To kick off the “Home Curfew” initiative, immigration authorities will immediately place 100-200 illegal aliens under house arrest in Houston and Baltimore with the goal of enrolling another 400,000 this year. Enrollees will generally be required to remain at home from 8 p.m. until 8 a.m., with the exception for those with work authorization or extraordinary circumstances.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) simply does not have the bandwidth to ensure that illegal aliens are complying with the program. It only has about 6,000 agents—many of whom are already assigned to different missions and responsibilities. Having every one of those agents (the best-case scenario) monitoring the whereabouts of potentially 400,000 illegal aliens is not only impossible, but downright dangerous.
The $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that will fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year was approved with bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress and then signed by President Joe Biden. With a war raging in Europe and inflation raging at home, the American public can take some reassurance in the fact that Democrats and Republicans managed to approve the spending package without even the threat of a government shutdown.
The current political environment is terrible for Democrats — and that is putting it mildly. Poll after poll shows that Americans disapprove of President Biden’s performance. On two key issues, Mr. Biden is so far underwater that he needs scuba gear. His handling of the economy has an approval rating of just 29%, with 69% disapproving. Likewise on immigration, only 37% of Americans think he is doing a good job, compared with 60% who disapprove.
Not surprisingly, polls show that the GOP has a 3.5-point advantage in the 2022 generic congressional ballot. With the border crisis raging and prices rising, and little being done to address either, it is all but certain that Republicans will take control of one or both chambers in November.
When presidential candidate Joe Biden was on the campaign trail in 2020, he touted that his immigration agenda would “direct enforcement efforts toward threats to public safety and national security, while ensuring that individuals are treated with the due process to which they are entitled and their human rights are protected.”
Ever since the U.S. economy has embarked on a post-COVID-19 recovery, Americans have been told by lobbyists for various mass-immigration vested interests that increasing immigration is the solution for growing inflation and difficulties that employers may be experiencing in finding workers. In a recent study, the Federation for American Immigration Reform challenges the lobby’s misleading, self-serving narrative, demonstrating that cheap-foreign-labor policies that put American workers last are not the answer.
Over the past 18 months, we have all witnessed the devastating harm wrought by a rogue administration that is asserting near-dictatorial powers in a relentless effort to keep our borders open. Marching in lockstep, President Biden and Democrats on Capitol Hill have created historic humanitarian, national security, public health and fiscal crises that are harming every city and state in the nation.
It’s official – the Biden administration has set a record for the most border encounters in a fiscal year. The kicker? There are still months to go for this number to go well beyond the two million illegal aliens who have already been encountered, and in many instances, released into the country.
The Biden administration has created an unprecedented border crisis affecting our entire nation. This has galvanized public opposition, creating a united front of state and local governments, former immigration officials, and public interest groups demanding that the administration stop its sabotage of border and interior immigration enforcement.
Enforcing laws has not exactly been the Democrats’ strong suit in recent years. At the federal level, the Biden administration has blatantly gutted border and immigration enforcement and is even defying court rulings ordering them to resume enforcement. At the state and local level, prosecutors have essentially nullified entire sections of criminal and civil codes by refusing to prosecute many offenders, while in some states “progressive” laws require that even violent criminals are routinely released without bail.
The chattering class and the ruling elites of deep blue cities and states are aghast that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is resorting to political publicity stunts to bring national attention to the migration crisis the Biden administration is inflicting on his state. In doing so, Abbott is giving these self-declared sanctuary jurisdictions a taste of the hardships imposed by Biden’s open borders policy and exposing their self-righteous hypocrisy. Abbott’s political theater has been so successful that Governors Doug Ducey of Arizona, Ron DeSantis of Florida, and even the Democratic mayor of El Paso have gotten into the act.