Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian on the Border Crisis: ‘Biden Took Something That Was Fixed and Broke It’

Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian on the Border Crisis: ‘Biden Took Something That Was Fixed and Broke It’

 

Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies Mark Krikorian to the newsmakers line to discuss the repealed immigration policies of Trump that has lead to the Biden administration’s inability to control the border surge.

Leahy: We are joined on our newsmaker line right now by our good friend, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, Mark Krikorian. Mark, what a terrific piece you had on Thursday in the National Review about Vice President Kamala Harris’s, your words, layover in El Paso.

I wanna take this sentence from your article and just get you to elaborate on this. ‘As hard as it is to believe the Biden-Harris administration was taken by surprise by the border surge that it caused.’ Can you tell us more about that?

Krikorian: Yes. The administration probably knew that there was going to be some increase at the border when they undid all of the things Trump had done which successfully stabilized the border.

I mean, Trump didn’t solve everything but definitely had stabilized the situation. They basically expected a little bit of a surge, but Mexico would help them suppress it, and people would listen to their pleas not to come.

Remember, the Vice President went down there and said, do not come, do not come. They’re kind of like Jimmy Carter back in 1980. I know it’s a long time ago, but Jimmy Carter basically did the same thing with regard to Cuba.

He said, anybody who gets out of Cuba, we will welcome them with open arms and open hearts. And Castro looked up and said, hey, that’s a great idea. So he emptied his jails. 120,000 people streamed out of Cuba until Jimmy Carter was like, oh jeez, that’s not what I meant.

(Leahy laughs) But he was able to shut it down because he hadn’t run on immigration. He wasn’t boxed in politically. This administration has run as the anti-Trump. And since immigration was one of Trump’s top things, they had to undo everything Trump did, creating this disaster that they really don’t have any good idea about how to fix.

Leahy: Yes. It seems very obvious they don’t have any good idea how to fix it. Crom Carmichael is our all-star panelist in Studio. Chrome has a question for you, Mark.

Carmichael: Well, if, Mark, if they do want to fix it, then the obvious answer is to return to Trump’s policies.

Krikorian: Of course. But my point is they can’t do that just psychologically or politically. Right? It’s not going to happen.

Carmichael: I think the obvious conclusion is they don’t want to fix it because there’s an obvious answer on how to fix it. I guess my question to you is that they’re not going to return to the policies of Trump. And so the surge is going to actually get worse. Would you agree?

Krikorian: Yeah, sure. There’s no question. In the summer, it may actually dip. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. The numbers may actually go down a little bit because it is unbelievably hot down there this time of year.

And frankly, if you are planning on sneaking into the U.S., not just Central Americans, but now we’re getting people from Romania, Uzbekistan, India, and everywhere trying to get in on the action here, some of them may figure, well, let’s cool our heels for a couple of months somewhere where there’s air conditioning, and then we’ll come.

So the numbers could go down a little. But even if they do, they’re just going to go right back up in the fall. Not to get too long into it but this is not some long historical thing we always have to deal with.

This surge is the result of specific loopholes in the law that was passed in 2008 and 2009 and other changes since then. So this is not something we just have to deal with in perpetuity. Congress and the President over several administrations created this problem.

Trump stabilized it again. That’s what I mean by he didn’t fix the loopholes, but he did stabilize it. Biden took something that was fixed and broke it. And it’s not going away until we fix those loopholes and change the things that make it attractive to sneak in. Because the odds are good that you’ll just be let go.

Leahy: What are the major loopholes and what are the chances of fixing them legislatively?

Krikorian: The chances, I can tell you now are zero until there’s a change in Congress and the White House. But not to get too wonky, there’s a provision that says so-called unaccompanied minors, and we kind of take your word for it that you’re under 18 can’t just be returned home.

They have to be given hearings. They have to be delivered into shelters and delivered to their parents who are here illegally often paying to smuggle them. That has to be changed. There’s a court ruling that Congress can overrule that says minors, even if they’re with their parents, can’t be held in immigration detention for more than three weeks.

But they have to be let go, including the parents. There’s more to it than that. But that’s the kind of thing that we have basically created the situation in a time when there weren’t a lot of kids or families coming over.

People in Congress figured out what’s the harm? Make us feel good. Virtue signaling, and it won’t really have any consequences. Well, within a few years, the problem exploded because these things started really in 2008, and 2009 is when these were passed.

It blew up under Obama in 2014. It’s just been getting these ups and downs, but it’s just been getting worse ever since.

Leahy: What you take on the job, direct Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has been doing?

Krikorian: Terrible but terrible because that’s what he was hired to do. In other words, he’s doing the job that this administration hired him to do, which is, first of all, not to enforce immigration law.

ICE, which is under his purview, is basically not permitted to do immigration enforcement except in the most extreme cases of terrorists and spies. And that sort of thing. Other than that, illegal immigrants have a free pass.

Leahy: Let me ask you this about Mayorkas. Is his failure to enforce our immigration laws an impeachable offense?

Krikorian: That’s kind of up to the Senate. They could impeach him. The House in the Senate, and frankly, they probably should, but they shouldn’t have approved him in the first place. And anybody who replaces them is just going to do the same thing because this is what the President promised to do.

This is a political problem in the sense that we’ve got to get rid of or change who’s in the White House and then change who’s in the majority of Congress before any of this can change.

Carmichael: Mark, is Mayorkas not upholding the law, or is he exploiting loopholes? And the reason I’m asking the question is in a new administration, once he is out of office, could he be indicted for not upholding his oath of office?

Krikorian: I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t think he’s upholding his oath of office, but I don’t think the president’s upholding his oath of office. The Constitution requires the executive to faithfully execute the laws, and that’s not what Biden is doing.

It’s not what Mayorkas is doing at Biden’s instruction. So, I mean, potentially, I guess. But I don’t like the criminalization of politics. I think what we need to do, and this is me talking as a citizen, CIS doesn’t get involved in elections, but as a citizen, the solution is to get rid of these guys from office and put in somebody who actually is going to do what’s necessary.

Carmichael: Here is I guess question, and you’re hitting on an excellent I’m asking you something in your responses philosophical in nature, which is appropriate. But if Republicans were to retake the House and have a majority in the Senate, but not 60 and have the presidency, you can’t fix immigration legislation with less than 60 votes.

Krikorian: You can’t fix everything, obviously, because of the filibuster. But the filibuster is protecting us this time. Do you know what I mean? There is a great reason for it. But there’s a lot of smaller things that can be changed that some of them the Democrats may go along with.

You put package deals together. Okay, they get some of this. We get these four immigration loopholes fixed. It’s not impossible. The first thing is, you need to get control of the majorities in Congress and get somebody in the White House.

Leahy: Last question. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the chances of fixing any of this over the next three and a half years?

Krikorian: Oh yeah. I mean, pessimistic isn’t a word. There is zero possibility of any of this getting fixed.

Listen to the full third hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Washington Correspondent Neil McCabe Updates on Woman at the Border Blocking Senators and Kamala’s Awaiting Presidency

Washington Correspondent Neil McCabe Updates on Woman at the Border Blocking Senators and Kamala’s Awaiting Presidency

 

Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed Tennessee Star National Correspondent Neil McCabe to the newsmakers line to discuss the unmasking and verification of the woman that blocked Senator Ted Cruz’s right to film migrants at the detention facilities on the southern border and a Harris presidency waiting in the wings.

Leahy: In studio with us is state Senator Mark Pody, the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael. On the newsmaker line, breaking stories left and right our Washington correspondent Neil McCabe. Good morning, Neil.

McCabe: Hey. Good morning, guys. Really good to be with you, Mark and Crom.

Leahy: So I was not in the studio on Wednesday. I just have to give a note of congratulations to you, Neil for breaking that great story about John Kerry, former Secretary of State, of whom we captured a photo of him on a plane not wearing a mask, which is, of course, something that Joe Biden says you can’t do. The regulations say you can’t do it. But we got that photo that was all over the place two weeks ago for about 48 hours. It was the only picture that apparently you could see on Fox News. And it was a Tennessee Star breaking story. Congratulations on that get.

McCabe: Wasn’t that fun, Mike? And it’s always funny when you’re working with you and Christina before a story posts, you think you have something, but you’re not really sure. And it’s like we reached out to American Airlines. They came back to us and they said, what was the flight number? I told them what flight it was, and they passed our deadline. We gave them another 15 minutes. But you just can’t hold that thing forever. And once it took off, it just took off.

Leahy: It really did. It’s been the most-watched or viewed story in the history of The Tennessee Star. It was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of page views. So good job on that. Now we have another story. We are giving the other side an opportunity to respond. They haven’t responded yet, but we’re about to break a story today. Again, you’re breaking another story. We have apparently the identity of the woman who was blocking Senator Ted Cruz from taking videos of the young kids in these, I don’t know what you call them. In very terrible circumstances on the border detention centers.

McCabe: They are detention centers and it’s a horrible situation. I read yesterday that there are now more migrant children in custody under Biden than there ever was during the peak of Trump. And they just keep coming. And this woman was going left when Cruz’s camera went left. She went right when he went right.

And she quite literally was violating the constitution. A senator has a constitutional obligation for oversight. And the idea that somebody in the executive branch would jump in front of somebody’s camera while he’s trying to narrate a video and keeps interrupting him and talking over him. If she is willing to do that to a U.S. Senator, you can imagine what they’ve been doing behind the scenes to reporters.

Leahy: Exactly. And, Neil, we’ve had this story since, I think, Sunday night. And we know the identity. We have given the Department of Homeland Security plenty of time to confirm or deny. And I think we’ve given them until nine o’clock this morning. To borrow the old Howie Carr line, when the phone didn’t ring, we knew it was the Department of Homeland Security calling back to confirm or deny the identity of this person. Crom Carmichael.

Carmichael: What you’re doing is you’re giving the Department of Homeland Security the opportunity to deny that you have correctly identified this person.

Leahy: We are doing that.

Carmichael: You’re not asking for confirmation or they could confirm it? You are at least giving them a chance to say no. I’m sorry. You got the wrong name.

Leahy: Exactly right.

Carmichael: Neil, is this person an employee of the Department of Homeland Security?

McCabe: Absolutely.

Carmichael: So it wasn’t somebody from the Biden administration sent down there to tag along with the senators and try to disrupt them?

McCabe: Yeah, she’s a political minder. She’s like a commissar who’s been sent alongside the delegation and it’s her job to sort of corral.

Carmichael: So she did travel. She wasn’t somebody who worked there with those children day in, day out. She traveled down. Interesting.

McCabe: No, no, no. If we have ID her correctly, and I believe we have, she’s someone who’s from Texas, but someone who works in a very senior position in the Obama administration in the Customs and Border Protection. And she has returned to a similar position at Customs and Border Protection. So she is working in Washington. Ted Cruz already said at his press conference that she went to another Senator and demanded that he delete the photos that he had taken and threatened that if he did not delete them, she would throw them all out of the facility.

Leahy: Under what legal authority was that, Neil?

McCabe: No idea. (Leahy chuckles) Michael, we asked them what was her role and what rules were they supposed to be following? Now I will say that it is considered a violation of people’s rights if someone is in a refugee or detention or prisoner status, you’re not supposed to exploit them, which is why Cruz made the point that he would blur their faces. But other than blurring the faces of children that are only for propriety.

My view is if I can see and I’m on the sidewalk and I see something, I can take a picture of what I see. It’s not a secret. But we’ll see what happens when this thing launches. I also want to say with Biden coming out with a new tax increase and he’s putting that in front of the infrastructure bill that he’s going to release. And then he’s got behind that a gun confiscation or a big restriction of gun rights bill coming up.

And Biden is really loading some barrels onto that wagon and he doesn’t have the horses to pull it. He’s absolutely running out of time. I’ve said this before. He hasn’t yet addressed Congress. He does not yet have a director of Office and Budget Management confirmed. They haven’t even nominated secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and a slew of other positions. And Nancy Pelosi has a five-seat margin in the House. That is very very high. And as these Democrats look at the polls, and they look at that red wave that’s coming in 2022, they’re not going to go down with the Biden ship.

Leahy: But the good news, of course, is that the legal but not legitimate occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden has given an assignment to Vice President Kamala Harris, which is to go down to the border. What’s happened with that assignment?

McCabe: Yeah, she’s pretending she never got that assignment, and it’s a very interesting dynamic. And it happened a lot sooner than I expected is that you are now seeing the Biden and the Harris camps really develop into factions. And now you’re seeing some embarrassing leaks about Harris that she’s supposedly uncomfortable at Blair House. She’s impatient to get into her mansion. And that sort of comes from the Biden people.

And wait for the Harris people to start leaking. And remember, Harris’s sister, Maya Harris is married to Tony West, who is number three in the Obama Justice Department and who was basically in the running to replace or take the place instead of it going to Loretta Lynch. Loretta Lynch got that top job. But Tony West is very much a part of that Obama legal machine. And in Maya Harris was very much running her sister Kamala’s campaign. There is a government waiting that is centered around Kamala Harris. And the Biden people are showing that they don’t want to leave or be pushed out so quickly.

Leahy: Deliver us oh, Lord, from a Kamala Harris administration. That’s my prayer for today. Neil McCabe thank you so much for joining us. We’ll talk to you next week at the same time.

McCabe: Thanks, Michael. Be good.

Listen to the third hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.