Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge

by Jeanine Pirro

  The whole system is absurd. It is falling apart from chain migration to the visa lottery to people who literally walk in illegally and are released into the population, because US Border Patrol is bound to do so by previous court decisions like the Flores Settlement. We simply need to stop the illegals, the drugs, and the sex trafficking. Why don’t we just stop everyone, period? No one has a right to come to the United States of America without our approval. Coming here is a privilege we grant to those we deem acceptable. The influx of 144,000 in one month—May 2019—is overwhelming our overcrowded hospitals and classrooms, our communities and our social services, which simply cannot sustain this continuing and increasing financial burden.

  At Nancy Pelosi’s request, the president halted for two weeks major ICE raids that were scheduled across the country to start on June 23. These well-planned and orchestrated raids would have resulted in the deportation of illegals for whom a deporation order had been issued, where no further court action was required. There are over one million people against whom there is a formal order of removal2 and another 850,000 waiting for a decision.3 The raids were even planned in sanctuary cities where there was no concern for the locals suggesting that illegals were protected. By postponing these raids, the president exercised restraint and showed he was willing to work with the Democrats in the hopes of getting Congress to do what it has been unwilling to do since 1986.

  The standoff was caused by Congress refusing to fund the Department of Health and Human Services, which is tasked with housing the children within seventy-two hours of detention of their parents or adult companions. “I can’t put a kid in a bed that doesn’t exist, and I can’t make a bed that Congress doesn’t fund,” said Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar.4

  So, this was not about the standoff over funding the border wall, ICE, or even US Border Patrol. This was the Democrats withholding funding from a completely different agency whose only job regarding immigration is to take care of the children.

  The Democrats had put themselves into such an impossible situation that Nancy Pelosi finally had to bring to a vote the $4.6 billion Senate bill appropriating $1 billion to shelter and feed migrants detained by US Border Patrol and almost $3 billion to care for unaccompanied migrant children who are turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services. The Democrats had been holding out for an alternative bill that would have put undue restrictions on how the Trump administration spent the money. God forbid it be spent on something that helps solve the immigration problem in the first place. Ocasio-Cortez, along with her pals Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib opposed this humanitarian aid, voting no on the funding bill and instead called for the abolition of ICE.

  Not only did she vote against the funding, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made the outrageous and deeply offensive statement comparing our overtaxed facilities at the border to concentration camps.5 Ed Mosberg, one of the few living Holocaust survivors, thinks she should be removed from Congress, saying, “She’s spreading anti-Semitism, hatred and stupidity. The people on the border aren’t forced to be there—they go there on their own will. If someone doesn’t know the difference, either they’re playing stupid or they just don’t care.”6

  “AOC—look at me,” said Sami Steigmann. “I am a Holocaust survivor. I went through it… What you are doing is you are insulting every victim of the Holocaust. Shame on you!”7

  This was a resounding victory for President Trump and a significant and well-deserved loss for Nancy Pelosi, who was not only forced to table her own bill due to a revolt by not only AOC and the progressives but eighteen centrist Democrats. She was left in a weakened position within her party when finally forced to move forward the Senate bill, which was eventually passed and signed by the president.

  It’s good Congress was finally able to pass a bill, but how long will this money last? And am I the only one who finds it bizarre that the Democrats are willing to spend $4.6 billion to temporarily feed and house illegal immigrants but won’t spend $5 billion for a wall that would solve the problem permanently?

  Moving illegal aliens into the interior of the country, many of them in sanctuary cities, is a problem all its own. But we can certainly help things if we stop illegal crossings in the first place. Those coming in are not being deported. They’re claiming asylum and are then released, pending return for their court hearing, generally scheduled a year or more later. Ninety percent of those who claim a need for asylum don’t bother to return to have it officially reviewed by a judge. Do you think maybe they know their asylum claim is bogus?

  These people are here to stay, especially if they come with children. And we are doing nothing more than building the next de facto amnesty class. This failure to protect our country and to burden our social services system is simply unsustainable.

  The monthly influx of illegals is bigger than most towns in America. Think that one through. They are coming in numbers every month large enough to create their own towns. It has to stop. Words don’t matter anymore. This is not time for talk, especially political hogwash.

  No more talking about 90 percent of all heroin in the United States coming in through our southern border. It’s killing our kids.

  No more talking about kids being sex-trafficked and raped during the journey toward our border.

  No more talking about transnational gangs bringing in 2,370 pounds of fentanyl through the border, enough to kill our entire country.8

  No more talking about MS-13 gang members coming across the border, torturing and murdering innocent American citizens.

  The truth is the Democrats want open borders to make sure they get more people here, on their side, to vote Democrat, so they never have to worry about getting reelected again. So that a Donald Trump can never happen again. Their revenge is so strong it’s palpable.

  Thirteen states have already legalized driver’s licenses for illegals, including my home state of New York, which joined the others just as we are going to print. And in many states, most recently California, obtaining a driver’s license automatically registers you to vote.9 That’s what I said—automatically registers you to vote. Why not give illegals pilot’s licenses, too?

  Do you get it now? Is their plot to remake America becoming clearer?

  Don’t worry about it, the lying liberals tell us. It’s still technically illegal for noncitizens, including illegal aliens, to vote. Yeah, right. Just like it’s illegal to present an unverified document to the FISA court. Who is going to stop them? The Left fights to make sure voter ID laws are burdensome and unconstitutional and many courts have agreed with them.

  The Left doesn’t want to enforce immigration laws. We know this because House Democrats told us so. House Republicans attempted to introduce a clause into HR 1, which read, “allowing illegal immigrants the right to vote devalues the franchise and diminishes the voting power of United States citizens.” All but six House Democrats voted against adding that language.10 You don’t have to be a genius to figure this one out. They fight every day, in every venue, to make sure illegals have the right to vote.

  It’s not even about party anymore. They’re all about ideology, not country. Their decisions are based upon ideology alone. They are bloated with political disregard for the American people. God help the United States of America.

  The Can Stops Here

  By May 2019, President Trump had had enough. The resist-at-all-cost Democrats and all-talk-no-action Republicans had exhausted his patience. So, he became the first president in modern history to actually do something about the crisis on our southern border. For thirty years, we’d listened to a lot of talk but seen zero action. Republican politicians raised plenty of money telling us they’d make this a priority and then kicked the can down the road once they got into office. Well, to paraphrase Harry Truman, President Trump decided the can stops here.

  Finally, we have a president who is willing to put his political future and his legacy on the line to keep his promise to secure our borders. That’s t
he difference between an outsider, owned by no one, who came to Washington to serve the public, and a politician only interested in getting reelected and serving himself.

  The president had been asking Mexico to assist in holding back the influx. Mexico talked a good game, but did nothing. On May 30, President Trump released an official White House statement telling Mexico they were out of time. He basically told them to do something about the flood of immigrants using their country as a staging ground to invade ours or pay the consequences.11

  He wrote, “As everyone knows, the United States of America has been invaded by hundreds of thousands of people coming through Mexico and entering our country illegally. This sustained influx of illegal aliens has profound consequences on every aspect of our national life—overwhelming our schools, overcrowding our hospitals, draining our welfare system, and causing untold amounts of crime.”12

  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  The president told Mexico that if it did not take drastic steps to get their horrific immigration issues under control, there would be a series of tariffs implemented on “all goods imported from Mexico,” and that these tariffs would only be lifted if “the illegal migration crisis is alleviated through effective actions taken by Mexico.”13 That night on Twitter, the president gave a hard deadline of Monday, June 10. If Mexico did not take appropriate action by that day, a 5 percent tariff would go into effect, rising an additional 5 percent for every month Mexico failed to take serious and effective action. Tariffs were scheduled to go up to 25 percent by October 1, 2019, if necessary. It was put-up-or-pay-up time for our southern neighbor.

  As usual, the so-called Resistance went into overdrive. God forbid a president do something about immigration that actually works. The New York Times fired the first shot in a fake news broadside with an article that included a long quote from one of their loony Leftist staff economists calling the president’s move “a colossal blunder.”14

  Really, New York Times? You mean like when you lined up a hundred experts who all told us that Hillary Clinton had the easiest path to the White House in decades?15 Or when you ran with the Russia collusion delusion on the front page for months, despite knowing exactly how false the entire narrative was from the beginning? Or maybe when you were forced to retract your bombshell story condemning Brett Kavanaugh, a decent man and honorable judge whose only crime was being appointed by Donald J. Trump, because you didn’t have your facts straight?16

  That kind of blunder?

  The Failing Gray Lady wasn’t alone. Within hours, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Politico had all published editorials denouncing the president’s move. Not that I believe the president ever doubted he was doing the right thing, but there is no better indicator than the fake news brigade. How many times do these people have to commit 100 percent against the president and be proven 100 percent wrong before opening their mouths?

  The fake news didn’t get it, but Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador did. Every year, Mexico relies on the money it makes from exports—a whopping 79 percent of which goes to consumers in the United States—for just over three-quarters of its GDP.17 Almost every peso they make starts out as a dollar from the wallets of hardworking Americans in cities and towns all over the United States. The tariffs President Trump put on the negotiating table would have meant a big chunk of that money drying up overnight. This was not a hit Mexico could afford to take and President Trump knew it. So did President Obrador.

  The message from President Trump to his Mexican counterpart was as clear as a shot of good tequila: either stop the flow of illegal immigrants, including those who are rapists, criminals, drug dealers, and their drugs, from coming across our borders, Señor Obrador, or we stop the flow of cash that you need to stay in office!

  That, folks, is called pressure, and no one knows how to apply it better than Donald Trump, our dealmaker in chief. He laid out the terms to Mexico in a way that was fair, even-handed, and just ruthless enough to let them know he meant business. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that if Mexico decided not to buckle down and get serious about their immigration crisis, President Trump would have let his tariffs go into effect and upped the pressure until they did. When you’ve got a man who’s sharpened his skills in the brutal world of New York City real estate going up against a career bureaucrat from some proto-communist hellhole, it’s barely a fair fight. And Mexico’s president knew it.

  Still, this move posed an enormous political risk to the president. Every day that his threat of tariffs went unaddressed by the Mexican government, another op-ed or speech came out denouncing his strategy. CNBC called it “dangerous” for the economy.18 Former New York City mayor and failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg called it “dangerous and disturbing” in Bloomberg News.19

  Some people can’t accept or admit Donald Trump’s policies are working. When will they see this president knows how to win? You don’t need a PhD in economics to know one thing for sure: when a president’s policies result in the lowest unemployment rate in the history of the United States, create over two million new jobs in three years, and send the stock market straight up while the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates, the guy deserves some room to maneuver.20 If you don’t understand what he’s doing, keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open. You just might learn something.

  No matter how many times the president’s successes prove that good advice, nobody takes it, often not even members of his own party. For days after his Mexican tariff announcement, many Republicans—even those who had worked closely with him, some as advisers—warned against implementing tariffs. Even Steve Mnuchin and Robert Lighthizer expressed dissatisfaction with it.21

  Rather than presenting a united front, skittish Republicans scattered like a bunch of frightened mice when the going got tough. Republican politicians were afraid of pushback from their constituents if President Trump had been forced to implement tariffs on Mexico. Sometimes, I think they’d be willing to welcome every convicted rapist and member of MS-13 from Central America into this country with open arms, and treat them to a free continental breakfast, rather than risk losing an election or their precious fund-raising opportunities.

  For them, illegal immigration is a talking point, something they can exploit for money and votes during the next election cycle. For President Trump, it’s about saving our country.

  Why do you think he made illegal immigration such a major point of his announcement speech in 2015? The Left wants you to believe it’s because he’s a racist who hates anyone whose skin color is different from his. But anyone who knows him knows this is a lie. You need only spend five minutes with the man to know he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.

  He told the truth about illegal immigration for the same reason he ran for president in the first place: because it was a serious threat to our country. Donald Trump watched presidents from both parties promise to get tough with Mexico and fix this calamity for decades, but no one stepped up. George H. W. Bush couldn’t get it done. The immigration rate soared on his watch.22 Clinton did nothing either; perhaps he was prescient and knew his wife would need their votes when she ran for president.

  By the time Barack Obama took office, it was as if we had stopped trying altogether. Out of one side of his mouth he promised to secure the border and allowed his administration to deport close to three million people in reportedly inhumane ways, more than any president in the history of this country.23 Out of the other, he told future illegals they had nothing to lose entering our country illegally by promoting radical legislation such as the DREAM Act, which gave amnesty to children whose parents had broken the law by entering the country illegally, without any corresponding legislation to secure the border and stop creating new DREAMers.24

  From 2014 to 2015, America saw a huge influx of young males from Central America enter our country through Mexico at Obama’s invitation, when he told them to come and apply for refugee status.25 Throu
ghout this period, members of violent street gangs and drug cartels streamed into this country. MS-13 gang members came over as unaccompanied minors and helped establish dangerous cells of that gang in our nation’s neighborhoods.26 They brought crime, drugs, and untold amounts of violence to the streets of our nation’s once-safe suburbs.

  Obama’s party benefits from illegal immigration at the polls, both from the illegals themselves voting fraudulently and their children, granted citizenship automatically, even though their parents broke the law coming here. It’s win-win for the Left.

  Until Donald Trump upped the ante with the threat of tariffs, Mexico had no respect for Washington, DC. After all the empty threats during the Bush, Obama, and previous administrations, it’s no wonder they believed Donald Trump was bluffing. But on the Friday before Trump’s deadline, with the first 5 percent tariff just three days away and the president leaving for England for a state visit with the royal family, it finally dawned on Mexico that Trump wasn’t bluffing.

  In desperation, delegates from the Mexican government traveled to Washington and started working out the terms of an agreement. Cool as a cucumber, President Trump did not cancel or even delay his state visit to Europe for these negotiations. That told Mexico he wasn’t desperate. Never let them see you sweat. As far as the president was concerned, the tariffs were fine with him.

  Guess who blinked first.

  Just before the president’s deadline, the United States and Mexico came to an agreement. The United States agreed not to impose tariffs—yet—in exchange for Mexico doing the following:

  • Send 6,000 Mexican National Guard troops up to the country’s border with Guatemala, where they would patrol for people leaving the country illegally.