Monday, June 25, 2018

Enforce Immigration Law or Change It

Mike Blake/Reuters
What’s needed is Congress
The United States maintains a policy of separating children from their parents in the case of illegal border crossings in the same sense that the United States has a policy of separating parents from their children when those parents are sent to prison for murder or tax evasion or are jailed for unpaid speeding tickets — or, for a more exact parallel, when we hold them in custody prior to trial.
For all the angst and wailing about the Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy at the southern border, there has been almost no acknowledgment of the basic facts of the case: 1) Unlike the mere act of being illegally present in the United States, which is a civil offense, crossing the border illegally is a criminal offense; 2) the president and his administration are sworn to see to the faithful execution of the laws of the United States; 3) the responsibility of the U.S. government is to the people of the United States at whose sufferance it governs, not to the world at large, in immigration law as in other matters; 4) those poor children are indeed put in a terrible situation — by their parents, directly, and indirectly by their home governments.
But, oh, how people love to denounce. Michael V. Hayden, CIA director during the George W. Bush administration, compared the arrest of illegal immigrants at the border and the subsequent separation of parents from their children to Nazi atrocities, a declaration of moral illiteracy if ever there was one. The New York Times has made a special crusade of the issue and published hilariously convoluted accounts of how the Trump administration’s decision actually to enforce the law on the books is a marked departure from the policy of the Obama administration, which, of course, it is, a rare case of truth in political advertising. Bill Clinton, who once dispatched armed men into a private home to seize a boy legally residing with family in the United States and ship him off to Fidel Castro’s gulag, has wagged his finger at the Trump administration. (He is a world-champion finger-wagger, as many of you will remember.) Mrs. Clinton, back to stand-by-your-man mode, put in her “Amen!” Dianne Feinstein and 42 of her fellow Senate Democrats are putting forward a bill that would forbid such family separations, but there are at the moment zero backers of any bill doing what the Trump administration’s critics are in effect demanding without having the gonadal capacity to say so: decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings. That’s what the slogan “No human being is illegal” means.
Read the rest from Kevin D. Williamson HERE.

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