Are Caravans in Mexico Threatening to U.S. Sovereignty?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns national sovereignty – the ability of a state to govern itself. This ability includes the authority to decide who enters the nation. This topic is back in the news because a migrant caravan left Honduras with plans to travel to the southern border of the United States.

In his article, Todd Bensman explained that the aspirations of the caravan ended soon after it crossed into Mexico. He continued with the following information. 

Mexico’s Policy of Controlled Dispersal

My assessment about Mexican caravans is based on experience traveling with the old rebel-style migrant caravans that aimed to crash the border back in 2018 and 2019 and the very new and different escorted transit caravans forming now.

I discovered these during a field research trip to Tapachula City just north of the Guatemala border in November 2024. The city of 400,000 is a major waystation and chokepoint on the Latin American migration trail exiting Guatemala.

Border hawk Trump had just been elected president, but open-borders dove President Joe Biden was still in office. Thousands of migrants in Tapachula were forming caravans and heading north, prompting American commentators to sound the alarm that the caravans intended to breach the U.S. border before Trump took office. I joined one of about a thousand north of Tapachula.

I was surprised to learn that the pundits were wrong.

The Mexican government was allowing these caravans to form so that its military and state police could inexpensively transfer them out of Tapachula and into other southern Mexican cities. The government scheme was (and still is) intended to relieve a growing humanitarian crisis in Tapachula, where shortages of work, food, and shelter had become critical. What I saw was a purposeful, government-controlled dispersal operation.

Influenced by Washington Policies

Why would Mexico volunteer to do any of this in the fourth year of Biden’s historic mass migration crisis when its central government under President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had let millions move on through largely unchecked?

The little-known answer is that, in December 2023 as I fully reported then, Biden’s emissaries initiated a quiet deal to have Mexico reduce the incoming U.S. border crowds because the social media video looked terrible for Democrats running in the 2024 presidential election campaign.

The simpatico progressive liberal Obrador, wanting a Democrat president, deployed 32,000 troops to block all roads leading out of Tapachula and southern states like Chiapas. Next, Mexico began aggressive, sustained roundups of undocumented foreign nationals in Mexican cities and towns along its northern border with the U.S. from Tijuana to Matamoros.

The soldiers and police forced tens of thousands from Mexico’s north onto jets and buses and shipped them to the Tapachula while thousands a day were still arriving from Guatemala.

Trump won the election in large part on Biden’s open border and, once inaugurated, demanded that Mexico’s new President Claudia Sheinbaum, also a progressive liberal, continue the blockades and border sweeps under threat of devastating trade tariffs. 

How It Works

To prevent a humanitarian disaster and relieve Tapachula’s misery, the Sheinbaum government initially handed out “transit slips” and brought in buses to transport migrants to other Chiapas State cities and as far north as Mexico City. But demand outstripped the bus supply, so officials defaulted to the cheaper escorted foot caravans.

Whereas the caravans of old would violently break through security roadblocks, the Mexican military and police would surround this new kind of caravan in the front, back and all along its length and protect the marchers from predatory criminals. The security forces would gently direct them to turn down this or that road fork. Then at destinations, the security forces would deliver the compliant marchers to aid organizations and shelters and block them from further movement north.

While the many walkers I interviewed in late 2024 said sure they’d love to enter the United States someday, all told me they fully understood that Mexico’s government was to simply move them to other southern Mexican towns offering more work and sustenance while they waited for work and residency permits. The police and soldiers all confirmed the intercity transfer caravan policy and that it was a relatively new policy.

What to Look For

The Fey Esperanza caravan was hardly the first, but it attracted significant U.S. media attention because a major U.S. midterm election campaign is underway. In 2025 and so far in 2026, Mexico escorted at least another dozen intercity transit caravans to southern Mexican cities that drew no similar American media attention.

The telltale clue that these and the Fey Esperanza were controlled dispersal caravans not heading to the U.S. border: the Mexican security escorts.

A lot of Americans would not have known which kind of caravan they were seeing from video and naturally presumed it was enroute to the U.S. border.

Indeed, the transit caravan was rapidly disintegrating during Oct. 3-4 weekend as per the routine. The Trump administration was correct to noisily telegraph to Sheinbaum that she cannot let caravans reach the U.S. border and that migrants in them would face a tough confrontation if she let them through.

The article concluded that the caravans would continue because immigrants are still moving from Guatemala to Mexico, and Mexican security forces are still moving immigrants from the north and sending them south. However, Trump’s tariff threats against Mexico force Mexico to work with the United States to keep caravans away from the border.

Bensman says, “All bets are off once Trump leaves office in January 2029, no matter if a Republican or Democrat takes his spot. Look for caravans that might try their luck in the months before or after January 2029. Those will not be benign.”

Should All Immigration Be Stopped for Now?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns legal and wise immigration. According to his paper posted at The Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hanson believes that legal immigration should be diverse and in numbers that “can be assimilated and acculturated and integrated, meritocratic.” He added that we want immigrants “with skills that ensure that we, the people of the United States, will not have to support them” and “some knowledge of the traditions and customs and protocol of the United States, as well as English fluency.” 

This did not happen under the Biden administration. We had “12 million people [come] in, sometimes at rates of 10,000 a day, plus over a million and a half legal immigrants, then you have a pool of 30 million illegal and legal immigrants and 53 million people who were not born in the United States.”

This sort of experience causes people to stop supporting immigration, and the Biden years were not the only times when such things happened.

It happened in the early 20^th century, say from 1900 to 1910. About 1.5% of the population, 1 million people, half a million some years, but some years a whole million, came into the United States from Southern and Eastern Europe. And they had very different ideas about politics.

Many of them were anarchists. They joined unions, and an anarchist, we remember, had killed William McKinley. He was an American-born anarchist, but there was a lot of worry that immigration at that level of 1.5% of the population every year from people who were not integrating but had radical ideas about changing America was dangerous, and it lost public support for years.

The same thing is happening, as I said now, because of the numbers, but also because we’re seeing a new type of immigrant.

Usually, we say the immigrant is good for America because he’s eager to get here. He’s eager to work hard. He loves the United States. He’s studied the United States. He wants to leave his homeland and start anew, and then he makes us say, “Wow, look at that energized immigrant that loves this country. We’ve got to snap out of it and compete.”

That was the idea of immigration, one of the ideas.

Not now.

We’re getting a lot of immigrants that are coming from failed states, mostly as a result of communism and socialism. Some of them come legally, some come illegally, and they’re coming in numbers that we can’t fully assimilate.

But there’s a new type of legal immigrant, and these are immigrants from the first generation or their children in a second generation from failed states.

And so, let me ask you a question. What do Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat of Michigan, or Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota whose family came from Somalia, Rashida Tlaib was from the West Bank, or [Alexander Ocasio-Cortez], whose father came from Puerto Rico, who was also a Democratic congresswoman, or the podcaster Hasan Piker, who’s from a multimillion-dollar family in Turkey and was born here and then returned to Turkey, or New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who came here from Uganda, or Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who came from /Egypt, his family did, or Melat Kiros, whose family and she came from Ethiopia, or Rep. Ro Khanna, a representative congressman from California whose family and his wife’s family came from India, second generation, or Gustavo Gordillo, who is a first-generation immigrant from Peru – and I could go on, but that should be enough.

What do they all have in common? Let’s count them.

No. 1, most of them are pretty wealthy. Ro Khanna’s family is probably worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Hasas Piker drives a Porsche. He has a multimillion-dollar home. His family is worth millions. Ilhan Omar, whether truthfully or untruthfully, filed a financial report that said she was worth $30 million. We can talk about Mr. El-Sayed. He filed a tax return for over $600,000.

But besides that, they are mostly wealthy, they’re also, with exception of AOC, Muslims, which is fine, except they accentuate their Islamic identity to the extent that Mr. El-Sayed has even said in an unguarded moment that he didn’t want to mention anything about the killing of the Supreme Leader, the theocratic enemy of the United States in Iran, because that might upset his constituents.

But in addition to being quite wealthy and Islamic and from failed states, many of them, as soon as they arrived here or their parents, equated their own race or their religion or their antithesis to what they call the oppressor or victimizer class, the white male heterosexual Christian we all know who’s supposed to be responsible for all the sins of the world, as somehow exploiting them.

In other words, think of the argument. You come from a failed socialist state in Somalia or Uganda or Egypt. You set one foot in here or your parents set one foot in here, and immediately you lodge complaints against the gracious host that welcomed you in and welcomed you in with security, prosperity, and freedom that you did not have under the system that you left, but which you seem to now champion in a very chauvinistic way.

And no sooner than you come without any knowledge of the United States’ nature or history or protocols, you’re so bold that you start to demand socialist changes.

You want to abolish the Senate. You want reparations. You want to reopen the border. You want to get rid of the filibuster. You want to get rid of the Electoral College. You want to pack the court. You want to change the capitalist system. You want to tax billionaires not on what they make, but on their worth. You want to go after people who have two homes.

All these are radical things that are outside the American tradition….

And unfortunately, what is the most ironic of all is a lot of these new immigrants who are very affluent are imposing a socialist system, they think, on Americans as if we’re the lab rats and they are the experimenters, and that’s not a very successful way to win the American people over to the cherished idea in the past of legal immigration.

 

Where Do You Get Your Information?

Americans are being fed information every single day. The type of information depends on where you get it from. Brent Buchanan, Founder and CEO of Cygnal, is “recognized as America’s most accurate private pollster for four consecutive election cycles, explained in an article published at The Daily Signal why he believes the information media shares about immigration “feels like propaganda.” 

Texas has accounted for 25% of all ICE arrests since enforcement ramped up. The state has processed thousands upon thousands of deportations. No riots. No mob violence against federal officers. No churches stormed during worship services. Minnesota represents less than 1% of ICE arrests. And Minneapolis is on fire. How do you explain that gap?

The answer has nothing to do with immigration policy and everything to do with where Americans get their information.

What the Polling Actually Shows

At Cygnal, we recently surveyed voters on whether the Trump administration’s deportation efforts have gone too far, are about right, or haven’t gone far enough.

The results: 50% said too far, 48% said about right or not far enough. That’s a statistical tie. A country split down the middle.

But if you only consumed legacy media coverage, you’d assume 80% of Americans are horrified by what’s happening. You’d think the deportation efforts represent some unprecedented crisis of conscience for the nation.

They don’t.

Nearly half the country supports the policy or wants it to go further. You just wouldn’t know that from watching the evening news.

The real divide isn’t about what Americans believe. It’s about where they get the information that shapes those beliefs.

Inside the Information Bubbles

The data gets interesting when you cross-reference policy views with media consumption patterns.

Among voters who believe deportation efforts have gone “too far,” 51% get their news primarily from national broadcast television: NBC, ABC, CBS. Compare that to 36% of all voters and just 14% of those who think enforcement hasn’t gone far enough.

The “too far” crowd also over-indexes on newspaper consumption compared to the general voter population. These are the legacy media institutions, the ones that dominated American information for decades.

On the flip side, voters who believe deportation efforts haven’t gone far enough slightly over-index on cable news (45% vs. 40% overall) and dramatically over-index on X, formerly Twitter (16% vs. 9% overall).

The “about right” middle? They’re slightly more likely to get news from cable and Facebook than the average voter. No real drastic differences outside the fact [that] they also don’t get as much of their news from legacy media.

What emerges is a clear pattern: liberals cluster heavily around broadcast television and print newspapers, while conservatives spread across cable, social media, and newer digital platforms.

These groups are consuming different facts, different story selections, different framings of what matters … and what doesn’t.

The Amplification Machine

As said at the beginning, Minnesota represents less than 1% of ICE enforcement activity, but it’s receiving wall-to-wall national coverage. Every confrontation, every protest, every dramatic standoff gets the full treatment – helicopter shots, breathless correspondents, the works.

Texas is processing 25 times the enforcement activity with minimal national attention. Why? Because compliance doesn’t generate clicks. Orderly deportations don’t drive ratings. A state that implements federal policy without mass unrest isn’t a story anyone wants to tell.

More importantly, it doesn’t make Trump look bad in their minds like Minneapolis does.

The editorial choice to focus on Minnesota is about feeding an existing narrative to an audience that wants that narrative confirmed, not informing the public….

The coverage doesn’t just reflect the violence. It incentivizes it.

The Death of Shared Reality

For most of American history, we argued about policy while agreeing on basic facts. Democrats and Republicans watched the same evening news, read the same wire service reports, saw the same footage. They disagreed about what to do, not about what was happening.

That’s over….

What’s Actually at Stake

The Minneapolis situation illustrates the real danger. You have a city tearing itself apart over enforcement activity that represents a statistical rounding error nationally. You have activists storming churches, attacking federal officers, setting fires. And the coverage of that chaos generates more chaos elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the state handling a quarter of all enforcement activity does so with minimal drama….

The question for us is straightforward: Are you going to let your media diet determine your reality? Or are you going to actively seek out primary data, diverse sources, and information that challenges your existing beliefs.

Democracy requires a shared factual foundation. When half the country thinks we’re in a humanitarian crisis and half thinks we’re finally enforcing laws that went ignored for decades – and both sides can cite “evidence” for their position – we have a collective epistemological breakdown.

The information bubble doesn’t just [distort] immigration. Everything is distorted. And the only people who can pop it are the ones willing to step outside their comfortable media habits and ask what they might be missing.

Why Should Immigrants Show Good Attitude and Gratitude for America?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns immigration. Illegal immigration should be non-existent, and legal immigration should lead to the betterment of America. According to Victor Davis Hanson, discussion about immigration should include the attitude of the immigrant towards America and their expression of appreciation or gratitude for the opportunity to come. Attitude and gratitude for the opportunity to immigrate can be shown in obedience to the laws of the land or actually expression of love for America. 

In his article published at The Daily Signal, Hanson explains how the above can be shown in a variety of context. In California, more than 17,000 illegal immigrants received licenses to drive, which led to “a lot of drunk driving incidents and violence” and murders by people who crossed the border illegally. Other areas had college students from the Middle East showing “support for Hamas, Hezbollah, antisemitic sloganeering.” In Minnesota, “the Somali community got a billion dollars or multibillion-dollar grants … supposedly to supply food and meals….”

There were a variety of state and local laws that were violated, but there were no prosecutions….

But this opened a larger question. If you were an immigrant and you came to the United States from a war-torn, impoverished, and dangerous place, like Somalia, shouldn’t you express gratitude?

Ilhan Omar came here, to take one example…. She came here at 13 and she was given every benefit of being a U.S. resident and then a U.S. citizen. She was given a generous scholarship to go to college. She was elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives. She was elected to Congress. I think she’s a four-term congresswoman.

She insisted, even though she was an American citizen, to wear the traditional Somali hijab, even though there was a rule in the House, an old rule, that people don’t wear headwear or gear or hats inside the Capitol chambers when Congress is in session. They made a special exception just for her.

But I mention this because she has a long line of indiscretions, and they form a pattern.

She said that the United States was a trashy country. She said that the dictatorship in America, i.e., the Trump administration, was not much different from the one that she left in Somalia. She said that Charlie Kirk, right after his death, was a scholastic terrorist….

She also said that it’s the Benjamins, baby, when she was making the argument that, as she put it, we in the Congress don’t have to have an allegiance to a foreign country and implying that Jewish members put Israel ahead of the United States.

And so, she’s been part of “the squad” and she’s had to apologize for some of her antisemitic rhetoric. She’s expressed overt criticism of the country that befriended her and allowed her to be educated at mostly at public cost, to be a representative of Congress, to write a book with a major New York publisher.

She’s also, she put on one of her financial disclosures that she almost had a zero net worth. Now, after her marriage to Tim Mynett … she now says that … their net worth may be as great as $30 million.

There’s also an accusation that, allegedly, allegedly, that she may have formalistically married her brother to ease his citizenship application, and then that marriage was legal and then it was dissolved as she married again….

My point is that, in this greater discussion about the fraud that goes on in Minnesota and our worry about immigrants on campus, behind the wheel of a semi-truck, administering a fraudulent food program, coming across the southern border, and then committing acts of violence, maybe, just maybe, we should ask of our immigrants a little gratitude….

And in this whole nexus, Ilhan Omar stands out as a person for two reasons. As an immigrant example, this country has lavished no more benefits on anyone than her….

And now she’s mysteriously a multimillionaire. And we still don’t know how the entire story of how citizenship was attained, from her brother….

And so, Ilhan Omar is an example of what’s wrong with legal and illegal immigration, that we allow people from countries that are … “Third World,” but are in chaos, in tumult, they come as refugees, they’re extended every benefit, and very soon they realize that their advance or their success politically hinges on the degree to which they express themselves as victims or as hard leftist or as ingrates. And she’s done all of that.

 

When Will Liberals Learn?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the national security need to know who is entering the United States and why they are coming. On Wednesday, an Afghan national is alleged to have shot two National Guardsmen near the White House. He entered the United States in 2021 following the fall of Afghanistan. The troops are part of the surge sent to Washington, D.C. in August to fight the crime problem.

According to the FBI, the two guardsmen are in separate hospitals and are in critical condition.

The shooter is in custody in a hospital and is in severe condition. Carlos Garcia reported the following at the Blaze: 

Multiple law enforcement sources said the suspect was identified as 29-year-old …. He also reportedly entered the U.S. on a Biden administration program called Operation Allies Welcome after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Law enforcement sources told NBC News that he used a handgun in the attack….

Dept. of War Sec. Pete Hegseth said that 500 additional National Guard troops were going to be sent to D.C. in light of the shooting.

“This will only stiffen our resolve to ensure that we make Washington, D.C., safe and beautiful. The drop in crime has been historic. The increase in safety and security has bene historic,” Hegseth said to reporters in the Dominican Republic.

“But if criminals want to conduct things like this, violence against America’s best, we will never back down,” he added. “President Trump will never back down. That’s why the American people elected him.”

Even though a foreign national shot two guardsmen, liberals are blaming Trump. After opposing Trump’s deployment of National Guard units to Washington, D.C. and other cities and claiming that the President is overreaching his authority, they are now blaming Trump for putting the guardsmen “in harm’s way.” 

There were reports that the guardsmen had died from their injuries. Then the FBI said that they had not died. At the time of this writing, there is conflicting information. At any rate, they were shot in the service of America and protection of all Americans; even those people who do not appreciate their service.

 

Is a Policy of Open Borders Moral or Immoral?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns open border policies versus morality. Is an open border the only moral immigration policy? Many people in the United States as well as Great Britain and Europe believe it is. Michael Barone writes of this dilemma in his article published at The Daily Signal.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, like the George Bushes, professed to want to enforce immigration laws. They decried the flood of illegals that crested in the prosperous decades before the financial crisis, and afterward saw with relief that the flow of illegals slowed.

As I wrote recently, careful projects of the illegal population estimate that it peaked at about 12 million in 2007, fell to about 10.5 million 2019, then increased by about 4 million during the Joe Biden administration, which essentially opened the borders to the point of paying for illegals to live in New York’s Roosevelt Hotel, two short blocks from where Jamie Dimon’s JP Morgan Chase was constructing its $9 billion office tower. The impetus for this policy came from something other than the usual elite economic argument that, as population growth is slowing, advanced countries need more workers to maintain economic growth. That something else can be summarized in the phrase “Orange Man Bad.” If Trump wants to stop people at the border, then we shouldn’t stop anyone there.

There is another element here, seen more prominently in Europe. And that is the conviction that barring people from your country who are different, in ancestry or customs, from the preexisting population is invidious discrimination.

Immigrants to the United States over the past half-century have come mostly from Latin America and Asia form countries that to varying degrees share religious orientations, market economic norms, and cultures of literacy and numeracy with most Americans.

It’s likely true that a flood of mostly illegal immigrants, like those welcomed by the Biden administration, will tend to have a higher proportion of violent migrants than among legal immigrants. And a higher proportion of arrivals with adversarial attitudes toward American mores, traditions and government.

But that is a problem orders of magnitude greater in Britain and Europe, where very much larger shares of immigrants, from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, are Muslims. Many are quite ready to assimilate to European mores. But many – especially the floods welcome[d] by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel starting in 2015 – are not. They want to impose their religion and their culture on the host society, and elite leaders of such nations have been willing to let them do so….

Political parties that campaign for restrictions on immigration are treated as pariahs with which established parties must never allow in coalition governments….

But it’s not apparent that [German] AofD’s policy of restricting the inflow of immigrants, or those of Eastern European democracies like Poland and Hungary, which re decried by unelected European Union leaders, is the moral equivalent of Nazism. Excluding people with different cultures and attitudes from your country is not the moral equivalent of murdering all your Jews.

Those leaders who treat the two as morally equivalent are captive to bad ideas. They have been taught to divide the world into oppressors and the oppressed, to cast immigrants as virtuous victims and their own citizens as culpable oppressors. They have been instructed to see colonialism not as a limited chapter in history but as its dominant theme, and to treat its harms as a kind of second Holocaust.

           From these delusions, most ordinary Americans, including recent legal immigrants and their                   offspring, and large numbers of ordinary Britons and Europeans, seem happily immune. Perhaps             in time, their common sense will dissuade the elites of their “luxury belief” in open borders. 

Do Immigrants Have a Statutory Right to Apply for Asylum in U.S.?

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear another immigration case. This case is about the ability of the U.S. government to limit asylum claims at the southern border, and it threatens to have “massive implications for the government’s ability” to do so. Katelynn Richardson reported the following in her article published at The Daily Signal. 

The justices agreed Monday to weigh whether migrants who show up on the Mexican side of the border must be allowed to apply for asylum.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, an alien who “arrives in the United States” can apply for asylum. The 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that even migrants who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border qualify as arriving in the U.S.

That interpretation of the law “deprives the Executive Branch of a critical tool for addressing border surges and for preventing overcrowding at ports of entry along the border,” the administration argued in its July petition.

“Before this litigation, border officials had repeatedly addressed migrant surges by standing at the border and preventing aliens without valid travel documents from entering,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the petition. “The decision below declares that practice  unlawful, on the theory that aliens stopped on the Mexican side of the border have a statutory right to apply for asylum in the United States and to be inspected by federal immigration officers.”

Several members of Congress wrote in an amicus brief that the 9^th Circuit “usurped the policymaking authority of the political branches.”

“The Nineth Circuit’s decision below effectively seized that exclusively political power by creating an entitlement to seek asylum for potentially millions of aliens whom Congress never authorized such relief,” they argued.

The United States is a sovereign nation that has the right and authority to determine who enters America. If immigrants have a statutory right to apply for asylum in the U.S., this means that the United States does not have authority over who enters the nation. This is common sense to me.

Besides, only Mexicans should be applying for asylum at America’s southern border because the law states that they have to apply for asylum at the first country. Anyone who comes through Mexico should apply for asylum in Mexico. I wonder how the Supreme Court will rule on this case.

What Does Separation of Powers Mean for Immigration?

The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns separation of powers in the federal government. The Executive Branch, the Legislative Branch, and the Judicial Branch are co-equal branches of the federal government. This means that none of the three has the power or authority to tell either of the other two branches how to do their job.

The Executive Branch cannot tell the Legislative Branch how to write bills or the Judicial Branch how to decide court cases. The Legislative Branch cannot tell the Executive (POTUS) what the foreign policy should be. For the same reason, the Judicial Branch cannot force their agenda onto the Executive Branch or the Legislative Branch. The only power or authority of the Judicial Branch is to determine what is constitutional and what is not.

Over the past four months, rogue lower judges in the Judicial Branch have tried to make foreign policy or immigration decisions and other presidential decisions. They are acting as a judicial coup attempting to stop or at least slow down the agenda of the Trump administration. One of the areas where the rogue judges have overstepped their judicial authority has to do with undoing a Biden executive order that admitted illegal aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela into the United States temporarily under a parole program. Virginia Allen wrote about this court case and published it at The Daily Signal. 

The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to revoke temporary protected status for 500,000 illegal aliens living in the U.S.

In a 7-2 ruling on Friday, the justices lifted a lower court’s order that barred the Trump administration from deporting illegal aliens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela who entered the U.S. under the Biden administration parole program.

The court’s decision comes in response to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s efforts to end the Biden-era parole policy that allowed migrants from the four countries to fly directly into the U.S. and be transported into the interior of the [country].

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to “terminate all categorical parole programs,” including the “processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.”

In March, the Department of Homeland Security issued a notice announcing the official termination of the program, effective on April 24, but a federal judge blocked DHS from revoking legal status for the illegal aliens in the U.S. under the parole program.

The Trump administration’s action was challenged in a federal court in Massachusetts, which stayed DHS’s action. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1^st Circuit upheld the federal court’s decision. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to undo the lower court’s stay.

The Supreme Court’s order allows the Trump administration to move forward with plans to terminate the legal status of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela migrants while an appeal is pending before the 1^st Circuit Court of Appeals….

The Supreme Court’s ruling Friday comes just two weeks after the justices issued an order allowing the Trump administration to proceed with plans to strip temporary protected status from thousands of illegal aliens from Venezuela living in the U.S.

Should America Welcome Immigrants?

 Celebrity Selena Gomez recently made a fool of herself when she posted a video of herself sobbing uncontrollably over the exportation of illegal immigrants. She quickly deleted her post, but she was mocked on social media for her acting stunt.

Many Americans support immigration because it is good for America. The United States of America was created as a “melting pot” where people from many nations come together to make a strong republic. However, the melting together has not happened in recent years.

America needs legal immigration, but there is no need for illegal immigration. David Harsanyi discussed immigration in his article published at The Daily Signal. 

While I’m also a fan of immigration for economic and patriotic reasons, dismissing the negative cultural externalities – including violent crimes – that can accompany chaotic mass immigration, illegal or not, does the cause no favors.

The fact is we could build a giant bubble around the entire country right now, and the United States would still reign as the most welcoming place for foreigners that’s ever existed. And if we want that title to remain, championing legal avenues and decrying mass criminality and anarchy is the way to go. Because what’s happening now is only going to turn decent people against legal immigration.

In recent years, American citizenship has been transformed from a sacred privilege bestowed on the lucky, gracious newcomer into a right that’s demanded of us by people who break or circumvent the law.

Moreover, illegal immigration is inhumane – and not only to those swept up in the human trafficking and dangers of the southern border.

Democrats talk about people living in the shadows. It’s true. Those here illegally will never be integrated into society. Even if they don’t benefit from welfare programs, they inevitably end up relying on taxpayers. This, too, causes resentment.

The Left acts as if we have a sacred oath to accept every refugee, but they have done virtually everything possible to destroy the public’s trust in the system….

As Europe has shown us, accepting unlimited numbers of refugees from the same area at the same time with the same ideas and the same problems leads to ethnic enclaves, poor integration, and reactionary nativist politics.

Though it’s not just refugees or illegal immigrants who can give immigrants a bad name.

Take the student visa problem. Just because your Gulf state petro-daddy or Chicom apparatchik parents can pay your way doesn’t mean we have any responsibility to host you. Colleges love foreign students because they pay cash for the whole ride, but too many of them are flying terrorist flags and creating havoc on our campuses. The spectacle almost surely makes normies less inclined to see immigration as a societal positive. Understandably so.

Leftists and civil libertarians had a breakdown when President Donald Trump signed an executive order to revoke student visas from noncitizen college students who participate in pro-Hamas protests.

Listen, I’m a staunch supporter of unfettered speech rights of pro-terrorist noncitizens in their own countries. Everyone has an inalienable right to speak freely, but foreigners do not have an inalienable right to gin up hatred against Americans on the Upper West Side….

People often like to virtue signal, insisting that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” or a nation of “ideas” rather than one of blood and soil. Those are both true statements to some extent. One of the “ideas” we had, though, was to be a sovereign nation that houses a set of norms, traditions, civic institutions, culture, laws, rights, and virtues. We’ve been astoundingly successful at absorbing immigrants on a massive scale because the expectation was everyone would embrace our values.

Does anyone think we’re getting better at assimilating immigrants?

It has been many years since I went shopping in local stores and heard only the English language and sometimes Alaska Native languages. It is more common now for me to hear languages from Central and South America or Southeast Asia. Even clerks speak to each other in languages other than English. I am not opposed to foreign languages, but I mention them to show one way that immigrants are not assimilating into our community.

What Do Scriptures Say About Immigration?

Immigration, particularly illegal immigration, is a big issue due to the rounding up of criminal illegal aliens and deporting them. In defense of illegal immigrants, Democrats often cite the Bible. I am a firm believer in scripture study and living according to the teachings of the prophets. However, I do not believe in misquoting or abusing scriptures.

James Hoffmeier noted that secularists and liberals rarely consult the Bible when making policies, and they “reject the Bible’s teachings on same-sex marriage, abortion, and trans ideology.” He said that he was surprised when the same people regularly cited the Old Testament while defending illegal aliens and/or sanctuary cities. 

As an Old Testament scholar, I was first intrigued by the fact that the Bible was even being used in the immigration debate, and yet I knew that the Bible was not being read seriously….

Three important questions must be raised before one attempts to apply Israelite law to the modern situation:

1. Was there such a thing as territorial sovereignty in the second millennium B.C. when these laws originated?

2.Within that socio-legal setting, what was a “stranger” or “sojourner”?

3. How does one obtain this status?

Regarding the first [question], the answer is unequivocal.

Nations small and large had clearly recognizable borders, typically demarcated by natural features such as rivers, valleys, and mountain ranges, much as they are today….

Wars were fought over where boundary lines would be drawn, and forts were strategically placed on frontiers to defend the territory and to monitor movements of pastoralists.

Permits akin to the modern visa were issued to people entering another land…

Secondly, what about the “stranger” or “alien”?

The Bible is not “a living, breathing document” that can mean whatever you want it to say. The question must be answered contextually and based on what the key words meant when they were written before we apply what that might mean in our own times.

The most significant Hebrew word for our discussion is ger, translated variously in English versions, which creates some confusion, as “stranger” (KJV, NASB, JB), “sojourner” (RSV, ESV), “alien” (NEB, NIV, NJB, NRSV), and “foreigner” (RNIV, NLT). It occurs more than 80 times as a noun and an equal number as a verb (gwr), which typically means “to sojourn” or “live as an alien.”

The problem with more recent English translations (e.g., TNIV and NLT) is that they use “foreigner” for ger, which is imprecise and misleading because there are other Hebrew terms for “foreigner,” namely nekhar and zar. The distinction between these two terms ger is that while all three are foreigners who might enter another country, the ger had obtained legal status.

There are several episodes in the Bible that illustrate how a foreigner became a ger.

The individual or party had to receive permission from the appropriate authority in that particular culture. Perhaps the best-known story has to do with the children of Israel entering Egypt.

In the book of Genesis, we are told of how during a time of famine in Canaan, the sons of Jacob did the natural thing under the circumstances – go to Egypt, where the Nile kept the land fertile. Even though their brother Joseph was a high-ranking official who had recommended to Pharaoh that they be allowed to settle in the northeast delta of Egypt, they felt compelled to ask Pharaoh for permission….

Here we notice that they declare their intention “to sojourn” (gwr) and deferentially they ask “please let your servant dwell in the land of Goshen.” No less authority than the king of Egypt granted this permission.

This means that the Hebrews, though foreigners, were residing in Egypt as legal residents, gers.

[Hoffmeier’s second story was about Moses was granted permission by Jethro to become a “sojourner,” “stranger,” or “alien.”]

Moses was thus able to call himself a sojourner (ger), not a foreigner (nakhiriyah) land. Gershom, his son’s name, contains the word ger, reflecting his change of status.

From the foregoing texts, we can conclude that in the ancient biblical world, countries had borders that were protected and respected and that foreigners who wanted to reside in another country had to obtain some sort of permission in order to be considered an alien with certain rights and privileges….

Finally, a brief word on the biblical practice of sanctuary….

Once again the conditions for sanctuary protection are plainly stated. “These six towns will be a place of refuge … so that anyone who has killed another accidentally can flee there” (Numbers 35:15).

Sanctuary, then, is explicitly a place to get a fair hearing in the case of accidental death, but for no other crime. The cities of refuge were not a place to void trial or punishment.

American cities that use their communities to circumvent the law to help the illegal alien in the name of justice are doing a gross injustice to the letter and spirit of the biblical law.

I left out most of the article, but I highly recommend it for anyone interested in immigration and/or sanctuary cities. As he explains it, Democrats, Leftists, or others have no ground to quote the Bible in support illegal immigration or sanctuary cities.

Is America Inherently Racist?

            There are people living in the United States who claim that America is inherently racist. They argue that the Revolutionary War was fought for slavery and that America has been racist since its day of founding. They use the argument of “original sin” of slavery to begin their argument, and they continue it with the way Indigenous people were treated, segregation, and Japanese internment camps.

All these events took place in the United States, and all of them are bad. However, they are not proof that systemic racism and white supremacy are inherent in American life. Ari Blaff does not agree with these arguments, and he gives one example to prove his point. 

But a curious phenomenon has been silently unfolding against this intellectual backdrop. Immigrants the world over – from South America and the Caribbean to Africa – are still coming to America in search of a better future for themselves and their children. As a native Canadian now traveling in the U.S., I have been curious about this seeming dichotomy and what it says about the nature of racism in America.

Following the relaxation of U.S. immigration policy in the 1960s away from racial preference, Black immigration to America in particular climbed sharply. According to the Population Reference Bureau, the foreign-born Black population in America increased seven-fold in the next two decades. Between 1980 and 200 it tripled again. By 2013, Pew Research Center reported that Black immigration had more than quadrupled since 1980.

The latest studies now place the Black immigrant population around 4.6 million by 2019, nearly double the community’s size in 2000. The figures are even larger for Latin American immigration. In 2018, an estimated 44.8 million immigrants were living in the United States with more than half coming from Mexico or Latin America, according to a Pew Research Center report.

These numbers are difficult to square with the rhetoric of some writers today.

There’s no question that racism is still a problem in the United States and beyond. But if America remains an unabashedly white supremacist state, as some claim, it’s worth asking why millions of Black and Latino immigrants would desperately see entry?

More specifically, why bother immigrating to a country in which leading intellectuals maintain that all aspects of life are structurally aligned against people of color? If the answer is that economic incentives outweigh the purported systemic racism, it’s worth asking whether economic incentives aren’t also evidence of opportunity. Immigration as measured by “foot voting” is one way to discern how individuals and families answer these questions for themselves….

It's not just the success of immigrants, but also that of native-born citizens in the United States that challenge the rhetoric emanating from cloistered academics today. Warts and all, the American Project continues to lift individuals and families of all shades to previously unimaginable heights.

            It is remarkable that a non-citizen from Canada is one to recognize that reality is different than what some people are claiming to be. America cannot be as bad as the socialists and Leftists assert. Otherwise, people of color would not risk rape, injury, and death to come. America has seen days when we did not live up to the ideals of Constitution, but America is not inherently racist. America is not perfect, but Americans are still moving to the ideals of the American idea.

Did Biden Make False or Misleading Statements about Immigration and Border?

            Last Friday, President Joe Biden was interviewed by NBC News about immigration and the border crisis. Experts say that the President made “numerous false or misleading statements” on the topic during the interview. Four members of the homeland security team at The Heritage Foundation responded to the claims by President Biden.

            Mark Morgan is the former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Chad Wolf is the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Mike Howell is an attorney that previously worked in the general counsel’s office for the Department of Homeland Security. The three men, plus Lora Ries, work for The Heritage Foundation. They responded to the following claims. 

Claim No. 1: Biden inherited “one God-awful mess at the border” from the Trump administration. Rating: False [Answered by Chad Wolf.]

The border crisis is entirely of the Biden administration’s own making, and it’s critical to understand the context in which it’s happening.

In the final months of the Trump administration, we saw border apprehensions increase because more people were coming illegally in the hopes of a Biden election victory. However, it wasn’t until the Biden administration took office that monthly apprehensions exploded, as Department of Homeland Security numbers make clear. [Emphasis added.]

This administration inherited a border that was under control thanks to strong and effective actions by the Trump administration. In May 2019 – the height of the 2019 crisis – 140,000 illegal aliens were caught crossing the border. However, by November 2019, this number was down to 42,000, and by April 2020, apprehensions were down to about 17,000.

This decrease was thanks to the Migrant Protection Protocols, which essentially eliminated fraudulent asylum claims at the southern border; asylum cooperative agreements with Northern Triangle countries, which gave individuals the ability to apply for protection closer to their home country instead of the southern border; and more construction of the border wall.

Every single one of these effective policies was still in place on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden undid them with the stroke of a pen in the first days of his administration. We’ve seen the numbers skyrocket since. Biden inherited the most secure border in U.S. history, and promptly blew it apart. [Emphasis added.]

Claim No. 2: “It is getting urgent action now.” Rating: False [Answered by

Mike Howell.]

This claim is fatuous on its face. Vice President Kamala Harris, who Biden tapped several weeks ago to lead the crisis response, won’t even visit the Norther Triangle until June.

Holding Zoom calls and calling for amnesty is not “urgent action.” Building more intake facilities is not urgent action, either….

“Urgent action” would be restarting construction of the border wall…. It would be restoring the Migrant Protection Protocols and asylum cooperative agreements with Northern Triangle countries. It would be untying the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement to allow them to deport those here illegally….

Claim No. 3: “For example, a month ago, we had thousands of young kids in custody in places they shouldn’t be, and controlled by the Border Patrol. We have now cut that down dramatically.” Rating: Misleading [Answered by Lora Ries.]

While the number of unaccompanied minors in Customs and Border Protection custody has decreased, the numbers are clear: Most of those minors are simply being transferred from one government agency to another – in this case, CBP custody to the Department of Health and Human Services.

In fact, more than 23,000 minors are [now in] federal custom as of a few days ago, more than 21,000 of which have been transferred to HHS….

And no matter who has custody of these minors, the Biden administration is doing nothing to eliminate the incentives for Centra and South American parents to continue to send their children to the border. Until that happens, these sky-high numbers will persist.

Claim No. 4: “Hey, look, here’s what happened – the failure to have a real transition. The two departments that didn’t give us access to virtually anything were the immigration [department] and the Defense Department. So, we didn’t find out they had fired a whole lot of people, that they were understaffed considerably.” Rating: False [Answered by Chad Wolf.]

What the president of the United States said is untrue. Plain and simple.

At the Department of Homeland Security, we provided the transition team with more than 200 extensive briefings on homeland security issues, the majority of which dealt with the border, immigration policy, and the processes and procedures we had in place to secure the border and reduce asylum fraud….

It's also untrue to claim anyone in DHS was fired during the transition. Not only is this factually incorrect, but it is illegal to remove any career executives for 120 days during a change in administration.

The Biden administration is not being truthful….

Claim No. 5: “Well, look, it is way down now. We’ve now gotten control.”

Rating: False [Answered by Mark Morgan.]

Nothing about the border crisis is “under control.” In just two months, more than 334,000 illegal aliens have been apprehended trying to cross our southern border, including 162,000 in April – the highest back-to-back monthly total in more than 15 years.

CBP officials also estimate more than 170,000 illegal aliens this fiscal year have evaded apprehension and are already in the U.S. Additionally, ICE is cutting arrests of violent criminal illegal aliens by 50%....

Claim No. 6: “For example, we have – they didn’t plan for, which it comes every year, this flow, whether it is 22,000 or 10,000, they didn’t have the beds that were available. They didn’t plan for the overflow. They didn’t plan for the Department of Health and Human Services to have places to take the kids from the Border Patrol and put them in beds where there was security and there were people who could take care of them. So, there is a significant change right now, a significant change in the circumstances for children coming to and at the border.” Rating: False [Answered by Mark Morgan.]

This is an outrageous claim – in November 2020, CBP under the Trump administration had fewer than 800 unaccompanied alien children, family units, and single adults in custody. In March of this year, that number had exploded to more than 10,000.

Even though apprehensions started increasing in 2020, as growing numbers of illegal migrants gambled on a potential Biden election victory and subsequent amnesty, the Trump administration had strong policies in place to quickly and responsibly process and deport most of these individuals. This meant there was no systemic issue with backlogs or overcrowded CBP or HHS facilities.

The Biden administration broke the system, and now has the temerity to blame the Trump administration for not implementing policies to anticipate its reckless behavior. It’s truly astounding.

Biden is right about one thing, though. The circumstances for children at the border have significantly changed. Biden’s open-borders agenda is only encouraging more unaccompanied minors and families to make the dangerous journey to the border, creating not only a humanitarian crisis, but also a windfall for the drug cartels and smugglers who profit off human misery, including, sadly, an ever-increasing number of children….

            According to the experts quoted above, the President of the United States is lying to or misleading the American citizens about immigration and the southern border. He obviously does not want the truth to get out. He has not been to the border and neither has Kamala Harris. In fact, the administration would not let the media into the border facilities until they had moved out some of the unaccompanied minors.

            The bottom line: Trump administration had the border situation under control with its policies. The Biden administration ended all the successful policies and invited the border surge. The crisis at the border belongs to Biden.