Democrats' DHS Budget Paralyzes ICE, Defunds Border Wall

The top Republican appropriator in the Senate said GOP Senators will try to block the Democrats’ one-sided agency spending bill for 2022.

“If Democrats want full-year appropriations bills, they must abandon their go-it-alone strategy and come to the table to negotiate,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), the senior Republican on the Senate committee on appropriations.  He continued:

A successful appropriations process rests on trust and bipartisan cooperation like we had in recent years under the Shelby/Leahy framework.  Regrettably, we’re a long way from that now

The draft budget was released Monday by Democrats prior to a vote in the appropriations committee. The Democrats’ power grab is very unusual because the legislators who sit on the appropriations panels are usually eager to trade spending favors instead of pushing ideological goals.

The homeland security portion of the budget would redirect unspent border wall funds to a different agency. It would tangle ICE in new rules that would also give pro-migration activists a veto over enforcement of the nation’s popular immigration laws, and it would expand legal immigration with the claim that green cards were supposedly “wasted” by Trump.

President Joe Biden stopped construction of the border wall in January, leaving wide gaps where migrants have walked through the border, despite 2021 directions from Congress. At least 800,000 working-age wage-cutting migrants have been allowed into the United States since then, while the drug cartels are smuggling a rising flood of debilitating drugs into Americans’ communities that have been damaged by cheap migrant labor.

The Democrats’ claim to be saving “wasted” green cards is a stealth effort to boost legal immigration, says Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA. “Every visa is used, period, full stop,” she said because the relevant law was written by Sen. Ted Kennedy to minimize the number of unclaimed green cards. She added:

If there are unused employment-based visas in a fiscal year, they automatically roll over to the family-based category for the following fiscal year. If there are unused family-based visas in a fiscal year, they automatically roll over to the employment-based category … That was the whole plan.

The plan seeks to award more green cards without public debate, said Rob Law, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “If increasing legal immigration was so popular, you wouldn’t have to hide it in a legislative maze,” he added.

The bill would increase legal immigration by roughly 272,000 green cards, according to the Cato Institute.

The legislation’s curbs on enforcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement “basically formalizes catch and release” by giving a bureaucratic veto to pro-migration political appointees with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), he said.

The veto would be given to DHS’ Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which is now held by am amnesty advocate Katherine Culliton-González. The DHS website describes her career:

Ms. Culliton-González brings more than 25 years of cutting-edge civil and human rights expertise … Katherine previously served at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division … [and] as Special Counsel for Immigrants’ Rights and Access to Justice at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) … Katherine has also served in recent years as a volunteer Chair of the Civil Rights Section of the Hispanic National Bar Association.

Culliton-González graduated from law school in 1993. Since then, Americans’ wages have flatlined because the government has invited a massive inflow of cheap blue-collar and white-collar labor into American jobs. The government also created a huge, coastal-based, no-rights workforce of people who work for government-supplied green cards, not company-paid salaries.

That imported labor violated the right of Americans to a national labor market, empowered executives to dominate professionals, and allowed Wall Street investors and wealthy Americans to dramatically expand their share of the nation’s wealth.

Law continued:

This is the next iteration of defunding ICE without expressly writing them out of the Homeland Security Act … By imposing these types of requirements and the oversight of a specific sub-office within DHS that has nothing to do with detention and enforcement, it is going to ensure that no illegal aliens inside the country are detained. And if they’re not detained, then they’re never going to be removed.

If the new rules are implemented, then ICE agents “are all going to start running around looking for counterfeit watches and NFL jerseys because that’s all they’re going to be able to do.”

According to Shelby, the plan would:

Return to the Treasury nearly $2 billion in funding that was appropriated on a bipartisan basis to construct a border wall to stem the flow of illegal immigration across our southern border (Homeland);

Allow Border Patrol funding to be transferred to remove border wall on public lands (Interior);

Reduce ICE’s detention capacity and hobble its enforcement and removal capabilities for those who are in the country unlawfully (Homeland);

Implement policies that will allow certain criminal aliens to be turned free in the United States (Homeland);

Rewrite immigration law to change the way visas are distributed, including to allow visas for persons from countries where vetting processes are substandard (Homeland); and

Allow the federal government to employ non-citizens participating in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

Nationwide, the federal policy of extracting legal and illegal migrants from poor countries is deeply unpopular because of its economic impact on ordinary Americans.

A wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan,  rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to each other.

Immigration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture. It also pushes people towards drug addiction and minimizes the incentive for employers to help them escape.

Immigration damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture. It also pushes people towards drug addiction and minimizes the incentive for employers to help them escape.