Immigration Enforcement: Trump isn’t Backing Off

American Thinker 

In response to the Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti killings, and President Trump’s announced changes in dealing with chaos in Minneapolis, corporate media crowed, claiming he was taking a U-turn. Plenty of conservative social media influencers blasted him. But Trump has done no such thing. Some prominent conservatives are overreacting. Corporate media -- vultures all -- are always anxious to tear a strip off Trump.

Trump's outreach to Minnesota governor Tim Walz marked a change in policy, corporate media and some conservatives claim. It’s a capitulation. Nope. Trump's de-escalation in Minneapolis isn't about scuttling his goal of getting criminal illegals off the streets and ending deportations. It's about finding different ways of doing it. Trump's many years of experience as a New York City developer and as president has taught him how to navigate sticky situations. He's learned that the way to achieving a goal is rarely by a straight line. It's a zig-zag course with plenty of setbacks and, usually, small steps forward until breakthroughs are accomplished.

How often in Trump's business and political careers has he quit? Infrequently, and certainly not when it comes to pursuing big prizes. For Trump, delay isn’t defeat. It’s an opportunity to learn and adjust.

Controlling the borders and winnowing out "undocumented" immigrants has been a core aim of Trump's since he first announced for the presidency. He isn't going to abandon that aim because of flak or roadblocks or wobbly establishment Republicans like Louisiana U.S. senator Bill Cassidy. He isn’t going to let quick judgments by conservative social media players pull him off his game.

Nor is Trump going to be deterred by the inevitable ups and downs in polling. It’s January, after all. The midterm elections are months off. Trump’s midrange goal is to improve optics and keep on plugging.

Nor will Trump permit lightweights like Minnesota governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey to derail him. Trump’s use of sledgehammer rhetoric masks a thoughtful and deft mind. For him, obstacles are cues to change approaches to get what he wants.

W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner provides proof that Trump is far from fickle. When it comes to winning, there’s no cut and run in him.

The Washington Examiner, January 27:

For the last decade, immigration has defined Trump’s political career. He used the issue to distinguish himself from Republican primary opponents, including Jeb Bush, whose brother advocated amnesty for most illegal immigrants as president, and Marco Rubio, who, as a senator from Florida, was part of the “Gang of Eight” behind the last major bipartisan amnesty push in 2013.

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Rubio recalibrated and is now Trump’s secretary of state. Bush is out of electoral politics, and his family, which included two Republican presidents, has lost influence within the GOP.

Trump’s most prominent 2016 campaign promise was his pledge to build a wall along the southern border at Mexico’s expense. It became a catchphrase at his rallies. “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe, thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts,” Trump told the New York Times editorial board.

Immigration was once again among the reasons Trump returned to the White House. Former President Joe Biden lost control of the border and allowed record levels of illegal immigration during his term, but Trump vowed to secure it again.

Moreover, the apparent massive fleecing of Minnesota state welfare programs -- involving loads of Uncle Sam’s money -- perpetrated by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis fuels, not detracts, from Trump's intention of sending criminals packing, whether they’re documented or entered the country illegally. The Somali fraud is reported to be in the many billions of dollars. Democrat leaders -- including Walz, who’s been forced from his reelection bid -- are implicated, even if it was just turning a blind eye to the gargantuan theft. Doing that alone would be a crime -- a crime committed to, in effect, grease the palms of an important voting bloc for Minnesota Democrats.

But Democrat crimes may be greater. Trump's Department of Justice is investigating. Walz and others may be in a much bigger world of hurt.

How do we know that Trump is only switching tactics and not bailing?

One name: Tom Homan. Homan is a longtime border and immigration enforcement vet. He was so effective in his work that President Barack Obama awarded him with the Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service. Because they need new voters, Democrats have done an about-face on border security and illegal immigration, but not Homan. He’s long allied with Trump.

Homan was just dispatched by the president to oversee efforts in Minnesota. Homan -- unlike Kristi Noem and others in the administration -- has pushed for a surgical or "peeling back the onion" approach to tackling immigration enforcement. Go after the worst of the worst criminal immigrants first. Enlist -- or in the case of Minnesota, maneuver -- state and local officials into cooperating with ICE and Border Patrol efforts. Homan's approach takes patience. It’s chess master stuff, but it lowers the heat while stripping layer after layer to accomplish the mission.

Note, too, that Trump is publicly calling for Walz and Frey to turn over criminal illegal aliens now in state and local custody. That simple ask puts Walz, Frey, and Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison in a tough spot politically. Why not hand over criminal illegals who have committed felonies? Why keep bad hombres in Minnesota lockups? Process them on the federal level then boot them out. Voters won’t object to kicking out murderers, rapists, child traffickers, and thieves. Trump is working at shifting the political ground back to himself. If Walz, Frey, and Ellison resist, Trump has a wedge issue readymade for the midterm elections.

Further clues that Trump isn't tucking tail and running. Amid speculation that he planned to fire Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and demote Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, no such things happened. Noem still has her job. Bovino was reassigned. Noem wins a vote of confidence from Trump, at least for the time being. Trump’s backing has quieted Noem critics -- for the moment. And his reassignment of Bovino simply moves him to another theater of operations. That's hardly a firing.

Initial reactions to Trump's new gambits in Minneapolis were wrong. Because Trump isn't invoking the Insurrection Act doesn't mean he intends to let go of the corruption in the Somali community -- corruption that, perhaps, was aided and abetted by the state's Democrats. It means that he's willing to alter his angle of attack and modify tactics to achieve his ends.

That's the mark of an exceptional leader, one with a strong, agile mind, who doesn't stubbornly keep trying to push through dead ends, but backs out and finds new routes to success. Trump isn't perfect, but that's the point. No one is. Yet anyone who’s really smart, possesses a gift for what he does, and loads of experience never permits himself to get stuck. Trump never backed off or got trapped through two impeachments, a rigged 2020 election, and ongoing persecution by Biden’s henchmen and Democrats in New York and Georgia.

Don't bet against Donald Trump achieving ultimate victory. He’s dedicated to not only cleaning up the immigration mess created by Biden’s handlers, but resetting immigration policies and enforcement approaches for future times.

You're watching a master at work. Keep watching. We all can learn something.

Podcast thread for Jan 30

 

Can all this dry air just go away?

Too Many Democrats Want Us Dead

American Thinker 

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the multiple assassination attempts on President Trump, and the violent targeting of federal agents in Minnesota, non-leftists in America must accept that leftists intend to do them harm. There are no signs that Democrats want to de-escalate political tensions in the United States. On the contrary, at least since community organizer Barack Obama became president, escalation -- including verbal harassment, stalking, physical intimidation, and outright violence -- has been a key component of Democrats’ political strategy. Scaring political opponents into silence or subjugation is now standard operating procedure for the Democrat Party.

Elected Republicans have proven useless in protecting non-leftist Americans. They routinely ignore leftist violence in the United States or actually join the Left’s side. Remember when then-senator Mitt Romney marched with Black Lives Matter protesters during 2020’s “summer of love” while Antifa and BLM were burning down cities, looting businesses, and murdering Americans across the country? Remember when then-senator Jeff Flake blamed President Trump’s “rhetoric” for causing a left-wing nut-job from Illinois to try to massacre an entire baseball field of Republican lawmakers (including Flake) in 2017? When elected Republicans are so beaten into submission that they defend the very people who wish them dead, normal Americans cannot look to them for even basic protection. 

It would be nice to think that this month’s Minneapolis insurrection against federal law enforcement officers would jolt sleeping American voters awake. Surely Republicans will be able to keep their slim majority in Congress later this year when Democrats are waging war against the U.S. government. Who would vote for the party that attacks police officers? Unfortunately, we’ve seen this show too many times. If there’s one thing that elected Republicans enjoy more than taking money from lobbyists who pay them to betray their own voters, it is finding a way back to being in the minority.

When President Trump beat “Crooked” Hillary Clinton in 2016, he did so by appealing to black, Hispanic, and working-class voters in a way that no Republican had done since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Instead of appreciating how Trump had revolutionized the Republican Party and quickly supporting his agenda, then-speaker of the House Paul Ryan pretended that the Democrats’ Russia Collusion Hoax was real, slow-walked Trump’s plans for a border wall, ignored every other promise Trump had made to voters, practically encouraged sitting Republican lawmakers to retire before the midterms, and promptly retired from office himself after handing Democrats the House in 2018.

After giving Nancy Pelosi the House, Ryan joined Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation Board of Directors, a perch from which Ryan criticized Trump’s re-election campaigns in 2020 and 2024. During all that time, Ryan continued to ignore how substantially Trump had expanded the Republican Party’s appeal to Americans across class and racial heritage and instead regularly accused the president of catering to a small group of white MAGA voters. In truth, Trump received more votes in the 2024 election than any political candidate in American history (aside from puppet Joe Biden’s 2020 election “victory” in which questionable mail-in-ballot procedures conducive to large-scale fraud supposedly gave the Delaware dimwit fifteen million more votes than Democrat demigod Barack Obama). 

The point is this: elected Republicans have proven time and again that they are willing to hand the Democrat Party victories it should not have -- even if they must vilify a sitting Republican president. 

If this were not clear before January 6, 2021, it certainly was clear afterwards. As much as corporate news propagandists have worked with the Democrat Party (and RINO saboteurs) to frame the million-person protest against mail-in-ballot fraud and the tainted 2020 election as a violent “insurrection,” it was no such thing. Corrupt FBI agents, DoJ prosecutors, and leftist judges certainly did everything they could to help the Marxist rewriters of history portray the protest as a “revolution” and attempt to “overthrow the government,” but they always hide the fact that none of the protesters were armed. Unarmed protesters do not make an “insurrection.” On the contrary, armed rioters attacking federal agents -- as we have seen in Minneapolis -- constitute nothing less than an insurrection. Strangely, the propaganda press calls the former “violent” and the latter “peaceful.” That’s how liars perpetuate false “narratives.”

What the J6 election integrity protests taught non-leftists in America is that nobody in a position of power will protect them. After the election-riggers successfully dispatched Donald Trump in 2021, Democrats could have calmed things down and attempted to heal the wounds of a deeply divided country. They did no such thing. Instead, the FBI and DoJ dedicated substantial resources to identifying (using Intelligence Community surveillance systems), hunting down, and prosecuting every grandparent, veteran, and patriot who had the bad misfortune of walking through the Capitol’s open doors and strolling through the “People’s House” that day.

The propaganda press called every Trump supporter a “domestic terrorist.” Senator Mitch McConnell and his RINO battalion (Murkowski, Romney, Tillis, Collins, Cassidy, Cornyn, etc.) joined former president George W. Bush and the rogues’ gallery of NeverTrumpers in immediately calling the three-hour tour of Congress an “insurrection.” It was almost as if Establishment Republicans, Democrats, and corporate news propagandists had agreed to the same talking points even before the January 6 protest began.

For the four years of Biden’s installation, Trump and his voters were under attack. Corrupt Democrat prosecutors and judges inflicted maximum pain on the president, his associates, J6 protesters, pro-life Christians, parents objecting to sexualized agendas in their children’s classrooms, and anyone who got in the Left’s way. The corrupt Biden administration attempted to institutionalize a censorship board to police conservatives’ speech. Biden’s tyrannical COVID authorities threatened to remove children from un-“vaccinated” parents, bar un-“vaccinated” workers from gainful employment, and lock up un-“vaccinated” Americans in “quarantine camps” until they were properly re-educated.

Think about what leftists are already promising to unleash once they retake political power. They don’t simply plan on expanding the Supreme Court with Marxists or delivering mass amnesty for the tens of millions of illegal aliens already inside the United States. An Ohio Democrat running for attorney general plans on seeking the death penalty for President Trump. Philadelphia’s Democrat district attorney Larry Krasner says ICE agents will be “hunted down” like “Nazis” for as many decades as it takes. An NYU professor is demanding “Nuremberg Trials” for Trump officials once Democrats regain power, and Democrats on social media want “to go door to door rounding up ‘red hats’ if they win again.” NeverTrumper Rick Wilson has explicitly called for White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller “to be the first one who is tried and convicted and fucking dangles.”

Meanwhile, random Democrat librarians are recruiting social media followers to assassinate President Trump, and random Democrat nurses are working to poison federal agents. Virginia’s Democrat attorney general has fantasized about shooting Republicans in the head and watching Republicans’ children die in their mothers’ arms. Calling for the death of the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Democrats chant, “Kristi Noem will hang!” Actress Molly Ringwald insists that Trump supporters will be found guilty of treason for having “collaborated” with “fascists.”

Too many violent Democrats want us dead. Too few authorities will do anything to stop the threat. Be safe. Be vigilant. Be ready.

The Rise of the New Confederacy

Townhall 

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun," King Solomon famously observed in the Koheleth (Book of Ecclesiastes). Truer words have never been written. Look no further than the present anarchic tumult in Minnesota.

On Jan. 12, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison initiated a lawsuit on behalf of the North Star State, along with municipal co-plaintiffs Minneapolis and St. Paul, against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons and the rest of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement apparatus. In his press conference announcing the suit, Ellison emphasized the same basic arguments as his formal complaint: Namely, that ICE's enforcement "surge" in Minnesota amounts to a "violation of the Tenth Amendment and the sovereign laws and powers granted to states."

In essence, Ellison and his Minnesota Democratic Party leadership confreres argue that the constitutional federalism articulated in the Tenth Amendment and its corollary of "states' rights" can shield the Land of 10,000 Lakes from the long enforcement arm of federal immigration law. Ellison and Minnesota Democrats claim that by declaring their state and cities to be illegal alien "sanctuaries," they can "nullify" federal immigration law. Stop me if you've heard that one before.

Democrats in America have a long and inglorious history of invoking "states' rights" and shirking federal law. It has never ended well.

In 1798 and 1799, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- members of the Democratic-Republican Party, the partisan predecessor to today's Democratic Party -- penned the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. The Resolutions, a direct response to the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts championed by President John Adams, argued that when Congress passes an unconstitutional statute, the states are permitted to declare the law null and void within their own jurisdictions. According to this argument, if a state's constitutional officers deem a federal law to be unconstitutional, the Supremacy Clause of Article VI of the Constitution -- which normally establishes federal law as "the supreme law of the land" over state law -- simply does not apply.

This sentiment was taken to its logical conclusion during the antebellum period. During the nullification crisis of 1832-33, South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification, declaring the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 to be unconstitutional and unenforceable in the Palmetto State. South Carolina even took initial steps to organize the militia in anticipation of attempted federal mobilization. In ensuing decades, South Carolinian John C. Calhoun emerged as the most passionate advocate for state nullification. Calhoun argued not only for a state's "right" to nullify federal law but also to secede from the Union, if necessary, to secure its sovereignty. The result was the 1861 attack on Fort Sumter and the 600,000-plus slain in the Civil War.

For nearly a century after the Civil War, Calhoun's ghost lingered. As the civil rights movement gained steam, segregationists invoked nullification and "states' rights" as justifications for defying federally mandated civil rights. The Southern Manifesto, signed by dozens of U.S. senators and congressmen in 1956, took the position that the Tenth Amendment permitted states to defy the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision of 1954. In the Little Rock Crisis of 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus relied on the same principles when he ordered the Arkansas National Guard to block Black students from attending Little Rock Central High School. Faubus lost his showdown when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division to forcibly desegregate Little Rock.

In echoing the discredited theories of yesteryear, Ellison, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.,, and the rest of the state's top Democratic brass have emerged as modern reincarnations of Jefferson Davis and George Wallace. They wouldn't see it that way, naturally. Nor would Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recognize that her own "race-infused worldview" and belief in "racial determinism," as Justice Clarence Thomas accused her of harboring in his Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) concurrence, is an updated version of Calhoun's vile life outlook. But that's precisely what it is.

On Thursday, Trump border czar Tom Homan announced that the administration is prepared to draw down federal personnel in Minnesota if the state cooperates. We'll see if that transpires, but I have my suspicions. Historically, Democratic Party subversives and insurrectionists have not been known for their cooperation with the feds. The good news for President Donald Trump is that he has a clear legal precedent for how to respond if the neo-Confederate uprising in Minnesota continues apace. On April 15, 1861, in response to the attack on Fort Sumter three days prior, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807. Trump has recently been musing about doing the same.

Will Trump pull the trigger? Maybe. After all, there's nothing new under the sun.

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Trump Is Reading Leftist Desperation As Strength

The desperation of petulant anti-ICE activists is a sign that the Trump administration is fighting a gang of adult children who can’t and won’t prevail in any serious fight.

The Federalist

As the radical hope of the 1960s withered into the radical burnout of the 1970s, leftists turned to violence. Groups like the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the FALN planted bombs, murdered cops, and robbed banks in the supposed service of political revolution. Looking back on those years, many of the participants in far-left political violence recalled it as a period of desperation and madness. Twenty years later, being a violent radical was an embarrassing memory. In interviews about their past with the journalist Bryan Burrough, old radicals used words like “deluded” to describe their younger selves. “It’s just so absurd I participated in all this,” the former Weather Underground bombmaker Cathy Wilkerson said, sitting in a Brooklyn diner with her grandson.

The turn to violence and rage wasn’t the moment of rising power — it was the moment of desperation. The New Left watched Americans turn to Governor Reagan and President Nixon, saw that their project of political transformation had failed, and lashed out as a bitter reaction. They attacked because they had lost.

History is a cycle, and here we are again: They’re attacking now because they have lost again. As the dumbest people in the history of the universe fight ICE and Border Patrol officers in the streets and engage in ludicrous warrior cosplay with the plastic whistles they somehow regard as symbols of heroism, they aren’t demonstrating that the country is on their side. Instead, they’re proving, with the greatest possible clarity, that they know the argument is over. The country isn’t with them. Recent polling headline: “Majority of Americans Support ICE Carrying out the Trump Immigration Agenda.” The battle has moved to the streets because the conversation is finished, the answer has been given, and they don’t like the answer.

Americans see why Joe Biden opened the border: A massive flood of illegal immigrants is a client class for the corruption of the Democratic Party’s revived Tammany Hall political model, and Miracle-Gro for big government. Surging blue state spending falls into place inevitably behind the effort to provide free food, clothing, housing, medical care, and every other free thing you can think of, for Democratic pet groups. The California state legislature’s legislative analyst is warning that the state is on a path to near-term insolvency; the sociopathic halfwit Democratic governor brags about the billions of dollars the state spends on free healthcare for illegals.

The corrupt free money agenda, the emerging insolvency crisis, and the fetishization of “our undocumented neighbors” is all the same thing. Americans don’t want it, and know we can’t afford it. The end. The desperation of petulant anti-ICE activists kicking cars full of federal agents or gaggling up around federal buildings isn’t a sign of a powerful opposition. It’s a sign that the Trump administration is fighting a gang of adult children who can’t and won’t prevail in any serious fight.

And yet the website of the narrative-making New York Times, on Wednesday morning, led with a cluster of headlines about “the ICE uproar” and the Trump administration backing down: “How Trump Realized He Had a Big Problem in Minneapolis,” for example, and “Why Did the Trump Administration Silence Bovino on Social Media?” The Substack journalist Alex Berenson similarly warns that “President Trump knows he has to change course,” as America panics over ICE. The conventional wisdom is that Trump has to retreat, as if retreating is the path to victory.

If you’re explaining, you’re losing. Throughout the first year of Trump’s second term, Trump acted and the left reacted. Whatever anyone said, they were fighting inside a narrative frame that the administration established. Today, the momentum has shifted. Endlessly re-arguing details about ICE shootings is arguing inside the framework of people like the repellent Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, who says that the story of the moment is that “they are killing us in the streets.”

The reality is that Joe Biden’s open border is producing a predictable reaction, Democrat-run places are racing toward financial collapse, ruinous blue state fraud is metastasizing everywhere, and Americans support a restoration of lawful immigration as an alternative to the unmanaged flood of people who show up wanting endless sums of free government money. But a president who sat in the driver’s seat for a year is now sitting in the back seat, complaining at the driver. He’s reacting. To borrow from an old panic, he needs to leap over the barrier and grab the steering wheel again.

The left is losing. Treat them like losers.

Fighting ICE In The Streets Is Not Demonstrating Jesus’ Love To Anyone

To claim that disruptions of law enforcement activities somehow represents the Gospel is not only risible, it’s insulting.

The Federalist

Some of the most vocal antagonists of the Trump administration’s attempts to rein in illegal immigration have come from men and women of the cloth. Last Friday, about 100 clergy members protesting deportation flights were arrested during a peaceful sit-in at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. Episcopal bishops in New Hampshire and Minnesota recently exhorted their flocks to be prepared even for death in order to protect vulnerable illegal immigrants.

In one sense, you can appreciate why priests, pastors, rabbis, and other clerics might feel called to intervene on behalf of illegal immigrants targeted by ICE raids in various communities across our country. The Democrats and corporate media have conducted a relentless campaign (falsely) portraying immigration authorities as heartless fascists brutalizing helpless immigrants and separating children from their families. But in truth, it’s not federal law enforcement but deluded activist clerics in need of a “come to Jesus” moment.

The Absurd Histrionics of Anti-ICE Activist Clerics

Last week Minneapolis’s Temple Israel synagogue hosted an interfaith service to launch the day of activism, with senior rabbi Marcia Zimmerman uttering the typical pablum that “history is on our side.” Washington’s Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde, the prominent Trump critic and a former Minneapolis priest, traveled to Minnesota for the Friday event, which was advertised as following in the footsteps of the 1960s civil rights marches. In a video seen millions of times on social media, Episcopal Bishop Robert Hirschfeld even urged priests “to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world, and the most vulnerable.”

Granted, there is a certain absurdity with a bishop of the Episcopal Church — the wealthiest per capita denomination in the United States and the epitome of liberal mainline affluence — portraying his priests as anti-establishment renegades and future martyrs. Moreover, such rhetoric gives the impression that anti-ICE clerics are marching off to resist the equivalent of Bull Connor and the Ku Klux Klan, rather than federal law enforcement carrying out warrants against illegal aliens, many of whom have extensive criminal records in the United States.

Yet this is the language of clerics opposed to immigration enforcement. “I believe that if someone professes to represent the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to preach it, that they should not be allowing ICE agents to drag people out of their homes,” said ordained minister and protest leader Nekima Levy Armstrong last week on the show Democracy Now! This effectively makes opinions on immigration enforcement a litmus test for whether or not you are a true Christian, which seems not a little overwrought, given the absence of the topic in the pages of the New Testament.

Immigration Enforcement Is Not Contradictory to Christianity

Many Christians and other peoples of faith may be wondering based on the extreme rhetoric of many American religious leaders — perhaps even their own pastors or priests — if supporting immigration enforcement is somehow at odds with their religious convictions, particularly those regarding caring for the persecuted and vulnerable. Undoubtedly, when we are talking about an unauthorized immigration population of around 14 million people, it’s inevitable that some of those people likely suffered a form of persecution in their country of origin, and many are in economically difficult situations here in the United States. Moreover, given everyone enjoys the imago dei, they are all deserving of respect and fair treatment, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted in their November 2025 statement, praying for “an end to dehumanizing rhetoric and violence, whether directed at immigrants or at law enforcement.”

Nevertheless, nations have the right to police their borders, especially when we are talking about the largest wave of human migration in U.S. history, and one of the largest in modern history. Citizens have a right to safety, which has been threatened by this huge influx of persons, many of whom are trafficked via dangerous cartels and other criminal networks or are engaged in criminal activity in this country. Citizens have a right to fairly compete for wages and employment, rather than being undercut by illegal aliens willing to work for below market rates, as Harvard economist George J. Borjas has argued for decades. And citizens have a right to have their taxes be spent on other citizens —  illegal aliens currently impose net fiscal costs of at least $110 billion per year on U.S. taxpayers.

Unless borders and laws mean nothing, there has to be some way for governments to address illegal immigration. Ideally, our federal government would do this in close cooperation with local law enforcement, so that disruption to the peace and security of local communities would be minimalized. As we have seen in Minneapolis and a host of other American municipalities, this is not happening, often encouraged by liberal state, city, and county officials who have their own incentives to fight immigration enforcement. As Mark Hemingway recently noted here, state and local politicians are beholden to voting blocs of recent immigrants, and blue states enjoy power and congressional seats from illegal immigrants who are counted in census results.

Anti-ICE Activism Is More About Leftist Ideology Than Christianity

As protests in Minneapolis and other sanctuary cities have made clear, anti-ICE efforts are coordinated and conducted out of a leftist playbook — Renee Good was herself trained by ICE Watch activists who operate local groups across the country. These activists may appeal to language and ideas that intersect with Christianity and other religious traditions such as caring for the poor or welcoming the stranger, but they are at their core ideologues of the left with a specific political agenda: ending immigration enforcement altogether.

American men and women of good will can and should debate various aspects of immigration enforcement, such as what tactics law enforcement should use to identify and detain illegal aliens, under what circumstances deporting millions of illegal aliens already living here is moral or even practical, and even how much illegal immigration we as a country are willing to endure. And there is certainly nothing wrong with ministering to illegal aliens, given Jesus’ exhortations to love and serve the needy is agnostic regarding the needy’s legal status. But to claim that disruptions of law enforcement activities, including antagonizing, threatening, and assaulting federal law enforcement, somehow represents the Gospel is not only risible, it’s insulting.

Border Czar Tom Homan Holds a Press Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota

President Trump’s Border Czar, Tom Homan, arrived in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Monday.  Today he gives a press conference following meetings with the Minnesota governor and Minneapolis mayor.

Mr Homan said he is now supervising the capture and removal of all criminal aliens from the Minneapolis region. ICE agents together with Customs and Border Patrol officials will continue operations throughout the region and the governor and mayor have given their assurances they will no longer attempt to interfere with capture, detainment and removal efforts.

Virginia Senator and SSCI Vice Chairman, Mark Warner, is Very Concerned About Tulsi Gabbard

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse 

Senator Mark Warner is the vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). In his position he is also a member of the intelligence community oversight group known as the “Gang of Eight.”  Senator Mark Warner replaced Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2017 for his SSCI position. Dianne Feinstein’s former chief-of-staff Dan Jones was a central participant in the 2016 Trump-Russia targeting effort.

Senator Warner moved into position in 2017 to sit at the center of the legislative branch effort to support the targeting and removal of President Trump. Warner ran cover for the actions in 2016 and worked to construct the fraudulent narrative after President Trump took office.  On March 17, 2017, shortly after 4:00pm, Senator Mark Warner entered the senate SCIF with SSCI Security Director James Wolfe to review the Title-1 search warrant used against U.S. citizen Carter Page.  The ‘read and return’ documents were delivered by FBI special agent Brian Dugan.  James Wolfe took 82 pictures of the FISA application (one picture per page) and then sent them to Buzzfeed journalist Ali Watkins. ¹{Background}

Mid-March 2017 Senator Mark Warner was trying to support the appointment of a special counsel to target President Trump, his directed leak was to support that objective.  Three days later, March 20, 2017, FBI Director James Comey appeared before congress and admitted the FBI was investigating Donald Trump. Senator Warner then used his position as SSCI vice-chair to advance the DC legislative efforts against President Trump.

Senator Mark Warner is very concerned about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, being in Fulton County, Georgia, yesterday when the search warrant for election records was carried out.  Senator Mark Warner is very concerned.

Why did Tulsi Gabbard take part in a raid on an elections office? We need to step up to protect our elections from this administration’s meddling. pic.twitter.com/6mHOgd4jKf

— Mark Warner (@MarkWarner) January 29, 2026

[¹ My position has never changed. I fully support former SSCI Security Director James Wolfe being given immunity from prosecution in exchange for his cooperation and testimony as to the involvement of Vice Chairman Mark Warner.  The other person who knows the granular details of how the leak took place is FBI Special Agent Brian Dugan, who investigated the Wolfe leak.]

♦ Within the Wolfe indictment you’ll notice the “Top Secret” document picked-up by SSCI Director James Wolfe took place on March 17th, 2017:

♦ Within the Mark Warner text messages you’ll note the SSCI Vice-Chairman went into the SSCI Secured Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) on March 17th, 2017, shortly after 4:00pm:
♦ Within the declassified and released FISA application you’ll notice the copy date from the FISA clerk for the FISA application was March 17th, 2017:

The information within the three events (Warner Text release, Wolfe Indictment release, and Carter Page FISA release) shows the connection of the events.  James Wolfe took custody of the Carter Page FISA, delivered it to the SCIF, it was reviewed by SSCI Vice-Chair Mark Warner, and then leaked by James Wolfe.

“82 Text Messages” The FISA application was 83 pages with one blank page. It was the Carter Page FISA application that James Wolfe leaked to Ali Watkins as outlined within the unsealed June 2018 indictment.

Sidebar, a fourth albeit buried public release came on December 14th 2018 confirmed everything.

The FBI filed a sentencing recommendation proving it was the Carter Page FISA that was leaked:

I only share the sidebar (out of chronological sequence) to emphasize there is no doubt it was the FISA application that James Wolfe leaked.

During his initial summer and fall negotiations with the DOJ, lawyers representing James Wolfe threatened to subpoena the SSCI in his defense.  The implication was that Wolfe was directed to leak the FISA by members of the committee.

The Wolfe defense team delayed pre-trial discussions with the DOJ, stalling for time throughout the fall of 2018 until the November midterms. Democrats won the 2018 midterm races and took control over the House.

In the lame-duck congressional period following the election, very specific senators on the SSCI asked the DOJ to go easy on Wolfe: Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein and Mark Warner.