ICE on ice

In 2018 the call to abolish was the Democrats’ hot new thing. The Fifth District DFL had accredited me to attend its special nominating convention in Minneapolis on June 17 (Father’s Day) as a reporter. I first heard the call for the abolition of ICE touted by Ilhan Omar speaking to the convention. I didn’t realize then that it was already on its way to achieving the status of a battle cry, if not a cliché.

Omar’s call to abolish ICE got certainly got the most enthusiastic response from the crowd that day. The convention endorsed Omar on the second ballot and she went on to win the competitive DFL primary against a formidable candidate or two.

Omar is of course all but an avowed enemy of the United States. She hates the United States with a passion. The hatred seems to derive from a weird IslamoMarxist synthesis, but everything about Omar is a fraud, including her name. I don’t take anything about her at face value.

One can’t miss the hatred. She seethes with hatred of the country that took her in, gave her refuge, subsidized her efforts to advance herself, and looked the other way when she married her brother for dishonest purposes. You’d have to be a fool to miss it. It may have something to do with the contempt with which she looks down on her marks.

From his first day in office President Biden has executed on the call to abolish ICE by keeping it in name but neutralizing its function, or its ability to function as an enforcement agency. ICE now serves as the welcome wagon for the horde of illegals that have taken up his invitation to come on up. From the bottom up ICE is a demoralized agency that has been rendered incapable of fulfilling its mission from the top down.

The Washington Post criticizes the Biden administration’s policies as “incoheren[t].” They have cohered perfectly to produce the utterly predictable result (according to the Post editorial):

As of mid-July, a staggering 1.1 million unauthorized border crossers had been apprehended so far in the current fiscal year, which began last Oct. 1. Nearly 190,000 migrants, a record monthly total high, were taken into custody by border officers in June alone, when the early summer’s heat often deters many from making the trek. At the current pace, officials project that apprehensions will reach 1.5 million by the end of the fiscal year, the most in more than two decades.

How coherent can you get? Those of us living in the real world are required to infer intent from the necessary and predictable consequences of given actions. This is what Biden et al. wanted. Ilhan Omar might be able to explain it to the Post editors.

The Post editorial advises that Biden needs a coherent strategy for the border. The Post’s advice is predicated entirely on political concerns. If word gets out on the disaster wrought by the administration’s policies, it will cost Democrats seats in the midterm elections. Post editors are otherwise in sync with the underlying sentiments.

In his critically important August 7 NR column “Why the border crisis is here to stay,” (behind NR’s paywall) Andrew McCarthy pierces the fog:

The federal government is aiding and abetting illegal immigration. That is a violation of federal law and thus another manifestation of Biden’s disregard for his solemn duty to execute the laws faithfully, on unabashed display this week with his dictatorial eviction-moratorium decree, which he and his administration concede is unconstitutional.

Immigration law commands that aliens who do not have a legal right to be present in the United States “shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution and, if found not to have such a fear, until removed.” That is, even those who credibly claim to fear persecution if returned from whence they came — the infinitesimally small percentage of legitimate refugees among the hordes now seeking entry — are supposed to be held in custody until that claim is fully adjudicated.

But Biden has signaled that the border is open and that those who try to cross illegally stand an excellent chance of getting in and staying. Rhetorically, the president pretends the laws are being enforced, but he knows this is impossible in the conditions he has willfully created. The government is woefully short of the detention space, enforcement personnel, and administrative resources that would be needed to handle the vast migrant crowds arriving daily.

Further:

The numbers here are staggering, even if we were to make-believe, Biden-style, that every illegal alien who crosses the border is “encountered” by border enforcement agents. (The government prefers to speak of “encountering migrants” because it can’t say it is detaining every alien who enters illegally, as the law mandates.)

In July, there were 210,000 such “encounters,” the highest monthly figure in decades, but a figure that in the Biden era is becoming run-of-the-mill. Before hitting 190,000 in June, it had hovered around 180,000 per month since March and was significantly up year-over-year before that. Meantime, as our Zachary Evans reports, 834 unaccompanied alien minors arrived at the border on Wednesday, the largest daily total on record. Just for the month of July, that figure was over 19,000.

The administration — which maintains that the president is above the law he is sworn to uphold when the law doesn’t suit his purposes — postures that, in the matter of unaccompanied minors from Central America, the president’s hands are tied by a court-endorsed stipulation. This is the “Flores settlement agreement,” which transnational–progressive officials in the Clinton administration struck in 1997 with the Democrats’ allied alien-rights activists. Contrary to its disregard for immigration and public-health statutes, the Biden administration insists that it must abide by this caprice, notwithstanding that Congress has never codified the decree and that the Supreme Court had ruled, earlier in the same litigation, that alien minors have no right to be released in the United States.

Now, let’s move from government “encounters” with illegal immigration to the reality of the matter.

A significant percentage of illegal aliens smuggle their way into the country without apprehension or inspection. The government’s “encounter” tabulation probably reflects less than 70 percent of the total influx, and perhaps much less than that. As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew R. Arthur details, “the true number of migrants who have entered illegally this year is close to 1.6 million.” That’s a population slightly larger than that of Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth-largest city. Hundreds of thousands of those have gotten in — separate and apart from the “encountered” migrants, many of whom Biden is settling rather than detaining and removing.

We are not talking about managing an unremarkable illegal-immigration problem, as any advanced country must do. In these numbers, it is an invasion — and hostile, even if not armed, because it quite consciously violates our laws and our sovereignty.

As long as the Biden policies remain in place, there is no end in sight; the challenge just metastasizes. Treating us as if we were imbeciles, the administration assures us that it is moving migrants away from the border (i.e., deeper into the country) to centers where they are “processed” and given dates to show up for hearings, at which their refugee and other claims to remain in the U.S. will be adjudicated. But this is ridiculous.

As I say, Biden has executed in substance the policy demanded by Ilhan Omar et al. One doesn’t need to be particularly perceptive to see this, but it puts the resulting disaster in the proper context.