“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
While the Supreme Court stopped President Donald Trump from rolling back one of the worst immigration outrages of the Obama administration this week, the president quietly moved forward to stop another, older, and possibly more dangerous problem.
All the headlines focused on “Republican” Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the court’s liberals in a 5-4 decision to keep the DACA program alive. Barack Obama gave amnesty to illegal aliens who came to this country before they were adults with the stroke of a pen. Trump reversed it with the same pen, but Roberts and the liberals decided keeping the Obama program alive trumped doing their job of fairly administering justice.
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The White House didn’t take it lying down. This week, Trump released new guidelines that crackdown on gangs, frauds, human traffickers, and even terrorists who exploit a 21-year-old loophole in America’s immigration laws.
The U.S. signed on to the UN Convention Against Torture in 1988. It was a symbolic gesture: The U.S. didn’t torture its own people in 1987, and we still didn’t after it took effect in March 1999.
But activist judges decided they could read whole new meanings into the treaty, and one of them has left America’s borders open to every criminal looking to avoid deportation.
Liberal judges said the new treaty banned the U.S. from deporting any illegal alien who says he fears he’d be tortured back home—even if he’s guilty of a crime in the U.S… and even if he’s a wanted for murdering or torturing people in his home country.
Sometimes the illegal alien’s word is all the “proof” that’s needed.
The law says the U.S. shouldn’t deport anyone who has credible fear that his home country will torture him based on his “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group.”
The problem is almost any group of two people or more is “a group.” Before he was on the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “the phrase is almost completely open-ended”– an Open Sesame for illegals.
Since the law is so clumsy and the evidence is so flimsy, illegals claiming “credible fear” win their cases up to a whopping 89 percent of the time, especially under Obama.
Once human smugglers heard about the Obama administration’s weak enforcement, the claims poured in. “Asylum” and “torture” claims increased more than 800 percent!
And there were almost no guidelines for who could use the “torture” law. As incredible as it sounds, the CAT loophole could be used by somebody who had “operated a death camp in World War II, ordered the mass murder of millions or sought to destroy an entire people,” Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) told Congress—17 years ago.
The Nazis who ran concentration camps are even eligible for amnesty.
People “who assisted in Nazi persecution or engaged in genocide, persons who have persecuted others, persons who have been convicted of particularly serious crimes, persons who are believed to have committed serious non-political crimes before arriving in the United States, and persons who pose a danger to the security of the United States, are ineligible for withholding of removal,” U.S. immigration enforcers wrote in the federal code back in 1999. “The Convention Against Torture does not exclude such persons from its scope.”
Amazing as it sounds, liberals are defending a statute that could benefit Nazi war criminals in the name of fighting racism.
We know other groups pose a bigger threat to America. Hundreds a year had committed crimes against U.S. citizens, then used the loophole to stay here and commit more crimes.
CAT has benefited terrorists—including Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He was one of two architects of that prelude to 9/11 to stay in the country by using CAT.
Another terrorist who twisted this UN treaty is a Somali terrorist and human trafficker named Ahmed Dhakane.
When he came to the U.S., Dhakane claimed he and his pregnant wife had traveled the whole world looking for safety from torture: He said they went from Somalia to Russia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Mexico.
But actually, he lived in Brazil the whole time, where he ran a human trafficking chain. He “instructed his customers how to make false asylum claims once they arrived in the” U.S. — and some of his clients belonged to Muslim terrorist organizations, too.
And his “wife” was no relation to him at all. She was an underage human trafficking victim he repeatedly raped because he may have thought having a pregnant wife would help his application.
But the CAT’s out of the bag—even the liberal judges admit it.
“Fraud in immigration asylum is a huge issue and a major problem,” the National Association of Immigration Judges told The New York Times in 2011.
So, on Wednesday, the Trump administration’s Departments of Justice and Homeland Security rolled out new rules to stop the abuse cold. They speed up the process, demand real evidence, clarify the vague wording, and let judges throw out “frivolous” cases and deport the fraudsters on the spot, instead of giving them a court date and putting them back on U.S. streets.
The people who represent border states are cheering.
It’s about time the government cut down on “baseless asylum claims,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz. “Our system has become a tool that aliens unfairly use to gain illegal access to our nation and to slow down their deportation process.”
Whenever the Deep State makes him take one step back, count on Trump to take two steps forward.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”