Part 2 of 3, judge refutes the basis of dem lawsuits on border wall…
Art Arthur, a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and former immigration judge, referred to a federal lawsuit filed against President Donald Trump by California and 14 other states over the president’s declaration of a national emergency and plans to redirect federal funds for border wall construction as “political theater.”
2 – Illegal Border Crossings Have Dropped
Claims that border apprehensions are decreasing over time offer a misleading picture of illegal immigration, explained Arthur.
The lawsuit declares, “CBP personnel have significantly increased over the past two decades, while illegal border crossings have dropped, causing the average annual number of apprehensions made by each CBP agent to drop by almost 91%, from 192 in FY2000 to only 18 in FY2017.
Arthur stated, “The number of aliens who are apprehended at the border is down. That is correct. There were historical means, however, back in 2011, 90 percent of all the illegal entrants that we saw were single adult males and 90 percent of them were Mexican, which meant that they could be turned around in about eight hours and sent back home. In the first four months of 2019, by comparison, 60 percent of all aliens apprehended along the southwest border were unaccompanied alien children and aliens traveling in family units.”
Arthur continued, “What we’re looking at right now is a humanitarian disaster. We’re going to see 600,000 people — 360,000 of which are kids and parents with kids, mothers with kids, fathers with kids — -showing up at our southwest border — it’s going to cost $1.2 billion just in humanitarian assistance to take care of them, to buy baby formula, food, diapers, blankets for this population of people that we’re seeing. Eight hours to turn around that single adult Mexican and send him back to Mexico, 78 hours to process any one of these individuals by the Border Patrol, and they don’t have the facilities to hold these people because you can’t put children with adult males. You can’t put two different families together. You have to separate these folks out. These border patrol processing facilities just aren’t build for this. We are looking at a humanitarian disaster at the border.”
Arthur broke down the projected $1.2 billion Border Patrol estimate for humanitarian assistance in fiscal year 2019 in a February 10 article:
As I have noted in previous posts, the president’s budget request is not all about infrastructure/fencing/ “the Wall”.
Included in that request is $800 million for urgent humanitarian assistance. My colleague Dan Cadman has noted that this request is for “unspecified” assistance. I have recently returned from a tour of the Southwest border in western Arizona and eastern California, and I now have a better idea of what that money is intended for: to support the Border Patrol’s expensive new mission as caretaker for thousands of members of family units and unaccompanied alien minors (UAC).
In FY 2018, the Yuma sector, which has jurisdiction over 126 miles of the border, spent $350,000 for humanitarian support, according to Justin Kallinger, operations officer for the sector. That money paid for more than $150,000 in meals, $15,000 for baby formula and diapers, and $27,000 for blankets. Already in FY 2019, the sector has spent $400,000 to cover humanitarian costs, including more than $240,000 in meals, $45,000 in baby formula and diapers, and $33,000 in blankets. All told, the Border Patrol expects to pay $1.2 billion in humanitarian costs border-wide.
This is a staggering toll, and the responsibility to provide such aid is a far cry from the Border Patrol’s primary mission: “to detect and prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States” and to “help maintain borders that work — facilitating the flow of legal immigration and goods while preventing the illegal trafficking of people and contraband.”
3 – A Wall Will Not Reduce Cross-Border Drug Smuggling
One of the lawsuit’s sections is entitled, “There Is No Evidence that a Border Wall Will Impact the Smuggling of Dangerous Drugs into the United States.”
Arthur noted how drugs such as fentanyl and heroin smuggled into America across the southern border are killing Americans.
“We have people dying in this town,” said Arthur, referring to his hometown of Baltimore, MD. “You drive through the streets of Baltimore and you see people drugged out and leaning up against curbs and doorways. This is an epidemic in this city, and the fact that the funds of the people of this state have to be spent on this political theater is just ridiculous. People are dying in this city. people are dying in this country because of these drugs and they need to be stopped.”