Only 5 Years?

Posted on March 28, 2016March 28, 2016 by Denise Simon

Prison for smuggler who guided people into U.S.

Efrain Delgado Rosales had been caught with undocumented immigrants 23 times in less than 18 years

UnionTribune: San Diego— An apparent career smuggler nabbed while guiding four undocumented immigrants through the Otay Mountains last year was sentenced Friday to five years in prison.

U.S. Border Patrol agents had caught Efrain Delgado Rosales with undocumented immigrants 23 times in less than 17 years, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

His latest encounter came in November, when agents spotted the 35-year-old guiding the foursome through rugged East County terrain.

The four men told authorities that Delgado had picked them up at a stash house in Mexico, led them to the border then left them for several hours. As they waited, thieves turned up and robbed them of all of their cash — thousands of dollars.

Related: See the case backlog through February 2016

Delgado returned and — indifferent to the robbery — guided them over the border and through the mountains. While hiking, he left behind three men who could not keep his pace.

At the begging of the fourth man, he eventually returned to collect the distressed trio, each of whom had paid $5,000 to be smuggled into the country.

The details they gave investigators about their experience with Delgado were strikingly similar to an instance in 2014, when a man smuggled into the country died while hiking in a rugged stretch of the Otay Mountains. One of his companions later identified Delgado as their guide.

Federal prosecutors said agents have apprehended Delgado 24 times since 1999, and in all but one instance, he was found with at least two and up to 46 undocumented immigrants.

*****

Brandon Judd, president of the American Federation of Government Employees National Border Patrol Council

March 21, 2016:

Obama Administration Official Confirms “Catch and Release” Policy

Border Patrol union chief tells the Judiciary Committee explosive information about the Administration’s policy of releasing unlawful immigrants into U.S.

Washington, D.C.– Following the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee’s hearing on the ongoing surge at the southwest border, the House Judiciary Committee received information from the head of the Border Patrol union showing that a high-ranking Obama Administration official confirmed to Border Patrol agents the Administration’s policy of releasing recent border crossers with no intention of ever removing them.

In his responses to questions submitted for the record to the Committee, Brandon Judd, President of the American Federation of Government Employees National Border Patrol Council, stated that on August 26, 2015 he and two other Border Patrol agents met with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to discuss concerns about the Administration’s policy of releasing unlawful immigrants into the United States. During the meeting, Deputy Secretary Mayorkas confirmed to the agents that the Administration has no intention of removing unlawful immigrants coming to the border as part of the ongoing surge. Specifically, he stated:

“Why would we [issue a Notice to Appear to] those we have no intention of deporting? We should not place someone in deportation proceedings, when the courts already have a 3-6 year backlog.”

This de facto policy contradicts the Obama Administration’s so-called enforcement priorities issued on November 20, 2014 by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson. Under the guidelines, unlawful immigrants who came to the United States after January 1, 2014 and recent border crossers are deemed a priority for removal and are to be placed in deportation proceedings. However, Deputy Secretary Mayorkas’ comments to Border Patrol agents contradict the Administration’s own policies put forth by Secretary Johnson.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) issued the following statement on this information provided to the Committee:

“Not only has President Obama sought to undermine our immigration laws at every opportunity possible, now his political appointees have implemented a ‘catch and release’ policy that contradicts the Administration’s already weak enforcement priorities. Rather than take the steps necessary to end the border surge, the Obama Administration is encouraging more to come by forcing Border Patrol agents to release unlawful immigrants into the United States with no intention of ever removing them.

“The ongoing lack of enforcement and dismantling of our immigration laws undermines both our nation’s immigration system and the American people’s faith in their government.”

What about King Midas?

El Chapo’s money man arrested in Oaxaca

OAXACA, Mexico, March 28 (UPI) — A man reported to be one of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán top money launderers has been arrested, Mexican Federal Police said Sunday.

Juan Manuel Alvarez Inzunza, 34, one of the top money launderers for Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, was captured while vacationing in Oaxaca, Mexico by Mexican Federal Police and the Mexican Army. He is alleged to have laundered about $4 billion over the last ten years. Photo by Mexican Federal Police

Juan Manuel Alvarez Inzunza, 34, alleged to have laundered about $4 billion in the last ten years, was arrested while vacationing in the southern state of Oaxaca, police tweeted.

Police said IInzunza, nicknamed “El Rey Midas” or “King Midas”, laundered about $300 million to $400 million dollars a year from the Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel through a network of companies and currency exchange centers in Mexico, the United States, Columbia and Panama, MSN reported.

IInzunza was arrested on a provisional extradition warrant from the U.S., where he is wanted for money laundering.

Guzmán was one of the heads of the Sinaloa Cartel, considered Mexico’s most profitable drug gang. His escape from a maximum-security prison in Mexico drew world-wide attention in 2015. He was recaptured after a shootout on Jan. 8.

Obamacare: Cadillac Tax

Posted on March 28, 2016March 28, 2016 by Denise Simon

Full Measure | Obamacare: Cadillac Tax

It was an investment advisor from Philadelphia who stumbled onto one of the biggest stories about the Affordable Care Act to date. His name is Rich Weinstein and he helped expose a startling set of videos that changed how many Americans view Obamacare. Though publicly available, these remarkable videos have only been rarely seen, getting just a few hundred clicks. On them, a key Obamacare adviser admits they intentionally misled voters, whom he called stupid. Weinstein tells Full Measure how he dug up the videos as a citizen journalist and warns of more trouble ahead.

Rich Weinstein: Back in 2013, I was a victim of ‘if you like your plan, you can keep your plan’. So late in 2013, we got the email notice from the insurance company saying that our plan was no longer ACA compliant. I had believed at that point that I wouldn’t lose my plan based on what the administration, everybody was saying about the Affordable Care Act. At that point, I kind of decided to get involved and figure out what really was going on.

So Weinstein got on the Internet and started digging. What he found was a group of Obamacare advisers referred to as “architects”.

Weinstein: I started noticing more in the news that these people called ‘architects’ were out there basically trying to influence public opinion. And I figured these architect people were, they were mostly academics, and I thought maybe they would leave a trail of breadcrumbs for me to figure out what was going on.

The breadcrumbs led to revealing videos in the public record, but largely unknown to the average American. One star in these videos was Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jonathan Gruber: Look, I wish Mark was right. We could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

In a series of remarkable policy talks at conferences and in academic settings, Gruber seems to brag that Obamacare only passed through its lack of transparency and the stupidity of voters. For example, Gruber says he and other backers of Obamacare hid the fact that it would be costly to healthy Americans.

Gruber: If you had a law which said healthy people are gonna pay in, you made [it] explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage and basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.

But it’s another Gruber video that Weinstein says made him shiver. A video that foreshadows a little known sea change in U.S. tax structure mandated under Obamacare.

Weinstein: When I realized they were going after that, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Like, why haven’t I heard this before?

Gruber: It’s a very clever, you know, basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter.

Weinstein: When he’s talking about the lack of basic economic understanding of the American people, when he’s talking about the American people being stupid, he’s pretty much talking about the ‘Cadillac tax’.

Weinstein wondered, what is the Cadillac tax? That was explained in another video he discovered, this one featuring Obamacare architect Ezekiel Emanuel in 2014. Emanuel said the Cadillac tax would go after a little known tax break millions of Americans get on their work insurance.

Ezekiel Emanuel: It is the single biggest tax break in the American tax code. It’s worth $250 billion dollars. To compare, for those of you who want to keep track, the mortgage deduction, sacrosanct, $70 billion dollars.

Weinstein: And it took me some time to figure it out, but I realized that they were going after that tax break and people are going to lose their tax break without knowing they were losing their tax break. That’s incredible.

Weinstein learned that since World War II, Americans’ health insurance benefits from work haven’t been taxed as income. The Obamacare Cadillac tax will change that.

It slaps a 40% tax on work-provided insurance policies valued above $10,200 for an individual or $27,500 for a family. For example, say your individual plan costs $15,200. You’ll pay 40% of the amount over $10,200that’s 40% of $5,000, which means an extra $2,000 to the IRS at the end of the year.

In another video Weinstein found, Emanuel describes how he had to convince President Obama and his political team to support the tax.

Emanuel: The other side, inside the White House, that other part of the health team and especially the political team, which David Axelrod headed up, hated this idea.

One reason they hated it, Emanuel explains, is because in 2008, Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain, proposed eliminating the tax benefit, in effect imposing a giant new tax and at that time, Obama was against it.

Barack Obama, October, 2008 campaign speech: John McCain calls these plans ‘Cadillac’ plans. And in some cases it may be that a corporate CEO may be getting too good of a deal. But what if you are a line worker, making a good American car like the Cadillac? What if you are one of the steel workers, who are working right here in Newport News? And you have given up wage increases in exchange for better healthcare? Well, Senator McCain believes you should pay higher taxes too. The bottom line, the better your healthcare plan, the harder you fought for your good benefits, the higher the taxes you’ll pay under John McCain’s plan.

But now, under Obamacare, he’d be imposing exactly what he criticized McCain for proposing: a massive tax hike on American workers’ health insurance. Emanuel would later reveal how it took some convincing to get the President to go along.

Emanuel: The President campaigned against John McCain, who wanted to get rid of the tax exclusion entirely with over $100 million dollars’ worth of ads saying, you know,’Republicans are gonna tax your health benefits for the first time ever’. This was an enigma. The President was going to go back on his word.

Weinstein: They wanted to get at your tax break and they couldn’t do it overtly, because Senator Obama in 2008 spent $100 million destroying John McCain.

Emanuel goes on to say in the video that he helped convince President Obama to impose the Cadillac tax on American workers with the idea that it would reduce health care costs. But how to convince the public to accept a huge new tax?

Gruber says they decided to use wordplay: the public would be told it was a tax on insurance plans rather than consumers.

Gruber: Calling it a tax on insurance plans rather than a tax on people, when we all know it’s really a tax on people who hold those insurance plans.

Gruber: You say,’Well, that’s pretty much the same thing. Why does it matter?’ You’ll see and they were both in and that passed, because the American voter is too stupid to understand the difference.

Gruber: We just tax the insurance companies. They pass it on in higher prices that offsets the tax break we get. It ends up being the same thing.

Sharyl: They were going to be able to tax the American public, but not call it a tax on the American public?

Weinstein: Well, they were going to tax the American public without the American public knowing it was a tax on the American public, because they were going to put the tax on the insurance plan, which would then be passed through to the American public through premium increases.

After some of Weinstein’s stunning video discoveries were reported on the news in 2014, Gruber apologized and called his remarks “inexcusably arrogant”.

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dec. 9, 2014 Hearing:

Gruber: In excerpts of these videos, I am shown making a series of glib, thoughtless and sometimes downright insulting commentsI know better. I am embarrassed and I am sorry.

Both Gruber and Emanuel declined comment for this report. President Obama has said he does not agree with Gruber’s assessment of the American public’s intellect, and that the former adviser’s views do not reflect the process. The White House wouldn’t offer further comment.

As for Weinstein: he sees the future. Not because he’s clairvoyant, but because the Obamacare architects laid it all out in those videos. He says the looming Cadillac tax will cause employers to drop insurance plans. More Americans will be forced to buy policies on the Obamacare exchange, where premiums and deductibles are quickly rising.

Weinstein: And the high-wage employees will not have the benefit of a subsidy. The lower-wage employees will, which turns a regressive policy into a progressive policy. I kind of jokingly refer to it as the Super Bowl of progressive politics, because you’re gonna go from regressive to progressive and people aren’t even gonna know what hit ’em. Everything I know about this came from people on the left. It came from Jonathan Gruber. It came from Zeke Emanuel. It came from other architects or other academics. It’s their words and that’s kind of the strength of what I’ve been able to find. My words really aren’t important. It’s their words. It’s all there on video.

Gruber: Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.

Why is it called the Cadillac tax? It’s on the most generous, high-end plans. The Cadillac tax was supposed to start in 2018. As word of it sunk in, the tax has become so unpopular among Democrats, Republicans, corporations and unions that Congress voted to postpone it until 2020. The problem is: employers are already anticipating it and adjusting by downgrading or even cancelling policies they offer at work.

Obama, More Iran Concessions Coming

Posted on March 25, 2016March 25, 2016 by Denise Simon

If you thought Obama was done making concessions to Iran — think again

WashingtonExaminer: One of the arguments critics of the Iran deal made during last year’s debate was that beyond the staggering immediate concessions to Iran, the deal paves the way for ongoing and future concessions. The reason is that the reality of the agreement leaves the U.S. hamstrung by fear that Iran can use anything as a pretext to pull out of the deal. We’re now starting to see this play out, as Obama administration officials are signaling that they may provide additional sanctions relief to address Iranian complaints, even though they promised Congress no such relief would ever be provided.

Specifically, the Associated Press reports that the U.S. government could be on the verge of a major capitulation: “The Obama administration is leaving the door open to new sanctions relief for Iran, including possibly long-forbidden access to the U.S. financial market.”

Last summer, as the deal was being debated, administration officials told Congress that this would never happen as a way of reassuring skeptics who feared that the entire sanctions regime against Iran was being unraveled. Plenty of layers of sanctions still remained to pressure Iran, the administration argued.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew insisted to Congress that under the deal Iran would “be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”

Additionally, the head of Treasury’s sanctions division said, “Iran will not be able to open bank accounts with U.S. banks, nor will Iran be able to access the U.S. banking sector.”

When asked if this was still the case, Lew said the U.S. may take future action to “make sure Iran gets relief.” The Treasury Department told the AP, “We will continue to analyze the sanctions lifting and its effects.”

To recap, in addition to $150 billion in sanctions relief, through the nuclear agreement, the administration caved into Iran on uranium enrichment, ballistic missiles, inspections, the duration of the deal’s restrictions and the maintenance of a facility under a bunker.

When the U.S. received nothing from Iran in terms of ending its sponsorship of terrorism or its human rights violations, the excuse from administration officials was always that there was a concerted effort to limit the negotiations to the Iranian nuclear program.

But the latest concession evidently under consideration by the administration would blow a hole in the entire sanctions regime. So it seems that in reality, it was only Iran’s concessions to the U.S. that were limited to the nuclear program — and even those were paltry. In reality, the U.S. will continue to make concessions that will make it easier for Iran to sponsor terrorism and make them a stronger bad actor throughout the Middle East.

As it is, since the deal was signed, the administration has been weak in responding to Iranian ballistic missile tests and it has accepted a prominent role for the radical regime in the Syrian peace process, even though Iran shares a lot of the blame for the situation in Syria.

In other words, the Obama administration’s concessions to Iran did not end in Vienna last summer. They merely started there.

*****

In part AP: Rep. Ed Royce, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, expressed alarm in a letter this week to the president that the U.S. could grant Iranian businesses the ability to conduct transactions in dollars within the United States or through offshore banks. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said he is “deeply troubled” by the possibility.

The concession would go a long way to meet Iran’s complaints that it hasn’t been sufficiently rewarded by the West for taking thousands of uranium-spinning centrifuges offline, exporting its stockpile of the bomb-making material and disabling a facility that would have been able to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

Asked if such a move was being considered, the Treasury Department told The Associated Press in an emailed statement: “We will continue to analyze the sanctions lifting and its effects.”

The State Department wouldn’t comment.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Congress after the July accord that Iran would still be “denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”

“Iran will not be able to open bank accounts with U.S. banks, nor will Iran be able to access the U.S. banking sector,” Adam Szubin, the department’s sanctions chief, told a House panel at the time. He said that would hold true even for simple transactions to “dollarize” a foreign payment.

But asked specifically about that commitment earlier this week, Lew allowed for future U.S. action to “make sure Iran gets relief.” More here.

Operation Hemorrhage

Posted on March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 by Denise Simon

It has been said often, either fight the enemy in a true war theater on the battlefield with real war tactics or fight them at home. Brussels and Paris and in the United States in Boston and San Bernardino to mention a few, the hybrid war gets real expensive. These costs are rarely measured or questioned. We are also not measuring the cost of freedoms are giving up. Add in the cost of the cyber war…..well….going back much earlier than 9-11-01 the costs cannot be calculated.

Operation Hemorrhage: The Terror Plans to Wreck the West’s Economy

The Western economy is a key underlying target in attacks like the one that the Islamic State perpetrated in Brussels.

DailyBeast: Every European who flies frequently knows the airport in Zaventem, has spent time in the ticketing area that was strewn with blood, limbs, broken glass, battered luggage and other wreckage.

It was another attack on aviation that pulled the United States into the conflict sometimes known as the “global war on terror” in the first place. Since then, airports and airplanes have remained a constant target for Islamic militants, with travelers being encumbered by new batches of security measures after each new attack or attempt.

After the ex-con Richard Reid managed to sneak a bomb aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, but failed to detonate the explosives, American passengers were forced to start removing their shoes on their way through security. After British authorities foiled a 2006 plot in which terrorists planned to bring liquid explosives hidden in sport drink bottles aboard multiple transatlantic flights, authorities strictly limited the quantity of liquids passengers were allowed to carry. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck explosives hidden in his underwear onto a flight on Christmas Day 2009, he ushered in full-body scans and intrusive pat-downs.

Those are the misses. There have been hits, too. In August 2004, two female Chechen suicide bombers, so-called “black widows,” destroyed two domestic Russian flights. In January 2011, a suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in an attack that looked almost identical to the one that rocked the airport in Brussels: the bomber struck just outside the security cordon, where the airport is transformed from a “soft” target to a “hard” one. Just months ago, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS)—the perpetrator of the Brussels attacks—destroyed a Russian passenger jet flying out of Egypt’s Sinai, killing 224 people.

The targeting of airports and airplanes has been so frequent that in lighter times—back when the terrorists seemed so much worse at what they do—some pundits openly mocked their continuing return to airplanes and airports. In one representative discussion from early 2010, a well-known commentator described jihadists as having a “sort of schoolboy fixation” with aviation.

But the reason for this targeting, of course, is neither mysterious nor quixotic, and it’s one the jihadists have explained for themselves. Following the November Paris attacks, ISIS released an infographic boasting that its slaughter on the streets of Paris would force Belgium “to strengthen its security measures … which will cost them tens of millions of dollars.” Moreover, the group claimed, “the intensified security measures and the general state of unease will cost Europe in general and France in specific tends of billions of dollars due to the resulting decrease in tourism, delayed flights, and restrictions on freedom of movement and travel between European countries.”

And that was before the group successfully attacked the Brussels airport, despite those costly new security measures.

Even before 9/11, jihadists saw bleeding the American economy as the surest path to defeating their “far enemy.” When Osama bin Laden declared war against the “Jews and crusaders” in 1996, he emphasized that jihadist strikes should be coupled with an economic boycott by Saudi women. Otherwise, the Muslims would be sending their enemy money, “which is the foundation of wars and armies.”

Indeed, when bin Laden first had the opportunity to publicly explain what the 9/11 attacks had accomplished, in an October 2001 interview with Al Jazeera journalist Taysir Allouni, he emphasized the costs that the attacks imposed on the United States. “According to their own admissions, the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16 percent,” he said. “The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent with $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses.” He told Allouni that the economic effect was even greater due to building and construction losses and missed work, so that the damage inflicted was “no less than $1 trillion by the lowest estimate.”

In his October 2004 address to the American people, dramatically delivered just before that year’s elections, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost Al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

Al Qaeda fit the wars the United States had become embroiled in after 9/11 into its economic schema. In that same video, bin Laden explained how his movement sought to suck the United States and its allies into draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahedin “bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

Just prior to 2011, there was a brief period when jihadism appeared to be in decline. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became ISIS, had all but met with defeat at the hands of the United States and local Sunni uprisings. Successful attacks were few and far between.

Valentin Bianchi/AP

Representative of those dark times for jihadists, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a special issue of its online magazine Inspire celebrating a terrorist attack that claimed no victims. In October 2010, jihadists were able to sneak bombs hidden in printer cartridges onto two cargo planes. Due to strong intelligence efforts, authorities disabled both bombs before they were set to explode, but the group drew satisfaction from merely getting them aboard the planes.

“Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the lead article in that special issue of Inspire boasted. “On the other hand this supposedly ‘foiled plot’, as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.” The magazine warned that future attacks will be “smaller, but more frequent”—an approach that “some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

The radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, writing in Inspire, explained the dilemma that he saw gripping Al Qaeda’s foes. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying again.”

Even in those days when the terrorist threat loomed so much smaller, the point was not a bad one. Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists aim to wear down Western economies.

Unfortunately, Al Qaeda’s envisioned world of smaller but more frequent attacks proved unnecessary for the jihadists. Less than two months after the special issue of Inspire appeared that celebrated an at best half-successful attack, the revolutionary events that we then knew as the “Arab Spring” sent shockwaves through the Middle East and North Africa.

This instability would help jihadism reach the current heights to which it has ascended, where the attacks are not only more frequent but larger. Unfortunately, the United States—blinded at the time by the misguided belief that revolutions in the Arab world would devastate the jihadist movement—pursued policies that hastened the region’s instability. The damages wrought by these policies are still not fully appreciated.

The silver lining to the jihadist economic strategy is that they, too, are economically vulnerable. The damage inflicted on ISIS’s “state” by coalition bombings and other pressures forced the group to slice its fighters’ salaries at the beginning of this year. But as Al Qaeda watches its flashier jihadist rival carry out gruesome attacks on Western targets and get bombarded in return, it discerns further proof of the wisdom of its strategy of attrition.

As it watches these two sets of foes exhaust each other, Al Qaeda believes that its comparative patience will pay off. It believes that its own time will come.

Border Security Facts or Not

Posted on March 23, 2016March 23, 2016 by Denise Simon

March 23, 2016

National Security and Border Threats

Key word, key term for entry: CREDIBLE FEAR = immediate entry, on the fly on asylum.

Horowitz: What is Homeland Security Hiding Behind Immigration Numbers?

CR: As Americans ominously observe the raging fire of suicidal immigration policies implemented by our European friends across the pond, one of the first questions on their minds is: how many of these Islamic radicals have been admitted to our country? The answer is we don’t even know how many people in total have come to our country since 2013 because the Department of Homeland Security has refused to publish that data or make it available to Congress.

It is already March 2016, yet the public and members of Congress still do not have any of the immigration data for 2014, much less 2015.

Over the past year we’ve been posting data on the number of immigrants, naturalized citizens, and immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries we have accepted in recent years. The immigration and naturalization trends are skyrocketing across the board, particularly from Muslim countries. Roughly 680,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries have been given green cards from 2009-2013. But notice we have no data since 2013.

While data on refugees can be pulled from the State Department’s database (when it is working) and information on some non-immigrant visas can be pulled from the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, the public is in the dark as to the number of people who have been granted green cards in total (and the breakdown by country) without access to the annual “Yearbook on Immigration Statistics” from the Department of Homeland Security.

It is already March 2016, yet the public and members of Congress still do not have any of the immigration data for 2014, much less 2015. Typically, the statistics are published during the spring of the following year. The release of data has gotten progressively slower since the INS was restructured into the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, but the Obama administration has consistently stonewalled on publishing data. For example, it wasn’t until last week that HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement published its 2014 report on refugees. But even Obama’s DHS had the 2013 data posted by June of 2014. Why is there still no data on 2014 two years later?

With evidence from Census data indicating a surge in immigration overall and a spike in immigration from the Middle East, why is it that in a first world country we don’t even know how many people have come in since the advent of ISIS? Given the terrorism threats and the growing population from the Middle East, wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people from predominantly Muslim countries have been granted green cards over the past two years?

Given the influx of Central American illegal immigrants, shouldn’t we know how many were granted asylum and how many children were granted Special Immigrants Juvenile Status, which leads to a pathway to citizenship?

Given Obama’s unprecedented move of advertising and recruiting immigrants to become naturalized citizens last year, shouldn’t we know how many have signed up and from where they originated?

The notion that even members of Congress don’t know the details of who is being added to our civil society until two years later is patently absurd and dangerous. Congress should have the full reports the following year and topline data every month.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough members of Congress who care enough to exercise proper oversight over this administration’s violation of our sovereignty.