White House adviser Jared Kushner is urging President Trump not to declare a national emergency at the United States-Mexico border that would allow the administration to take steps to build a wall to stop soaring illegal immigration and a deadly inflow of drug trafficking.
Kushner has “cautioned against” Trump declaring a national emergency at the southern border, sources tell the Washington Post, despite no clear insight as to how a split GOP-Democrat Congress will approve even a fifth of border wall funding.
“But Kushner has told others in the White House that Democrats are coming along — and that a deal will be done,” the Washington Post reports. “For his part, Trump has told advisers he could still declare a national emergency, a route Kushner has cautioned against.”
As Breitbart News noted, Kushner has also reportedly taken over immigration negotiations at the White House amid the government shutdown:
[Jared] Kushner has emerged as an omnipresent and assertive player in the now-33-day impasse, despite deep skepticism on Capitol Hill about his political abilities and influence, according to more than a dozen Trump associates, lawmakers and others involved in the discussions.
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“Apparently, Jared has become an expert on immigration in the last 48 hours,” Trump said, according to three people familiar with the exchange who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Insiders tell Breitbart News that recent meetings at the White House have been to urge organizations and their activists to support a compromise budget deal that ties an amnesty for about a million illegal aliens and foreign nationals to $5.7 billion in border wall funds.
The budget deal — a product of meetings between Kushner, Vice President Mike Pence, White House Legislative Affairs Director Shahira Knight, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — spends about ten times as much on foreign aid as it does on the border wall, and pro-American immigration reform groups have rejected the deal.
Regardless of support from those organizations invited to the White House yesterday, the deal is set to fail in the Senate.
Kushner is not the only figure around Trump to lobby against the president using his national emergency powers to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
Republicans like Graham, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Sen. John Thune (R-SC), and Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) have all said they want Trump to strike a deal rather than declare a national emergency.
The latest suggestion from a handful of Republican Senators, including Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Kushner, has been to craft a deal that gives green cards — and eventually U.S. citizenship — to at least 700,000 illegal aliens enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Those amnestied illegal aliens would be allowed after five years to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country, a process known as “chain migration.” This could trigger a chain migration inflow just from the amnestied DACA population of anywhere between 2.2 to 4.2 million foreign nationals arriving in the U.S.
Border crossings in November 2018 — the last month from which data is available — hit close to 52,000, marking the highest level of illegal immigration in the month of November since 2006. Projections indicate that illegal immigration for next year will reach 600,000 border crossings, the highest level of illegal immigration in more than a decade. Last year alone, about 2,000 illegal aliens convicted of murder and those suspected of murder were arrested by federal agents.
Meanwhile, drug overdoses in 2017 killed an unprecedented 72,287 U.S. residents, nearly three times the number of individuals killed by global terrorism. Nearly 50,000 of those deadly overdoses were caused by either heroin or fentanyl.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.