Triggered

  Members of these cartels come to the United States by both illegal and legal methods, including through our seriously flawed “amnesty” and “sanctuary city” policies set up by local Democrat administrations. Not too long ago, in Huntsville, Alabama, a thirteen-year-old girl was beheaded by Sinaloa Cartel soldiers after she watched them stab to death her grandmother, a woman with ties to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel is known to hire members of the MS-13 street gang to do “wet work” for them in the United States. MS-13, you might remember, is another notorious organization of ruthless, bloodthirsty thugs who come into the United States from Central American countries such as El Salvador. Once existing mostly in Los Angeles, MS-13 has spread to other cities with high populations of illegal immigrants. Many MS-13 members came into the United States as “unaccompanied minors.” They are children who, during the Obama administration, were sent alone to the border, where the US government was legally required to take them in. According to the Obama administration, not to take those minors in and give them free food and shelter for eternity would have been a severe human rights violation.

  Since 2015, there has been a dramatic spike in the number of “unaccompanied minors” who show up at the southern border. Studies have shown that many of them are sent by relatives who have ties in the United States and want to take advantage of the system. Many are used as pawns by violent gang members who claim the child is theirs to get in. Many of the children have ended up in communities that already have very high populations of immigrants from Central America, particularly towns on Long Island such as Huntington Station and Brentwood. This means that the kids don’t have to learn English or assimilate into their new communities because there are already subcommunities there for them to join—little clubs that are often ruled by violent members of MS-13. According to multiple studies by experts in gang activity, these new unaccompanied minors are the best pool of recruits MS-13 has ever had.

  Gang members often approach new immigrants in the hallways of Long Island high schools, taking them in and promising a sense of belonging and protection. The new kids have no way of knowing the bloody history of groups such as MS-13 or the Mexican drug cartels whose dirty work they so often do inside the United States. They don’t know, for instance, that MS-13 kills women and babies, usually using machetes to do it. In Nassau County on Long Island, there is an abandoned lot near a mental hospital that has become known as “the killing fields” because of the large number of dead bodies that has been dumped there by local members of MS-13. Last year, Long Island Newsday reported that police have identified roughly five hundred members of the gang, about three hundred of whom are still active in Nassau County. In Suffolk County, which sits right to the east of Nassau, there are three hundred more. This is a criminal gang that has been allowed to infiltrate some of the safest communities in the United States because of bad immigration policies.

  If we allow this trend to continue, members of Mexican drug cartels will soon be fighting it out on the streets of this country rather than their own. What’s MS-13’s motto? “Kill, rape, control”? Its members specialize in bestial acts. They decapitate victims and tear their hearts out. They sound like wonderful people, right? Yet when my father called them animals, the left lost its mind. In response to my father, Nancy Pelosi reminded us that we are all God’s children and wondered if my father believed in “the spark of divinity.”

  Give me a f**king break.

  Today, the Congress of the United States is the last real obstacle to full border security for our country. The Democrats need to stop the nonsense of investigating nonexisting and disproven conspiracies and instead do something that will keep Americans safe and allow people to sleep safely at night, knowing that the violence in faraway places such as Mexico and El Salvador has no chance of reaching our homes. Unfortunately, the Democrat lawmakers—most of whom live in houses surrounded by lovely big gates and go to work every day in a building staffed by dozens of armed guards—don’t like talking about the American lives that illegal immigration endangers, the strain on our health care system illegal immigrants cause, or the jobs the illegals take. Instead, with their allies in the mainstream media, they reframe the discussion so that when my father talks about the emergency crisis at our southern border, he’s labeled a racist or heartless or both.

  The Democrats and their cohorts in the media are always engaged in a spin cycle that goes something like this: an illegal immigrant commits a crime, sneaks a few hundred kilos of heroin into the United States, or votes illegally. Prominent Democrats stay silent, preferring to focus on important issues such as how cow farting is harming the ozone layer. Next, a conservative points out that we might have a problem with illegal immigration, maybe after mourning the death of an innocent kid whose life was taken by MS-13. But then the liberal machine fires up, and dozens of members of Congress start yelling about how racist and evil the Republican Party is. There is no such thing as a substantive immigration debate in this country, and the Democrats have done a brilliant job ensuring that there never will be. Say what you want about them, but when it comes to vindictive politics and obstructionism, they’re good as it gets. Meanwhile, two hundred American children are dying of overdoses each day. Two hundred a day.

  The crisis has especially crippled Pennsylvania, where the overdose rate has climbed to nearly twice the national average. Whereas some places around the country have seen a slight decrease in opioid-related deaths, the rate in Montgomery Country, where the Hill School is located, has recently spiked. First the Democrats sent the residents’ jobs overseas; now they sit and do nothing as parents bury children there at unprecedented rates.

  The other thing the Democrats are good at is hypocrisy.

  In 2013, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and just about every other Democrat senator voted for a bill that included seven hundred miles of border wall. Obama agreed to sign it and said that the bill was “consistent with the key principles for commonsense reform that I—and many others—have repeatedly laid out.” Allow me to repeat what Obama called a border wall: “commonsense reform.”

  In 2016, the former president—that’s right, Obama—went on to say, “Because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders we simply cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented, and unchecked. Americans are right to demand better border security and better enforcement of the immigration laws.” And by the way, this whole hysteria about kids in cages? Well, it began under Obama. Liberals seem to have conveniently forgotten about that.

  In 2014, our old Hillary had this to say: “We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. We don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.” Weird, right? Sounds just like my dad, but when Hillary says it, no problemo!

  So what happened to the Democrats, you ask. Well, my father was elected president, and they decided they hated him more than they wanted to protect the United States. So with the help of the mainstream media, they got to work at making the wall into a racial slur. Under Obama, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported building a wall or fence at the border, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll. Now that number is below 50 percent. It dropped for one reason: a concerted effort to spread misinformation and lies by Democrat politicians and fake news.

  Nancy Pelosi calls my father’s actions on the border “barbaric,” but I don’t remember her saying anything like that about Barack Obama’s immigration policy, which included separating children from their parents, keeping the kids in tent cities, and deporting 2.5 million of them! Remember who started this crisis! Funny how no one on the left mentions that, isn’t it?

  Then there’s Democrat Dick Durbin, who called my father a racist because he used the term “chain migrations.” But then Durbin had to apologize when a video was found showing him using the same words in a speech on the Senat
e floor. When Gavin Newsom was elected governor of California last January, he vowed to make his entire state a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, even promising them state Medicaid. In Nancy Pelosi’s hometown of San Francisco, illegal immigrants are allowed to vote in local elections.

  Yet when my father proposed sending illegal detainees to sanctuary cities, Democrats cried bloody murder. Julián Castro, the ex–San Antonio mayor who’s one of the six thousand Democrats running for president, called the proposal “cruel.” So did Nancy Pelosi’s spokesperson. House committee chairs Jerrold Nadler and Elijah Cummings wanted to launch—wait for it—an investigation! You’d think they’d have run out of paper for issuing all those subpoenas by now.

  One of the most prominent Democrat hypocrites is Cher. Back in 2017, she urged all her fellow Hollywood types to open their homes to serve as minisanctuaries to protect Dreamers. But then, in April 2019, she sent a tweet saying that her city, Los Angeles, “ISN’T TAKING CARE OF ITS OWN,” adding “If My State Can’t Take Care of Its Own (Many Are VETS) How Can It Take Care of More.”

  Here’s my response:

  Donald Trump Jr.

  Amazing, simply amazing. I guess the leftists are only pro illegals when they can lay the huge burden on someone else.

  Dems want it both ways. They want to be seen as the compassionate party, welcoming illegal immigrants with open arms, but they don’t want to be the ones who have to take care of them. Well, you can’t have it both ways. Money doesn’t grow on trees.

  When you clear away all the hysteria surrounding the wall, it turns out to be part of a compassionate immigration strategy. The United States can’t solve the problems that today’s immigrants experience. Those problems have to be addressed in the immigrants’ home countries. My father is right to get tough on Mexico. It’s in countries like our neighbor to the south that the answer to the illegal immigration problem lies, not in the United States. When DJT cut off aid to a lot of those countries, even some honest leaders on the left said it was a smart move. Much of the money we’d sent to those countries had never made it to those who needed it. Instead, it had been syphoned off by dictators and crooked politicians.

  Ever since Ted Kennedy, Democrats have been wrong on immigration. Their strategies have only kept poor countries poor and overwhelmed the United States with desperate people in need of help. As a result, we have a shortage of skilled workers and far too many unskilled immigrants in need of government assistance.

  Even if you ignore the moral side of the argument—that it’s our job to be nice to the world and take care of everyone, which is ridiculous—there’s a set of dire economic circumstances here. The United States cannot afford to pay to take care of the world when we can’t even care for our own citizens. I can hardly count all the people who came up to me on the campaign trail lamenting the sad state of our VA hospital system, a system that is finally being addressed by my father. He believes that our veterans should be taken care of before even one dollar goes to helping an illegal immigrant on food stamps or paying for undocumented students to go to college.

  How can that be controversial?

  Does this mean we need to shut down all immigration? Of course not. We can continue to allow refugees into the United States to live and work if they show genuine respect and admiration for America, as my friend in the coffee shop from Ethiopia did, and strive to make our country better. There is a system in place whereby each new immigrant is given a visa that allows him or her to remain in the country for a specified period—usually one to two years, longer if he or she has a job or plans to attend college. The H-1B visa gives preference to people in foreign countries who excel in specialized fields such as medicine or engineering. This enables us to fill our cities with qualified professionals from other countries, some of whom may bring outside expertise or a different point of view. In the last few decades, this visa has allowed doctors and surgeons from all over the world to come in and provide much-needed relief to US cities whose health care systems are on the verge of breaking under the weight of our swelling illegal immigrant population.

  This visa system has been especially helpful in towns such as Brownsville, Texas, just a few miles north of the Mexican border. In Brownsville, people are twice as likely to have diseases as the average American, and nearly all the doctors and nurses who treat them are here on visas. To the hysterical left, these “best and brightest” visas are racist and exclusionary; to the Trump administration, they are a model around which we should design the rest of our immigration system. My father recently introduced an idea to overhaul our immigration policy using a merit-based system instead of the chain migration system that is now in place. The reaction by the left, and even by some on the right, was as if he wanted to put machine-gun turrets on the border.

  I have five children. As they grow up, the people a merit-based system would draw would be their direct competition. Theoretically, I should think of this as a negative. But it really isn’t. Competition is good, and it forces parents and students to make wise choices, such as not going $300,000 into debt for a PhD in underwater basket weaving. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a wasted education, but if you can’t pay off your debt with the job that education trains you for, I’m not sure what else to call it.

  Even with careful vetting and a lengthy application process, it is far too easy for bad actors to squeak past our visa safeguards without setting off any alarms. Terrorists such as ISIS members can exploit these lax borders. This is why, in a perfect world, the US government would be able to keep track of each and every visa it issues—and, more important, the people who hold those visas—using the best technology available. Unfortunately, the technology in use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today is about as up to date as Nintendo. I know, having worked on a mostly privately funded national campaign, how easy it is to get your hands on technology that keeps incredibly detailed information on people. In presidential politics, this is the name of the game. If our federal government had even a small percentage of the technological capability of the average private sector corporation or political campaign, finding potential terrorists in a pool of 1 million visa applicants would be easier than locating Elizabeth Warren on an Indian reservation. Instances of Islamic terrorism on US soil—which have already declined sharply since Democrats lost control of the White House—would almost certainly fall further, and we would free up space for more bright, competent immigrants to obtain visas.

  But our government doesn’t have access to that kind of system—not even close.

  When ICE wants to check on the status of a foreigner staying in the United States, it has about twenty-seven different databases to comb through, all of which are supported by ancient computer systems and run by people who have no idea how to use them. As a result, more than 700,000 people who are granted temporary visas for work, study, or asylum disappear into the system every year, moving away from their last known addresses and effectively dropping off the federal government’s radar.

  So when ICE wants to look for a visa holder who’s gone dark, it’s faced with the choice of either searching through dozens of old databases, interviewing sources, and combing neighborhoods looking for one person or just giving up in the hope that nothing terrible will happen. This is all made much worse by the fact that to the hysterical Democrats in Congress, ICE might as well be the Gestapo. When DJT was elected and promised to give more funding to ICE so it would be able to carry out its duties effectively, protests broke out in the streets, mostly in communities that aren’t affected by the scourge of illegal immigration. Three of the Democrat presidential hopefuls want to either abolish or gut ICE. “We should probably think about starting from scratch,” Democrat senator Kamala Harris said. Elizabeth Warren wants to shut the agency down altogether.

  The good news is that the American people are awake to what’s happening with immigration. Democrat rhetoric and fake news might be able to fool some people for a while, but it can’t do so foreve
r. Just as in the real estate business in Manhattan, the market always figures it out. The American people know there’s a problem at the border. They know that everyone who’s coming over isn’t a good actor. They know it’s not the American dream that many of today’s immigrants seek but the easy American dollar. And that, as my Ethiopian friend said, makes it harder for those who come here legally. But the American people see through all the lies of the left.

  The market always knows.

  7.

  NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER’S DEMOCRAT PARTY

  I’VE LEARNED A THING OR TWO about politics over the past few years. For instance: never trust the polls; don’t believe what you read in the newspaper; and never, ever underestimate the people in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Ohio (hear that, Hillary?). Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned, however, is that there’s no substitute for getting out on the road and shaking hands with real people, not just the paid seat-fillers and people who show up for the free coffee and donuts. You can learn more from one hour in a parking lot outside a campaign event or while filling up at a local gas station than you can in a hundred strategy meetings at campaign headquarters. From our first moment on the campaign, my brother Eric and I have always had a rule that we won’t leave a room until we’ve shaken every hand extended to us. The same is true of taking pictures, signing hats, and hearing stories. Our motto is that if there is anyone left in the room, we’re still in the room. My father got that from his very first seconds on the campaign stage. He used to poll people by listening to their applause, and he’d know what policies were working based on how loud they cheered. He didn’t need a team of data scientists to know the people were behind him.