A Mess of the Administration's Making

By James R. Edwards, Jr. on June 25, 2014

The tidal wave of illegal alien young people that's buffeting our southern border seems to be nothing other than a "crisis" of the Obama administration's own making. What would you expect to happen, given the clear pro-amnesty signals and unilateral disarmament perpetrated by this administration for more than five years?

Obama has gutted the 287(g) program that leverages state and local police in catching and holding accountable illegal and criminal aliens throughout the country. His administration has sued states exercising their own inherent authority. He has restored catch-and-release, refusing to hold illegals in mandatory detention. He has put in place the DACA administrative amnesty that essentially legalizes many thousands of illegals who supposedly entered the country as minors. He has threatened further administrative lawbreaking to issue even more amnesties if Congress doesn't enact one through the lawmaking process. Obama even honored immigration lawbreakers at their very own White House ceremony!

Now, the latest Obama self-inflicted scandal response amounts to the very opposite of Teddy Roosevelt's policy. Rather, Obama has adopted a "speak softly (meekly? wimpily?) and carry a big wallet" approach. The administration has announced that it will hand $170 million to the home countries of many of the surging illegals — Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala — to deal with what the administration has claimed are the root causes of the flow. Think the soft-on-crime, feel-good, meaningless money pits like midnight basketball and rap sessions for seasoned young criminals that then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), then-Rep. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and the Clinton administration stuffed the ludicrous 1994 crime bill with.

Instead of deploying the U.S. military to the border to stop the waves of illegals from crossing into America in the first place, reinstating expedited removal to get illegal border crossers out of our country within 72 hours, actually following the law with mandatory detention, and penalizing the aiders and abettors (the source countries' governments and Mexico, through which the illegals are allowed to transit) by cutting off all their visas until they have stopped the flow from their side of the border and accepted the return of every single one of their illegal alien nationals, Obama is handing out "run letters" — "Notice to Appear" summonses to immigration court which the recipient illegals use to game the system and stay on this side of the border. The illegal aliens refer to them as "permisos" or permits. Obama is willing to send 400 American soldiers to Iraq, but won't send American soldiers to our own border.

The reason the Obama administration is making even a sleight-of-hand show of some worthless enforcement steps is that its spin on this crisis has dissolved. The whole "humanitarian" or "refugee crisis" line doesn't hold water and nobody with a brain believes that sham assertion. Until the administration gets serious and declares an immigration emergency under Section 404(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act and treats this crisis like the wholesale criminality it is, nobody should be fooled that Obama wants anything other than mass amnesty.