Pentagon Awards $976 Million in Border Wall Contracts

The Department of Defense awarded two contracts worth nearly $1 billion on April 9 for the construction of border walls in New Mexico and Arizona. The department awarded $789 million to SLSCO Ltd., a builder based in Galveston, Texas, to replace a border wall in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. The department also awarded $187 million to Barnard Construction Co. Inc., a builder based in Bozeman, Montana, to replace pedestrian barriers in Yuma, Arizona. Both projects should be completed by October 2020.

According to a statement from the Pentagon, both contracts will be paid with Army funds. The statement did not specify whether the funds came from the $1.4 billion approved by Congress, the $3.1 billion shifted from other departments, or the $3.6 allocated for border wall construction via the emergency declaration by President Donald Trump. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. Santa Teresa, where the $789 million section of wall will be built, is part of the El Paso border sector, which has seen the sharpest increase in crossings. From October to March, apprehensions of illegal aliens in the El Paso sector grew 1,670 percent for family units, 333 percent for unaccompanied minors, and 60 percent for single adults, compared to the same period last year, according to the Border Patrol. Agents working the El Paso sector apprehended 35,898 unaccompanied alien minors, 53,565 migrants traveling as families, and 9,933 single alien adults in six months before March 31.

The Yuma border sector, where the $187 million border wall will be built, has experienced a 273 percent increase in illegal border crossings by migrants traveling as families from October to March compared to the same period a year earlier. Border Patrol agents in the Yuma sector apprehended 3,679 unaccompanied alien children, 24,194 aliens traveling with a family member, and 3,520 single alien adults in the six months before the end of March.

During his campaign, President Donald Trump promised to build a wall on the border with Mexico. Despite staunch opposition from Democrats in Congress, he has secured more than $8 billion for wall construction this year. Virtually all of the construction is occurring in sections of the border which already have older walls that no longer meet Border Patrol’s operational requirements. “We’ve built a lot of wall. A lot of wall. And it’s new wall,” Trump told reporters at the White House on April 10. “You know, when we rip down an old wall and then replace it, it’s called a ‘new wall.’ And that’s what we’ve done. A lot of wall is going up. And every place we build the wall, it’s less and less,” the president added, referring to the decline in illegal border crossings in sections where walls have gone up.

The White House is in the midst of reshuffling the senior leadership of its immigration agencies. The leadership changes are part of Trump’s plan for a tougher approach to immigration. The president said on April 10 that migrants are drawn to the United States because of the great economy and loopholes in the immigration system. The sharp increase in family units illegally crossing the border is largely attributed to a patchwork of policies which force immigration authorities to release family units into the interior of the country before their asylum claim are adjudicated.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pentagon-awards-976-million-in-border-wall-contracts_2874208.html

Feds Seize $178K in Cash at California-Mexico Border

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers discovered a shipment of more than $170,000 in cash being smuggled from California into Mexico at a port of entry.

CBP officers observed a 2018 Nissan Titan approaching in the southbound inspection lanes at the Presidio Port of Entry. Officers determined the driver to be a 48-year-old U.S. citizen. He was accompanied by a 23-year-old Mexican national, according to information obtained from CBP officials. During a routine exit interview, officers became suspicious and searched the truck. The search revealed multiple bundles of currency wrapped in tape. The officers found the cash hidden inside the tailgate of the truck.

As federal law requires the declaration of large quantities of cash, the officers seized the total $170,030. They also seized the pick-up truck. Officials placed the driver and passenger under arrest and turned them over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations special agents. Officials did not disclose the immigration status of the Mexican national.

“CBP officers are working hard to stop the illegal movement of guns, ammunition and unreported currency,” said Michael Neipert, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Presidio port director. “Travelers who do not follow federal currency reporting requirements run the risk of losing their currency and may potentially face criminal charges.” CBP officers assigned to the nation’s ports of entry seize an average of $65 million per year in U.S. cash, according to a CBP report. In Fiscal Year 2019, officers found nearly $33 million. In addition, U.S. Border Patrol agents operating under the CBP umbrella seize about $6 million in smuggled cash.

https://www.breitbart.com/border/2019/04/10/feds-seize-178k-in-cash-at-california-mexico-border/

Kim Jong-un to Senior Officials: North Korea in ‘Tense Situation’ Requiring ‘Fortitude’

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un admitted the country was enduring a “tense situation” in light of ongoing sanctions and a failure to make a deal with American President Donald Trump in their meeting last month.

He told senior Workers’ Party leaders Wednesday they must exhibit “fortitude” in light of the state of affairs. “Making a deep analysis of the matters pending urgent solution in the party and state, the Supreme Leader urged the need for leading officials to fully display a high sense of responsibility and creativity,” North Korea’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a press release published Wednesday, highlighting that Kim was addressing the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), those responsible for implementing the nation’s communist ideology. Kim reportedly urged the communist leader to also mantain “the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance and fortitude in an attitude befitting the masters of the revolution and construction under the prevailing tense situation and thus follow through on the new strategic line of the Party.”

Kim also suggested Party leaders strive to remove “formalism, expediency, subjectivism, self-protectionism, defeatism, party authority and bureaucratism chronic among leading officials and all sorts of other undesirable practices” from their daily routines. The meeting occurred shortly before Thursday’s scheduled parliamentary meeting, considered a high-profile affair for Kim in which he is expected to deliver a significant policy address. His tone in addressing a smaller group of senior party leaders suggests he will deliver a less-than-optimistic address to the parliament, some observers have suggested. The South Korean news outlet Yonhap predicted that Kim is “unlikely to announce any major policy shift” with the United States and cites experts interpreting the speech as Kim looking to impose his authority in the aftermath of the failed Trump meeting, particularly to diplomats present at the meeting who played major roles in brokering the summit. “Kim’s remarks during the politburo meeting appear to be making it clear again that he wants to tighten up internal discipline to achieve the new strategic line,” Lim Eul-chul, a professor at the Institute for Far East Studies at Kyungnam University, told Yonhap.

Prior to the February 27 Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, Vietnam, North Korean state propaganda predicted the two leaders would come to agreements favorable to Pyongyang.

“There’s no reason North Korea-U.S. relations can’t have a major breakthrough, as we have seen in inter-Korean relations,” Meari, a North Korean government-run website, suggested, adding that Kim would enter the talks looking to secure “a permanent and stable peace regime” with Washington. Unlike their first meeting in Singapore last year – which yielded a vaguely-worded agreement to “commit to establish new U.S. – DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the population of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity” – the Vietnam meeting ended abruptly, with no results for either side. President Trump walked out of what was scheduled to be a two-day meeting after an initial discussion with Kim, departing before a planned lunch with the communist dictator.

“Chairman Kim and myself, we want to do the right deal. Speed is not important. What’s important is that we do the right deal,” Trump initially said, before stating that he left because Kim demanded the United States lift sanctions on his regime, something Trump was not ready to do. “It was about the sanctions … basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” Trump said before returning to the United States. “He wants to de-nuke, but he wants to do some areas that aren’t what we want.”

https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2019/04/10/kim-jong-un-to-senior-officials-north-korea-in-tense-situation-requiring-fortitude/

Nolte: Public Unions Lose over 90% of Non-Member Dues After SCOTUS Ruling

Two powerful, left-wing public unions lost over 90 percent of non-member fees after the Supreme Court ruled against forcing non-members to pay union dues.

In other words, until June of 2018 we lived in a country where public sector workers who chose not to join their respective unions were still forced to pay union dues, which are called agency fees. These agency fees represented 70 to 80 percent of union dues and were forcibly removed from the pay checks of public workers who wanted nothing to do with far-left unions that spend billions of dollars every year to elect Democrats.

The Supreme Court ruled that these mandatory union dues violated the free speech of non-members, who had been forced through these un-American agency fees to contribute to political campaigns they wanted no part of. Overall, while I have no issue with unionizing in the private sector, public unions are a cancer on our democracy, a scam that launders taxpayer dollars through these public unions and into Democrat campaign coffers. The idea that public sector workers were forced to pay these dues was outrageous and the Supreme Court did the exact right thing in putting a stop to it.

The best news is that this liberation of the working man has been devastating to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who lost millions of dollars and 210,000 agency-fee payers in 2018. Overall, while these public sector unions still have millions of voluntary members, AFSCME lost 98 percent of its 112,233 nonmembers (now only 2,200 pay agency fees). The SEIU lost 94 percent of its 104,501 nonmembers (now only 5,800 pay).

This does not mean SEIU and AFSCME have lost their power. With 1.9 million and 1.3 million voluntary members, respectively, both organizations still take in a ton of taxpayer money that will be funneled almost exclusively to Democrats and other left-wing causes. But with an end to what was nothing more than legalized theft, the First Amendment rights of public workers are finally protected from a scam that forced Americans to pay for speech they disagreed with.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/10/nolte-public-unions-lose-over-90-of-non-member-dues-after-scotus-ruling/