The president of the open borders group known as La Raza is comparing President Donald Trump’s immigration orders to a number of historic atrocities, including the slave trade, in a new Washington Post op-ed.
The piece by National Council of La Raza President Janet Murguía, claims Trump’s plan to deport criminal illegal immigrants; build a wall along the southern border; and crack down on sanctuary cities will “similarly tarnish our nation’s character” like the slave trade did:
Some of the darkest chapters in U.S. history have involved forcibly relocating minority populations: the slave trade, the Trail of Tears, Operation Wetback and the internment of citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II. Each was considered legal and justified in its time. Now they are condemned as assaults on the values that define our nation.
President Trump’s first executive order on immigration and the draft enforcement memos signed by Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly promise to similarly tarnish our nation’s character. The memos call for expanding the nation’s deportation forces by 15,000 to round up, detain and deport the undocumented immigrants living among us. Instead of focusing on criminals, they make all undocumented people priorities for enforcement, and through a process called “expedited removal,” they severely reduce due process protections.
Murguía says Trump’s immigration orders through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are based entirely “on falsehoods” about illegal aliens, arguing that illegal immigration is down and it does not pose as much of a threat as the Trump Administration purports.
The La Raza president also parroted the talking points that illegal aliens help grow the economy by paying taxes every year:
And the cost of the undocumented? Their contributions to the economy far outweigh their burden. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants pay $11.6 billion in taxes each year. According to the Social Security Administration, undocumented workers contribute $15 billion annually to the fund, but only withdraw an estimated $1 billion.
This claim has been repeatedly debunked by groups like the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR), which found in a comprehensive study that illegal immigration costs American taxpayers a whopping $113 billion, as Breitbart Texas reported.
Murguía also claims that there is “little evidence that most undocumented immigrants pose a threat to national security.”
But, in documents released by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest back in 2016, research found that there have been 580 individuals convicted of terrorism in the U.S. since the September 11th attacks, with 380 of those individuals being foreign-born terrorists, as Breitbart News reported.
Murguía refers to the recent deportation of Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an illegal immigrant living in Phoenix, Arizona, with her two children for 20 years.
“A woman who was a resident of Phoenix for 20 years was also deported, leaving behind her two U.S.-citizen children,” Murguía writes in the piece. “They are hardly security threats, but will be ‘enforcement priorities’ under Homeland Security’s new policy.”
Nonetheless, Murguía did not mention that Garcia de Rayos had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008 after she was found to be illegally using a Social Security number to work at a theme park, as Breitbart Texas reported.
In 2013, a judge ordered Garcia de Rayos to return home to Mexico, but she instead was required to periodically meet with immigration officials due to lax enforcement policies under former President Obama.
Murguía goes on to claim that the Trump administration has “declared war”, referring to ICE’s efforts to deport criminal illegal immigrants as “stalking people leaving church or going to the movies.”
Murguía’s piece concludes with a plea for the rest of the open borders lobby and amnesty advocates to continue to try to hold up deportation processes by the Trump Administration, writing “we’re deploying every tool we’ve got to oppose this ill-conceived policy — in the media, in the courts and in peaceful protests in the streets.”
John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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