Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations

UN is Whining About Immigration Crimes, So Blame Obama

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The United Nations published a dispatch on the sexual crimes of illegal immigrants while in detention. So….rather than whine about Donald Trump, hey UN, go knock on the doors of the White House and that of Jeh Johnson’s office.

At least Donald Trump deserves real praise for raising the verbal flags on the issue of immigration.

Sheesh, get a load of this.

Violence Against Women is the Dark Underbelly of The USA’s Migrant Detention System

Donald Trump is fond of ascribing violence in American cities to immigrants. He has even gone so far as to propose a Constitutional amendment that would erase the bedrock law of giving citizenship to any baby born on American shores.

But what about violence inflicted on migrants once they crossed the border?  The fact is,  many who come to the USA fleeing violence–particularly women–are subject to abuse upon arrival.

Central American women, detained in Texas last year, alleged sexual abuse in detention. Many were asylum-seekers. Some had suffered sexual violence back home. But the nightmare was not over. Guards took them from their cells for sex, women said. They groped mothers in front of their children. Playing on detainees’ desperation, guards told women they would help them once released – but in exchange for sex.

The horror stories hardly stop there. Transgendered women especially are at risk. Despite identifying as female, they are often placed in all-male units. Nicoll Hernández-Polanco, one transgendered woman detained in Arizona, fled Guatemala seeking asylum from persecution based on gender identity. In six months in all-male detention, she alleged that male guards constantly groped and insulted her. Another male detainee sexually assaulted her. When she protested these conditions, she was put in solitary confinement, she said.

These are only a few of many more sexual abuse allegations. The Government Accountability Officeinvestigated over 200 such complaints filed from 2009 to 2013. Yet even this number is an underestimate. Detainees often avoid reporting incidents, fearing retaliation or re-traumatization.

The sexual abuse of migrants in detention centers is the dirty underbelly of the USA’s migrant detention system. It’s a problem that has been known to authorities for years, yet there has not been sufficient effort to clamp down on these kinds of criminal activities that prey on deeply vulnerable women.

So what can be done to stop the abuse?

For starters, freeing certain detainees would probably help. Last month, a federal judge ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release mothers and children detained together. (The Texas women who alleged sexual abuse had been in such a family-detention center.) While a welcome change, this one step is far from a solution. Thousands of women are still detained. They are still potential victims of abuse.

There are broader, systemwide changes that might also push the needle in the right direction.

For one, the DHS does not follow guidelines set by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). These rules include more checks, training, and restrictions on guards. A first step is to improve compliance with PREA. Yet even that would only go so far. Detainees, like prisoners, are inherently vulnerable to abuse.

Also, many detainees are simply waiting to go to court. They have been convicted of no crime and pose no security threat. Detention is a drastic method just to ensure court attendance. Detainees might stay locked up for months. Each day they spend in detention, they remain at risk of abuse.

Finally, alternatives to detention already exist in many countries. In the USA, effective methods include social services and legal representation. Asylum-seekers are very likely to pursue their cases, even with no supervision.  With a better chance in court, people are more likely to show up for hearings. They need not be locked up beforehand.

Changes will be slow. The detention system is entrenched. To comply with Congressional budget directives, DHS must detain at least 34,000 people a day. Politicians must change this mandate to make detention reform possible.

The United Nations can play a role. It has already urged US compliance with PREA in detention centers. It can make more Americans aware of the abuses in detention centers and the alternatives to detention. Many voters know little about immigration detention, which happens in remote sites.  Alternatives to detention may be hard to imagine. The UN can help US advocates see how other countries have successfully used alternatives. With this knowledge, advocates can press for reforms to detention.

No immigration system should allow abuses in detention. Women fleeing violence must not suffer again. Asylum-seekers to the US must truly find refuge there.

*** Hold on…while this is a self inflicted wound at the hands of the Obama doctrine on immigration and while Jeh Johnson is his corrupt soldier…there is more they are hiding and with purpose.

STONEWALLED: Feds Hide Fiscal Details About Vast Operation To Resettle Illegal Alien Minors

Illegal aliens who show up at the border have been resettled all across United States of America instead of being detained and deported, as Donald Trump recently called for in his new immigration plan.

Breitbart: According to data from the Justice Department obtained by Breitbart News, 96 percent of Central Americans caught illegally crossing into the country last summer are still in the United States. Now Breitbart News has learned exclusively that a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from a pro-security group about the cost of this operation is being stonewalled.

In January of 2015, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, on behalf of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), filed a FOIA request to discover the cost of accommodating the tens of thousands of illegal unaccompanied minors who came across the border encouraged by President Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty for illegal youths.

The FOIA letter made five requests of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency: that the federal agency detail (1) the costs of building of family detention centers; (2) the costs of apprehending, processing and detaining unaccompanied minors; (3) the costs transporting, transferring, removing and repatriating unaccompanied minors; (4) the costs related to ICE’s representation of government in removal procedures involving unaccompanied minors; and (5) the number of instances where objections to the return of unaccompanied minors were raised by the governments of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

The federal agency, however, refused to answer many of these questions– instead only partially answering two of the five requests. The agency provided only the costs of transporting, transferring and removing illegal minors, as well as the costs of the man-hours such tasks required. Those costs totaled $58.2 million—quadrupling ICE’s costs of $15.6 million in the year previous.

FAIR told Breitbart News that the agency did not provide clear documentation nor explanation as to how it arrived at this estimation.

FAIR asserts that, “The failure to provide most of the cost information related to the surge of [unaccompanied minors] indicates that the government has either failed to properly document those costs, or is refusing to reveal them.”

Because this FOIA request only inquired into the fiscal impact on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency– it does not at all take into account the cost incurred by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) nor the public education system. Because most of the unaccompanied minors were turned over to HHS following their apprehension, FAIR notes that HHS’ costs “for providing shelter, food, education, health care and other services, likely vastly exceed additional costs incurred by ICE.”

The flood of minors has also placed fiscal strains on our public education system. FAIR notes that, “68,541 [unaccompanied minors] were apprehended entering the U.S. Virtually all of them have been allowed to remain in the U.S., at least temporarily.”

Because federal law dictates that all children are entitled to an education regardless of their immigration status, the fiscal burden of educating these students has fallen onto our public education system.

As FAIR notes, educating 68,541 illegal immigrant children at “an average annual cost of $12,401 per child enrolled in K-12 education, the annual cost to local schools is at least $850 million. However, since virtually all of the [unaccompanied minors] are non-English proficient, the actual costs are likely substantially greater.”

The increased costs and difficulties associated with educating illegal minors from poor and developing countries has been well-documented. As Fox News Latino reported in June of this year, the border surge has left many “schools struggling with influx of unaccompanied minors.” While the federal government’s policy of releasing illegal minors into American communities imposes burdens all across our nation’s education system, it will perhaps hurt minority American students most profoundly, by straining the educational resources needed in their communities.

For instance, New York’s Hempstead School District, which is a 96 percent black and Hispanic district, had about 6,700 students dispersed amongst its 10 schools and usually receives an average of a couple hundred new students every year. “However, last summer’s enrollment skyrocketed to about 1,500 new kids – most of them undocumented immigrants.” Fox News Latino writes, “The crush of new enrollees left the district scrambling, forcing it to dip into its emergency reserves to shell out more than $6 million to hire more English as a Second Language teachers and additional staff to alleviate overcrowded classrooms. Still, it has not been enough. The average classroom in the district now has about 40 to 50 children and [as one teacher explained is] posing a safety issue… ‘You have to understand,’ [one teacher said], ‘many of the children are not even proficient in their native language, Spanish, and now we have to teach them how to speak English. That can be very difficult.’”

Deporting instead of resettling illegal immigrants would save taxpayer dollars in two ways.

First, by deterring future border crossings, it would reduce the amount of illegal immigration in the future. As FAIR explains, refusing to implement immigration law has only encouraged more illegal immigrants to unlawfully enter the United States: “In July 2015, the Government Accountability Office confirmed that President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA] program played a substantial role in triggering the surge of [unaccompanied minors] in 2014.”

Second, deporting rather than resettling illegal immigrants would save the costs of feeding, clothing, housing, educating, hospitalizing, and caring for illegal immigrants and their relatives. A previous study conducted by FAIR documented that illegal immigrants cost U.S. taxpayers about $113 billion every year. After FAIR explains that by comparison, “The estimated cost of deporting an illegal alien is $8,318. Using just the partial enumerated $58.2 million costs to ICE and the conservative $850 million estimate for education of [unaccompanied minors] resettled in the U.S., the amount of taxpayer money spent on dealing with unaccompanied minors would have paid for the removal of an additional 109,000 illegal aliens.”

Defund UNRWA and Terminate it Over Fraud

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The Best Way to Fix UNRWA’s Budget Crisis

Algemeiner: Out of UNRWA’s $100 million deficit that threatens to delay the school year, $28 million comes from Jordan.

That covers the costs for 120,000 students in 175 schools taught by 5,500 teachers throughout Jordan for four months.

This means that the annual budget for educating Jordan’s students of Palestinian origin is $70 million.

Nearly every one of these students is already a Jordanian citizen.

Jordan says that it cannot afford to educate these students, relying instead on UNRWA, even though this means that the kingdom has two separate school systems with two separate bureaucracies, two separate transportation systems, two separate administrations.

So why not just redirect the money earmarked for UNRWA to Jordanian schools directly?

Western nations should be happy to get rid of Jordanian apartheid where Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens. They can and should be mainstreamed into Jordanian society, something that should have happened decades ago.

By no definition can they be considered “refugees.” So why continue to treat them that way?

A five or seven year program to fund Jordan’s existing education (and medical) system to accommodate Palestinians, and phase out the current apartheid system for to million so-called “refugees,” is something that everyone who cares about equal rights should support.

And Canada could be in the forefront to kickstart such a program.

In 2007, Canada gave $32 million to UNRWA. As it soon realized that UNRWA is not aligned with Canadian values, the nation dropped its support to zero, redirecting some of it to various specific PA projects.

UNRWA is at a crossroads. It cannot continue to fund fund its ever-growing “refugee” population without a plan to reduce the number of people on its rolls, as it was originally intended to do. There is no rational reason for Jordanian citizens who happen to have Palestinian ancestry to be considered “refugees.” The only reason UNRWA exists in Jordan is as a crutch to help Jordan’s budget (besides the political reason of inflating the number of “refugees” to pressure Israel forever.)

It is past time to force UNRWA to change its working definition of “refugee” to be more aligned with that of the UNHCR and to phase out aid to the fake “refugees’ who are citizens of Jordan. This budget crisis gives the world a chance to do exactly that, by using limited aid funds smartly and at the same time to eliminate two million “refugees.”

The same can be done in the West Bank and Gaza, two other places that Palestinians cannot possibly be called “refugees” by any sane definition. Since most countries recognize “Palestine” as a state, pay the PA to take responsibility for their own people – with a deadline.

The money saved can help the stateless Arabs of Palestinian origin wasting away in Lebanon and Syria, where UNRWA aid is most urgently needed until a more permanent solution is found.

Enlightened nations like Canada and Australia and the U.S. would also be happy to replace the current UNRWA dinosaur with a real plan to reduce its budget while directing funds at those who need them most.

Now is the chance to accomplish something useful before UNRWA implodes and its current welfare recipients are left with nothing but anger.

Deeper Dive on UNRWA

The U.S. Senate received lately a precedent decision regarding refugees UNRWA and the Palestinian Arabs. To understand the change one should have mentioned that UNRWA’s beginning was appropriate.  A UN relief organization for the British Mandate Arabs, most of whom fled and some were deported, due to Arab aggression seeking to destroy Israel just as it has been established. But the treatment of refugees changed direction, and instead of a caretaker, UNRWA became a reproduction, exacerbation and perpetuation plant of tremendous size.

There are two UN bodies dealing with refugees. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that handles all the world’s refugees, and UNRWA, which deals only with the ones that became the Palestinian Arabs (at first they did not know that they are so. They were Arabs. Separate identity developed later). The Commissioner dealt with fifty million people. They won the first aid, and they are no longer refugees. UNRWA, however, started the way with 711 thousand, and miraculously has made them into more than five million. The Commissioner rehabilitates refugees. UNRWA fosters, multiplies and perpetuates the refugee problem.

This paradox is known to anyone who has eyes in his head. It comes from many reasons. One is the strange definition of UNRWA refugee: “They were in the territory of Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948 and lost both their homes and livelihoods as a result of the Arab – Israeli conflict.” But over time their descendants also came into the frame, and strangely enough, and contrary to the definition, also those who were not needed in the first place, and even those who became wealthy later – were still considered a refugee. Thus the number of “refugees” is rising over the years in somewhat vertiginous and strange manner.

Against this background, in recent months MK Dr. Einat Wilf worked, in cooperation with AIPAC, to influence the primary source of funding for UNRWA – the United States. The result is the “Kirk Amendment,” named after the Republican senator Mark Kirk. His amendment would require the State Department to report what is the actual number of original refugees, answering to the definition that appears in the original mandate of UNRWA. It is estimated at only 30,000.

There is something sophisticated in Kirk’s amendment, because the Amendment does not demand a cut in aid or a change in the criteria. These are reporting requirements only – A report on the number of original refugees, and a report on the number of descendants. But reports on the amendment made it clear that this entails a first step towards a more fundamental change. As following the report the question will rise – why should taxpayers pay for those who are not really refugees?

In fact, these questions have been popping up. U.S. Undersecretary of State, Thomas Nides, sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, which is urging them to vote against the amendment. He claims that the issue is particularly sensitive, the U.S. should not intervene in determining the number of refugees, and that this matter should be resolved in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Embassy of Jordan in Washington has put pressure against the adoption of the amendment, and Nides notes in his letter that the amendment might create “a negative reaction, especially in Jordan.”

Nides’s request was denied. The amendment passed. Meanwhile there are no strong blast waves. And it’s a shame. It’s time to blow up the bloated balloon, of ever-swelling Palestinian refugees numbers. On the day the Palestinian “refugees” will be treated similarly to the tens of millions of other refugees in the world – will be the day when the situation will begin to improve, along with prospects for peace. Because the “refugee problem,” as the Arab side stated over and over again, “is perpetuated in order to achieve the solution of the elimination of Israel.”

The treatment so far of the problem of refugees has become the biggest obstacle to peace. It’s time for a change. The U.S. Senate took a preliminary step, limited and uncertain – A step in the right direction. Hopefully, the next steps will follow.

International norms

And more points to the attention of the Congress: By official count of UNRWA, the number of refugees in Lebanon reached early last year to 425,000. However, according to a study published by the American University of Beirut, which UNRWA itself has helped finance; it is only 260 to 280 thousands. They are immigrating and fleeing from Arab countries, because they suffer from severe apartheid in the Arab world (also according to the report). So there is no connection between the number registered and funded and the number of those still there. So the United States, which is the primary contributor, should pose the obvious question: where exactly does the money go, when there is a 57% exaggeration in the number of refugees?

And yet another fraud: under the UN Refugee Convention, Article 1 (A) 2, those who received citizenship in any country, cannot be considered a refugee. And here, according to UNRWA’s official publication, Jordan has more than two million refugees, the vast majority of whom have Jordanian nationality. So you can decrease two millions in Jordan, and another 150 thousand in Lebanon and Syria is likely in a similar situation. There the number is also an inflated. Recommendation to this effect is also found in the report filed by James Lindsey. For seven years, Lindsey served as a senior UNRWA official. After his retirement, he was a research fellow in the “Washington Institute”, where he published a comprehensive study with deep reform proposals.

And the parade goes on. UNRWA has a staff of more than 29,000 people, only two hundred of whom are not Palestinians – a great mechanism that also deals with incitement through the education system held by the organization. This is the largest agency of the United Nations. Just for comparison, UNHCR, the Commission that handles all other refugees of the world, holds a much smaller team of 7,685 employees, and handles 34 million refugees.

UNRWA – has one employee per 172 patients. In UNHCR – one employee per 4,424 patients.

UNRWA per capita budget is also more than double than the UNHCR. Considering that many of those listed are already citizens of other countries, or that the lists are inflated, as in Lebanon, then it means that a Palestinian Arab “refugee” costs the international community, particularly the U.S., far more than any other refugee in the world.

The chain of absurdities and frauds must be stopped. Uniformity in definitions and norms is necessary. The anti-Israel side argues again and again that Israel should abide by international norms – Great and just demand. This is exactly what should happen, even with the refugees – the same definitions for “who is a refugee”, and the same treatment of rescuing the really needing rather than perpetuating them as “refugees.” This will be the greatest contribution of the international community to promote peace. Senator Kirk began. Hopefully he will continue.

Ben-Dror Yemini is a journalist, a researcher and a lecturer

 

 

The Argument for Terminating Passport/Visa Waiver Program

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Other countries are taking a hardline stance against immigration and those foreigners seeking refuge. Failed nations are to blame when advanced countries do little to control crime, terror insurgencies and financial tailspins. The United States is experiencing historic influxes of people seeking asylum, refuge and otherwise aliens from worldwide locations. However, the United States is not alone when it comes to failed international relations and policy but Europe is as well, where a larger debate on the matter is required.

Europe migrant crisis: Surge in numbers at EU borders

BBC: The number of migrants at the EU’s borders reached a record high of 107,500 in July, officials say, as a sharp surge in expected asylum requests was reported in Germany.

Germany has seen a wave of migration from Syria and the Balkans, and now says it could receive as many as 750,000 asylum seekers this year.

The EU has been struggling to cope with migrant arrivals in recent months.

France and the UK say they will sign a deal to tackle the crisis in Calais.

Over the summer, thousands of migrants have sought to get to the UK through the Channel Tunnel from makeshift camps around the northern French city.

 

France’s Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and his British counterpart, Theresa May, say they will sign a deal there on Thursday to strengthen their countries’ co-operation on security, the fight against criminal smugglers, human traffickers, and clandestine immigration.

In early August, the UK pledged to add €10m (£7m) to a fund established in September 2014 to secure the port of Calais, and initially endowed with €15m over three years.

‘Third consecutive record’

EU border agency Frontex said the number of migrants surpassed the 100,000 mark in a single month for the first time since it had begun keeping records in 2008.

The Warsaw-based agency said in a statement that the figure of 107,500 migrants for July was the “third consecutive monthly record, jumping well past the previous high of more than 70,000 reached in June”.

The German government had earlier forecast that 450,000 asylum seekers could arrive in 2015, but is now set to increase that to 650,000 or higher.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said more countries in Europe should share the burden.

“It is unsustainable in the long run that only two EU countries, Germany and Sweden, take in the majority of refugees,” he told German daily Die Welt.

Hungary’s southern border marks the edge of the EU’s Schengen zone of passport-free travel and is thus a target for migrants seeking to enter the EU.

Its government has said it will send thousands of police officers to its southern border with Serbia in its latest step to stem the flow of migrants. More here.

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Walking into Mexico at the nation’s busiest border crossing with the United States is no longer an uninterrupted stroll for foreigners.

Starting late Wednesday, pedestrians going to Tijuana from San Diego at the San Ysidro crossing must choose between a line for Mexicans who get waved through, and a line for foreigners who must show a passport, fill out a form and — if staying more than a week — pay 322 pesos, or roughly $20, for a six-month permit.

About a dozen foreigners stood in line Wednesday night, directed by English-speaking agents to six inspection booths where they got passports stamped. It took about 10 minutes from start to finish.

Travelers have long followed similar protocol at Mexican airports, but the new border procedure marks a big change at land crossings that weren’t designed to question everyone. Pedestrians and motorists have generally entered Mexico unencumbered along the 1,954-mile border with the United States.

“This is about putting our house in order,” said Rodulfo Figueroa, Mexico’s top immigration official in Baja California state, which includes Tijuana.

The changes, which have been in the works for years, come as Donald Trump has surged to the top of the Republican field in the U.S. presidential race. He has insisted that Mexico sends criminals to the U.S. and pledges to build a border wall at Mexico’s expense.

For Mexico, it is a step toward closing an escape route for American criminals who disappear in Mexico. Border inspectors will tap into international criminal databases. Motorists will see no change, and if lines get too long, officials will also wave pedestrians through.

More than 120 Americans expelled from Mexico this year while living in Baja California had arrest warrants in the U.S., according to Figueroa, delegate of the National Migration Institute. Some ordered to leave last year were on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

But authorities say benefits extend beyond stopping unwanted visitors. A recent hurricane stranded twice as many Americans in Cabo San Lucas than U.S. authorities thought were there, Figueroa said, and registering as a foreigner would have made it easier to identify those who needed help.

Figueroa said Mexico can initially process about 1,000 foreigners daily, up from about 50 currently.

“If the line becomes clogged up, we will just let everybody through,” Figueroa said. “If we can’t check everybody, we won’t.”

Figueroa said San Ysidro is believed to be the first U.S. land crossing to have a separate line for foreigners to show passports and that it will serve as a model for others as they are upgraded. Aurora Vega, a spokeswoman for the National Migration Institute, referred questions to other departments. Officials at the Foreign Relations Department and Mexican Embassy in Washington had no immediate comment.

About 25,000 pedestrians (and 50,000 motorists) cross daily at San Ysidro to work, shop and play but it is unclear how many are foreigners in Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection says about one-third entering San Diego are U.S. citizens, one-third are U.S. legal residents and the rest are from other countries, largely Mexico. An unknown number have dual citizenship or residency in the U.S. and Mexico.

Both countries have long wrestled with logistical hurdles of stopping people going to Mexico by land. The U.S. occasionally stops motorists and pedestrians as they leave — mainly to check for guns and cash — but it doesn’t have a system to record exits like at airports, seen by many as a significant shortcoming in border security.

Previous efforts to question more foreigners entering Mexico met resistance in Tijuana, whose economy partly relies on Americans who visit restaurants, beaches, doctors and dentists. Lines to enter the United States at San Ysidro have exceeded four hours.

Roberto Arteaga, who has made tacos, shined shoes and sold tickets for private bus and van rides in Southern California during 28 years as a street vendor near the border crossing, says requiring passports and imposing a fee for longer stays sends the wrong message.

“We should be welcoming,” he said during a lull in business Tuesday. “This will hurt Tijuana’s economy.”

Other crossers said the move was overdue.

“Anything to keep the country safer is much better for everyone,” Cynthia Diaz of Oceanside, near San Diego, said as she stood in line to return to the U.S with her niece, who visited Tijuana for a root canal. “It’s safer for us on the other side too.”

Terrorism Works, U.S. Chart Proves Vulnerability

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Chart Lists Terrorists in U.S. Due to Lax Immigration Policies

The Obama administration’s lax immigration policies have allowed a large number of terrorists with documented ties to ISIS and other radical Islamic groups into the United States, including individuals from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Uzbekistan who have been criminally charged in recent years.

Examples include a naturalized U.S. citizen from Somalia (Hinda Osman Dhirane) charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, a lawful permanent resident (Akhror Saidakhmetov) from Kazakhstan charged with conspiracy to provide material support to Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Yemeni national named Mufid A. Elfgeeh who also supported a foreign terrorist organization, possessed illegal firearms and attempted to kill U.S. government officers and a Syrian national named Mohamad Saeed Kodaimati who knowingly made false, fraudulently and fictitious statements to the FBI.

That’s just a snippet of a long list of foreigners with terrorist ties who have been granted U.S. entry by the Obama administration. The document was provided this month by a pair of federal lawmakers attempting to pinpoint the tragic consequences of Obama’s negligent immigration policies. The legislators, both U.S. senators, are asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Secretary of State John Kerry to provide details on the immigration history of the individuals—as well as their family—that appear on the chart. The list features 72 people involved with or sentenced for terrorist activity in the last year alone.

They include individuals who have engaged in or attempted to engage in acts of terrorism; conspired or attempted to conspire to provide material support to a terrorist organization; engaged in criminal conduct inspired by terrorist ideology; or who have been sentenced for any of the foregoing, the senators, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Ted Cruz of Texas, reveal. “We would like to understand more about these individuals, and others similarly situated in recent history, and the nexus between terrorism and our immigration system,” they write in a letter to Lynch and Kerry. Sessions chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Cruz chairs the Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts.

They ask that the State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ) coordinate with other relevant agencies to provide answers to their questions by early next month. Among the senators’ inquires is an unredacted copy of each non-citizen or naturalized citizen’s alien file and a breakdown by immigration status of those who at any time after entering the U.S. got flagged as a member of a terrorist organization or political/social group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity. The lawmakers seek other information as well, including the identification of subjects with terrorist ties who have been deported from the U.S. and those who have been placed in removal proceedings but were allowed to remain inside the country.

As if it weren’t bad enough that terrorists are entering the U.S. legally thanks to our weak immigration policies, the Obama administration also has a terrorist “hands off” list that permits individuals with extremist ties to enter the country. The disturbing details of this secret list come from internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents exposed last year by a U.S. senator. Specifically, an electronic email exchange between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asks whether to admit an individual with ties to various terrorist groups. The individual had scheduled an upcoming flight into the U.S. and was believed to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a close associate and supporter of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Islamic terrorists are also sneaking into the U.S. through the porous southern border. Judicial Watch has reported this for years and, more recently, published a series of stories documenting how Mexican drug cartels are smuggling foreigners with terrorist links into the El Paso, Texas region. The foreigners are classified as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) by the government and they are being transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs wait for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20. JW has also reported that Mexican smugglers are moving ISIS operatives through the desert and across the U.S.-Mexico border with tremendous ease.

America’s Dramatic Drop in Freedom, Shameful

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Ronald Reagan is shuttering in his grave

Every person in the United States has a DUTY to be a watchdog of government and to protect the legacy of our Founding Fathers. As noted below, the failure belongs with us.

What are you ready to do and when do you start to remove this shame?

United States Drops In Overall Freedom Ranking 

Daily Caller: A new report on the freedom of countries around the world ranks the United States 20th, putting countries like Chile and the United Kingdom ahead of the U.S.

Last year, the U.S. was ranked 17th, but a steady decline of economic freedom and “rule of law” has dropped the level of freedom, according to the Cato Institute, Fraser Institute and the Swiss Liberales Institut, which created the study together.

Co-author of the report Ian Vasquez told The Daily Caller News Foundation that the steady growth of government and increased regulations of business and labor contribute to the U.S. low rating.

“Since the year 2000, the U.S. has been on a decline in terms of economic freedom,” Vasquez told TheDCNF.

The other main reason for the United States’ low rank comes from the “rule of law” measure. Vasquez told TheDCNF that increased invasions of privacy through the war on drugs and war on terror have contributed to the decline in freedom.

Also, the increased use of eminent domain is factored in as a violation of property rights.

The other indicators used to make the list were security and safety, movement, religion, association, assembly and civil society, expression, relationships, size of government, legal system and property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade internationally, regulation of credit, labor and business.

Based on those measures, here are the top 25 countries.

 

1. Hong Kong

2. Switzerland

3. Finland

4. Denmark

5. New Zealand

6. Canada

7. Australia

8. Ireland

9. United Kingdom

10. Sweden

11. Norway

12. Austria

12. Germany

14. Iceland

14. Netherlands

16. Malta

17. Luxembourg

18. Chile

19. Mauritius

And then finally..

20. United States

Just after the U.S.,

21. Czech Republic

22. Estonia

22. Belgium

24. Taiwan

25. Portugal

“The U.S. performance is worrisome and shows that the United States can no longer claim to be the leading bastion of liberty in the world,” Vasquez wrote.”In addition to the expansion of the regulatory state and drop in economic freedom, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the erosion of property rights due to greater use of eminent domain all likely have contributed to the U.S. decline.”