Every single Senate Democrat has backed a bill by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that would effectively prevent authorities from arresting illegal aliens within 100 miles of the U.S. border.
In the words of moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Feinstein’s “Keep Families Together Act” would “essentially prevent arrest within 100 miles of the border, even if the person has committed a serious crime or is suspected of terrorist activities.”
For that reason, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has called Feinstein’s bill the “Child Trafficking Encouragement Act,” since it would create incentives for illegal aliens to cross the border with children to evade arrest by authorities.
A new analysis by Gabriel Malor of The Federalist points out an additional problem: thanks, he says, to sloppy drafting, the bill would effectively prevent federal law enforcement from arresting anyone in most of the U.S.
Malor writes:
Every Senate Democrat has now signed on to cosponsor a bill written so carelessly that it does not distinguish between migrant children at the border and U.S. citizen children already within the United States. The bill further does not distinguish between federal officers handling the border crisis and federal law enforcement pursuing the ordinary course of their duties.
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The scope of the bill is not limited to those portions of these departments involved with the border crisis, and there is no other limiting factor in the bill that would cabin the prohibition on family separation to immigration-related matters. In other words, this bill is going to regulate conduct across a great many federal offices that have nothing to do with separating children from families arriving unlawfully in the United States.
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Two hundred million people live within 100 miles of the border. … All major U.S. metropolitan areas fall within either 100 miles of the border or are near a port of entry or both.
Feinstein’s bill is largely symbolic: Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) said Tuesday that he was not interested in any legislative fix, but wanted the president to bear responsibility for any policy chance. As leader of the minority party in the Senate, Schumer can block any legislation by using the filibuster rule to prevent a vote.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.