Monday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh urged President Donald Trump to get take a more aggressive tack on immigration in the wake of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s announced departure from the Trump administration.
Limbaugh argued the immigration was Trump’s strongest issue and that should be cause for Trump to move ahead with border wall construction.
Partial transcript as follows (courtesy RushLimbaugh.com):
LIMBAUGH: I’m gonna tell you something, folks. I don’t for a minute believe that these caravans and this mass exodus of people from Central America and even South America is random and organic. I think this is a plan. It is a plan that has worldwide sponsors that are in cahoots with Mexican drug cartels, and its sole purpose is to put all kinds of economic and societal pressure on the United States to create crisis.
Have you noticed now how many people who only months ago were lampooning the idea that there’s a crisis on the border are now admitting that there’s a crisis? What is that? What’s the gambit? Why are all these leftists and all these Democrats, these presidential candidates on the left, “No, there’s no crisis at the boarder. Oh, no, it’s overblown. We don’t have a crisis.” Now they’re all saying it is.
They’re not saying it’s a crisis for the same reason we are. They’re saying it’s a crisis because they want to advance their own solution, which is just open the border and end the crisis. If there’s no border, there’s no crisis. If there’s no border, you don’t have any illegals crossing it. If there’s no border, there’s no problem. You just leave the gate open, leave the door open, let people come in, and it’s just a natural flow of human beings.
That’s how they want to end the crisis. We of course want to end the crisis by shutting this down, simply stopping immigration, illegal immigration. Build a wall, do whatever, whatever resources are necessary. And you know, Kirstjen Nielsen and this situation notwithstanding, I hope Trump hits this hard this week. It’s his best issue. And he has the American people on his side. And that’s why he got elected.
And if the truth be told — dare I say this, Mr. Snerdley — there are some Trump supporters out there getting nervous that it’s taking so long given that it was the number one issue and given that it has only gotten worse, this was what was supposed to be first up on the agenda to fix. (interruption) She just left her home. She’s gonna do a press conference here outside her home. She’s in Alexandria, Virginia, she’s meeting the press.
Now, what should I do? Should we JIP this or should we just roll tape on it and get audio sound bites? ‘Cause our microphones are there. Let’s go ahead and listen to a bit of it. We can always make up for lost time. Here she is.
NIELSEN: — securing the border. I will continue to support all efforts to address the humanitarian and security crisis on the border. And other than that, I’m on my way to keep doing what I can for the next few days. So thank you all for being here.
LIMBAUGH: Okay. That’s it. She’s gonna keep working. She’s gonna everything she can. She just got canned! Well, we are rolling on this because our machines never stop rolling, so if there’s any highlights here, we will have it.
I want to go back just one more time on this Flores Settlement because this is important because the Democrats and the media are continuing to use – (interruption) That’s it. She’s heading back into her house now. That’s it? See, my instincts prevailed yet again. If we would have stuck with that any longer, it would have been thank you for coming and now I’m going back in for a toddy.
All right. The Flores Settlement. The Flores Agreement. This outrage, this phony outrage over the separation of children is why we have the current crisis on the border in the first place. It’s been manufactured. We have been separating children — it’s all about asylum and it’s all about detention centers, and it’s all about the law. And once somebody claims asylum — and kids can’t — once an adult comes in and claims asylum, you separate them. You detain them and you put ’em into a detention center. It takes three weeks, or did, to process the claim.
But you have to separate them at the time, by law. This is the Flores Settlement. And I’m really cutting to the chaff here. And it has now become — it’s been happening for years and never reported. Now it’s being reported and the American people are being led to believe it’s the first time ever, it’s Trump doing it ’cause Trump hates people, Trump hates kids, Trump’s a Nazi, Trump’s a racist, Trump’s a pig, and Trump’s separating children. And it’s nothing new. It’s been part of American policy and law sanctioned by a left-wing appellate court and the ACL freaking U.
Thanks to this phony outrage, we’re now back to catch-and-release, which means we will have more than one and a half illegal aliens released into the U.S. this year alone. The way it works, you come in, you make an asylum claim, and you’re given a date to come back for process. And the thing that happens is nobody comes back. And we don’t know where they go.
We don’t track ’em. We don’t implant little chips in ’em to follow ’em where they go. So 99% never come back for the hearing. They just blend in. They just fade away. But that was the goal. That was the goal behind the phony outrage in the first place. Just as it was the ultimate goal behind the Flores Settlement itself. The idea has always been to flood the border with such numbers that we would just have to give up on having a border.
The whole idea here — and it’s coming to fruition — just flood the border so that we can’t handle it. I hate to keep citing this, but it’s another variation of Daniel Moynihan’s defining deviancy down. You give up trying to enforce laws against bad behavior. ‘Cause there’s so much of it going on, you can’t catch ’em all, and you can’t prosecutor ’em all, so you just ignore the law and you change the law so that the criminal activity that was is no longer called criminal.
And as you do that over and over, you are permitting deviancy to normalize, to become normal and to rise in terms of its occurrences throughout your culture and society. In a way, it’s a variation of the old Cloward-Piven strategy in action, and it’s succeeding. Because every day another Democrat calls for doing away with the border or doing away with the concept of citizenship, can’t ask a citizenship question on the census, no, no, no, that’s bigotry. No, no, no, no, that’s insulting, no, no, no, no, that’s racism.
Just imagine if all these people do this, if all of these people crossing the border were wearing MAGA hats, what do you think the media and the Democrat Party would be doing? They would be building the wall. They would be down there, they would grab their armed units from the KKK or whatever and they would send ’em down there and they would start shooting on site these people with MAGA hats trying to get into the country. That’s the way to look at this.
If all of these refugees, if all of these migrants, if all of these wonderful illegal immigrants were wearing MAGA hats (chuckles) what do you think the reaction would be? So I hope Trump hits this hard — whatever is going on here with the Kirstjen Nielsen situation — it’s his best issue. It’s his rallying point issue. He has his base and an increasing number of the American people on his side.
And folks, it’s only gonna get worse. Can you imagine the optics this summer? You know, summer traditionally in America has been riot season. I don’t mean to be insulting here, but in America summer is riot season, and especially if there’s an election in the coming fall. Now, there isn’t one this year, but just imagine the summer optics and how devastating they will be for open borders.
Trump needs to shuffle around some money and get that wall up! Get started on it ASAP! And we had a call last week, we had a bunch of people suggest this and we need to do it. We need to start taxing the — you know how much in remittances illegal immigrants are sending back to the home countries? It’s around $60 billion. We need to start taxing that as a threat to Mexico and Central America.
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