by Jason Hopkins
Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib defended her vote against an emergency spending bill that provided billions in funds to help manage the U.S. immigration crisis, and compared CBP’s work to Nazism.
“Absolutely,” Tlaib said Sunday when asked on ABC’s This Week if she agreed with comparisons of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention centers to Nazi concentration camps. “I mean there’s an number of experts that say this is — because it’s traumatic. I mean I don’t know how to explain to people what we saw when we’re explaining to people and they’re kind of looking back and saying, ‘well that can’t be true.’”
“And you know, this is a choice by the current administration, they are choosing to not allow asylum seekers to go through the legal process,” she continued.
Tlaib’s comments come after she and several other Democratic lawmakers toured CBP facilities that hold aliens who entered the country illegally. The Democratic representatives – which included Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joaquin Castro, and others – claimed the migrants were subjected to horrific living conditions.
However, when host Martha Raddatz asked why she would then vote against a $4.6 billion emergency spending bill that would help CBP provide better care – nearly $3 billion of which would go specifically toward unaccompanied migrants, Tlaib suggested that spending money on a “broken system” was not the solution.
Tlaib claimed that, during her tour, three CBP agents took her aside and said, “This is a broken system. This is inhumane.”
“And let’s be honest here, Martha. In the 80s, it was more that was coming across the border and we didn’t do this. We allowed asylum seekers to go through the legal process. We allowed community-based agencies to take the lead,” she continued. “There is a better choice and we’ve seen it in the 80s, we need to do better than what we’re doing now at the border.”
Tlaib is correct in claiming that more migrants were apprehended along the southwest border during the 1980s, but her omission of the demographics of today’s illegal migrants was misleading.
Migrant apprehensions topped one million each fiscal year from 1983 to 1987, according to CBP data. These numbers are higher than the 396,000 apprehensions seen in fiscal year 2018 and preceding years. However, as numerous officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have made clear, it’s the type of migrants reaching the border today that is fueling the crisis.
The vast majority of illegal aliens appearing before Border Patrol agents are either family units or unaccompanied alien children. U.S. laws are designed to quickly process and deport single men arriving from Mexico who are looking for work – the majority of which made up alien apprehensions in the 80s, but U.S. laws are not equipped to handle families and children who are arriving at the border and immediacy claiming asylum.
Speaking before a congressional panel in June, Border Patrol chief Carla Provost said 435,000 family units and children have poured across the U.S.-Mexico border this year alone. The situation has forced her agency to divert 40% to 60% of its manpower away from the border as it tries to manage the flood of these new type of illegal migrants.
DHS Acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan has addressed Congress numerous times and has made the same argument.
“I want to make clear that this crisis is unlike anything we’ve seen at our border, and it, in large part, is due to the gaps in our immigration laws that are driving it, causing a dramatic demographic shift in the flow of illegal immigration into the United States that is placing children at unique and critical risks,” McAleenan said during a June hearing, pointing out that 72% of all border enforcement actions in May were related to family units and unaccompanied children.
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Jason Hopkins is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
This is the kind of moron we don’t need in public office. She’s OK with the 150 billion/yr that illegals cost us (Annual cost to the US of Illegals Public Benefits: >$100 Billion; annual cost to the US of Illegals Health care: $18.5 Billion – Forbes), with the thousands of murders they commit annually, and with 36,007 convicted criminal aliens freed from detention who were awaiting the outcome of deportation proceedings, many of whom had multiple convictions including: 193 homicide convictions (including one willful killing of a public official with a gun); 426 sexual assault convictions; 303 kidnapping convictions; 1,075 aggravated assault convictions; 1,160 stolen vehicle convictions; 9,187 dangerous drug convictions; 16,070 drunk or drugged driving convictions; and 303 flight escape convictions.
Twelve percent of murder sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping sentences and 16 percent of drug trafficking sentences are meted out to illegal immigrants. The number of criminal illegal immigrants in federal prisons in 2010 was about 55,000; the number incarcerated in state prison systems and local jails was approximately 296,000 for the year 2009.
Based on the GAO’s sample of criminal immigrants, it’s estimated that the study population of these criminals had actually been previously arrested around 1.7 million times, averaging about seven arrests per person. That translated into a half-million drug related offenses, 70,000 sexual offenses, 213,000 assaults, 125,000 arrests for larceny/theft and 25,000 homicides. 25,000! That’s nearly half the casualties of the ten-year long Vietnam War.
The makeup of those criminal immigrants incarcerated in federal prisons: 68 percent were citizens of Mexico and over 90 percent were from one of seven Latin American countries: Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The GAO reports that 1 in 5 Federal prison inmates are criminal aliens – 20% – even though they are 3% of the population. Over a 6 year period from 2011 to 2016, more than 730,000 criminal aliens were in US prisons or jails, accounting for 4.9 million arrests, for 7.5 million offenses. More than 1 million drug crimes; more than 663 thousand assaults, sex offenses, and kidnappings; 33 thousand homicides, and 1,500 terrorism-related crimes. From 2010 to 2015, taxpayers paid more than 15 billion dollars – $2.5 billion/year to keep criminal aliens behind bars.
Meanwhile, this brain-dead, anti-American fool thinks that 5 billion to build a wall to keep these scum out and deprive the cartels – who are the de facto immigration service of Mexico, not the Mexican government – of a major source of income (drug smuggling, human trafficking, and extortion) is not a good use of taxpayer funds.
5 billion to stop it; 150 billion and untold lives annually to perpetuate it, and this numbskull votes against building a wall. What abject imbeciles elect someone like this?