupy ICE campfires. Indeed, Harris began messaging as her own the most fringe ideas about immigration and the border ever heard on the main American public square.
Abolish ICE. End all deportation and detention. Extend U.S. asylum access to all comers so they can stay and disappear. Grant citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants. Free healthcare to all. Stop the wall.
The van Spronsens of a border security abolitionist movement burgeoning among progressives at the time were pushing an extreme agenda driven by an ideology unchained from the Democratic Party basement to dismantle immigration enforcement as cruel and inhumane, a violation of human rights like Jim Crow laws and slavery.
They demanded the dismantling of ICE “concentration camps” full of detained latter-day Jews who this time were illegal-immigrant brown people, an end to deportation “death flights” home, the dismantling of ICE’s Nazi jack-booted brown shirts, abolition of laws deterring illegal immigration, and a southern border opened wide to anyone in the world who might feel like crossing it as an inalienable civil right.
Yes on “Abolish ICE” — and Immigration Law Enforcement with It
Harris went full throttle with the narrative that ICE agents she may one day lead were indeed the racist thugs everyone was saying they were.
“Certain communities saw ICE as comparable to the Ku Klux Klan for administering its power in a way that is causing fear and intimidation, particularly among immigrants and specifically among immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America,” Harris accused during a Senate confirmation hearing of Trump’s nominee to lead ICE, Ronald Vitiello.
Then-Sen. Harris responded on MSNBC in 2019 to a question about abolishing ICE that the United States should “probably think about starting from scratch” on enforcing immigration laws, while a spokesperson for Harris said the senator was weighing “a complete overhaul of the agency, mission, culture, operations”.
None of this could be said to be opportunistic at the time, either. In 2015, while serving as California’s Attorney General, Harris told the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles that “An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal. I know what a criminal looks like who’s committing a crime. An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.”
In fact, illegally crossing the southern border is a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison for a first offense and a felony on subsequent violations.
She was one of the candidates who raised a hand at another debate when asked if she supported decriminalizing illegal crossings and when asked if she would give free healthcare to illegal immigrants.
In a 2019 interview with National Public Radio, candidate Harris expressed a willingness as president to declare all illegal border-crossers refugees based on unconfirmable claims of political violence, even if that meant ignoring the law, despite well-known reporting that many let in on such claims disappear into the nation’s illegal immigrant population:
I disagree with any policy that would turn America’s back on people who are fleeing harm. I frankly believe that it is contrary to everything that we have symbolically and actually said we stand for. And so, I would not enforce a law that would reject people and turn them away without giving them a fair and due process to determine if we should give them asylum and refuge. (Emphasis added.)
Harris’ presidential campaign website took a page from Antifa and Black Lives Matter ideology handbooks about dismantling detention and deportation infrastructure, declaring her belief that “[W]e must fundamentally overhaul our immigration enforcement policies and practices — they are cruel and out of control.” She promised to “increase oversight” of agencies like the U.S. Border Patrol were she to be elected.
Expect claims from Harris supporters that, well, this was a primary campaign intended to appeal to the party base and she didn’t really mean any of it.
That’s not believable if Wall Street Journal reporting this week is accurate. People who have worked with Harris over the years told the Journal she only takes up a policy idea after “detailed deliberations … and has been reluctant to always endorse immediate, sweeping policy changes” before achieving full understanding.
“She really wants to understand what the data and evidence is to support a potential course of action,” Jill Habig, who worked for Harris in different roles over the years, is quoted saying. “She really wants to understand not just the idea in theory, but how it’s actually going to work in practice.”
Toning Down in High Office in Favor of Denialism and Gaslighting
Harris went on the down-low about her policy views after becoming vice president, but repeatedly denied a mass migration crisis was underway at the southern border, refusing to visit there, and, when she finally did under pressure, staying indoors in controlled environments with the television cameras.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sent some illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard to make a political point in September 2022, Harris was quoted insisting the administration’s policies had “closed” the border when, in fact, hundreds of thousands had just crossed.
Local TV quoted one of the Martha’s Vineyard immigrants refuting the vice president’s absurd claim. “It’s open, not closed. The border is open,” the gentleman responded in English when asked about Harris’ claim that it was closed. “Everybody believes the border is open. It’s open because … we entered! We come in. Free. No problem.”
As vice president, Harris has regularly blamed “root causes” and “climate change” for the vast influx that began right after she and Biden took office and implemented an extreme vision straight from the burning streets of blue cities. Immigration was all so very “complex”, Harris explained during a state visit to Central America to get the strategy up and running.
During an April 2021 roundtable discussion Harris said:
We are looking at extensive storm damage because of extreme climate. We’re looking at drought in an area in a region where agriculture is one of the most traditionally important bases for their economy. We’re looking at what’s happening in terms of food scarcity as a result of that and in fact, incredible food insecurity, which we used to call hunger, food insecurity.
Whatever the Democratic Party nominee might float about her plans for border security over the next four months, Americans concerned about what she and Biden have done at the border should know that, in her case, past definitely is prologue.
Crime
Venezuelan Migrant Says She’d ‘Return’ To Country After Living In Housing Taken Over By Venezuelan Gang
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/tvrd-dc-venezuelan-gangs-take-over-appartments-denver-image-2024-09-07.jpg)
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Hailey Gomez
A Venezuelan immigrant living in migrant housing in Aurora, Colorado, appeared to fight back tears while speaking to independent reporter Nick Shirley, saying she would return to her country after living in the U.S.
This week, the city of Aurora faced major pushback from Republicans after footage surfaced online of armed men inside an apartment complex in late August. Shirley was seen visiting various migrant housing units before stopping at the viral location to interview residents where the armed men had been spotted.
Shirley spoke with a Venezuelan woman who showed him the poor living conditions her family endures, stating she pays $1,200 per month for the apartment. The migrant stated that the electricity and hot water in her apartment weren’t working, telling Shirley that the landlord hadn’t accepted any payment for the “past couple of months.”
“Does your father still have to pay rent?” Shirley asked as they walked around her father’s apartment.
“The owner is no longer receiving any kind of payment, because he is also taking all this, that the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all of this to get us out as if we were dogs and it’s not fair,” the migrant stated, according to a translation.
Shirley asked if gangs had been charging people, to which the migrant replied, “no.” The independent reporter then asked if her life in the U.S. was what she expected after crossing the border.
WATCH:
“No, never. I would have stayed in my country. They say that here everything is different, the laws, everyone gets a good job, you get ahead, you can save money to take back to your country,” the migrant stated. “But not everything is as they say, the American dream is simply just a dream. When you get here you wake up, it’s not like they say.”
Shirley then pressed the migrant, asking in Spanish if she would take a “flight or opportunity to go back” to her home country.
“With all the love in the world I would return to my country,” the migrant said.
Republican lawmakers on Friday sent a letter criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s “open border policies” and local “sanctuary” policies over the reported presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which allegedly terrorized several apartment buildings in Aurora.
Reportedly beginning as a prison gang in 2014 within the northern Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua has grown into one of Venezuela’s largest criminal organizations. With around 5,000 members and stretching internationally across Latin America and the U.S., the gang has allegedly been connected to several high-profile crimes within the U.S., including the kidnapping and strangling of a Florida man last year.
This week, the Aurora Police Department announced the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua gang members, Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, following a July 28 shooting that left two men hospitalized with serious injuries.
Daily Caller
‘Clearly Flawed’: Immigration Hawks Decry Biden-Harris Admin’s Decision To Quickly Resume Mass Parole Program
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From the Daily Caller News Foundation
The Biden-Harris administration has decided to resume a mass parole program that was sidelined due to the discovery of widespread fraud, but immigration hardliners say the vetting process remains critically flawed.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is resuming an immigration program that allows foreign nationals to apply for asylum in their home countries and fly into the U.S. at various airports upon approval, known as the CHNV program, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela into the country, a spokesman confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. However, border hawks are cautioning that the program has not sufficiently updated its vetting procedures since it was placed on pause last month after the discovery of rampant fraud.
“My Committee has engaged with the department since this pause was announced, and the results were sobering,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said in a Thursday statement following news of the program’s restart. “Instead of scrapping the clearly flawed program, the department is allowing it to continue without rooting out the fraud or putting adequate safeguards in place to prevent exploitation by sponsors here in the United States.”
Originally launched for Venezuelans in October 2022, the CHNV program was later expanded in January 2023 to include Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians. The parole initiative gives foreign nationals two-year authorization into the U.S. and work permits, provided they have not previously entered the country illegally and pass other vetting processes.
Green referred to the CHNV program as a “massive shell game” that allows 30,000 otherwise inadmissible foreign nationals to simply enter the country every month in lieu of crossing the border unlawfully.
At the beginning of August, DHS confirmed that they placed the program on hold following an internal audit. That report — first publicized by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) — identified a litany of red flags, such as 100,948 CHNV forms being completed by just 3,218 sponsors, 24 of the 1,000 most used Social Security numbers by sponsors belonging to a deceased person and an IP address located in Tijuana, Mexico, being used more than 1,300 times.
Matt O’Brien, investigation director at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), told the DCNF that the CHNV program is inherently susceptible to fraud due to the inherent reliance on sponsors and foreign governments.
“The supposed improvements made by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) simply can’t lead to better vetting,” O’Brien said to the DCNF. “The entire structure of the program encourages fraud because it relies on a ‘sponsor’ relationship that is impossible to verify and imposes no enforceable obligations on sponsor or beneficiary.”
“Second, and perhaps more importantly, one cannot vet Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans or Nicaraguans,” O’Brien continued. “None of these countries have reliable, functioning records systems. And none of them share information with the U.S.”
The program has so far paroled roughly half a million foreign nationals into the U.S. since it launched in January 2023, according to Customs and Border Protection. There are more than 1.6 million other foreign nationals awaiting travel authorization into the country through the CHNV program.
CHNV is being relaunched with bolstered procedures meant to address the issues that initially halted the program, such as manually vetting sponsors in smaller numbers. Sponsors suspected of engaging in fraud in the program will continue to be referred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for investigation.
However, the House Homeland Security Committee says DHS hasn’t explained what’s improved in the program now that is back up and running.
“DHS resumed issuing travel authorizations but has not provided the Committee with any additional information on how they intend on preventing fraud,” a House Homeland Committee spokesperson stated to the DCNF.
The spokesperson also noted that DHS has not satisfied the committee’s document requests for information following the allegations of mass fraud.
FAIR also noted that the program is better off being abolished.
“DHS announced it has already restarted CHNV, while offering only very vague assurances that they’ve fixed the problems,” FAIR President Dan Stein said in a statement, noting that DHS has not explained how they plan to vet each sponsor. “The American public has every reason to be very skeptical.”
“There is only one way to address the myriad problems with the Biden-Harris CHNV program,” Stein continued. “As House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted earlier this month when FAIR exposed the rampant fraud: ‘Shut it down permanently.’”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
Featured Image: Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz
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