Part 7 Continued: What's the truth of a border crisis?

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Examining the Presidential candidates in light of biblical teachings

By Sandy Szwarc, BSN, RN, retired emeritus
© Szwarc 2024

“Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” – 1 John 3:18

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” – John 8:32

“Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” – Luke 12:2

“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,
when it is in your power to do it.” – Proverbs 3:27

“And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold. But he who endures to the end shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” – Matthew 24:12-14

One of the most challenging issues in examining the candidates in light of Jesus’ teachings is the border crisis and immigration policies. Yet, it may be the deciding factor for many Christians still undecided on how to vote.

Examining the issue of “Border Walls And Sovereignty Of Nations In Scripture,” Part 7 began by looking at the actions of Kamala Harris as lead on the border: the more than a hundred executive orders and immigration policies that she had created and rewritten, without congressional approval or the vote of the people. Under her management policies, more than 2.6 million illegal aliens were “paroled” and released into our country, nearly 1.9 million more were given “temporary protected status,” and the more than 100,000 illegals were let in as “refugees” under new criteria she created, the most in three decades. No one knows the real number of gotaway illegals through the virtually open border. I looked past the conflicted media’s efforts to keep the truth from the public and found unsettling facts of what the small community of Springfield, Ohio has been facing as a result of her immigration policies.

Continuing Part 7, I tried to grasp the reality of the consequences for all of us when the Administration fails to follow Biblical teachings or our Constitution.

Ms. Harris has been accountable for U.S. immigration laws being thwarted, violated and rewritten by Executive Order. By going to original sources, it proved impossible to ignore the harmful consequences of her border management.

The border crisis now surpasses the worst case scenarios warned by nearly every law enforcement, medical, economic, humanitarian, and legal expert.

The exact number of people in the country illegally is hard to know for certain. The popular figure cited by media back in 2021 was 11 million and the source of that number was Pew Research Center, according to ESR Research. [Pew Charitable Trusts is an NGO that quickly drifted left after its founders died, and by 1994 has become a massive bureaucracy working to influence government and private organizations, funding 40-times more liberal causes as conservative.] But Yale researchers found that the popular 11 million figure was completely bogus and estimated that in 2016 the actual number of illegals in the U.S. had been closer to 22.1 million.

FAIR research estimated the number of illegals in the U.S. in June 2023 was about 16.8 million, and had increased 16% during the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Deputy Director Patrick J. Lechleitner reported to Representative Tony Gonzales that as of July 21, 2014 a total of 425,431 convicted criminal illegal aliens had been released into the U.S. – guilty of murder, rape, drug trafficking, kidnapping, larceny, assaults, burglary, etc. − with another 222,141 pending criminal charges during this Administration.

These 425,431 convicted criminals are on the streets of America.

The September 18, 2024 Committee on Homeland Security meeting and accompanying investigative report, Crisis by Design, reported on the intentional unlawful Biden-Harris policies that dismantled border security and immigration laws. Their Administration’s directives, they found, signaled to illegals that the borders were open and that anyone crossing illegally would be released into the interior. Sadly, this also motivated desperately poor people to risk their lives, often becoming victims of crime themselves, to try and get to our borders.

Growing numbers of Illegals on the terrorist watch list are being apprehended − 388 by border patrol between ports of entry and 1,468 by Office of Field Operations (OFO) at land ports of entry – since FY2021; and more than 53,600 criminal aliens had been apprehended.
A historic number of criminal aliens and suspected terrorists and national security threats, however, have been let into the country under Biden-Harris. Just between October 2021- October 2023, over 70,000 special interest aliens identified as possible threats to national security (largely from Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt) had been encountered by Border Patrol.
A former San Diego border patrol chief agent testified to the Committee of an exponential increase of SIAs with significant ties to terrorism during the Biden-Harris Administration, once the word was out that the border was far easier to cross. He said he’d been forbidden from releasing information about the increase or discussing arrests, but described how the Administration has been thwarting their ability to detain or return illegals to their countries of origin. The “open border policies” and “the fact that so many illegal aliens were being released into the United States spread worldwide very quickly,” he said, resulting in the unprecedented influx of illegals.

On August 28, 2024, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced an additional $380 million in expenses for community Shelters and Services Program. That’s in addition to $259.13 million prior to April. In FY 2023, the DHS spent over $780 million for illegal services. These figures do not include costs to process illegals, including transportation, shelter, detention, food, medical care, education for children, translators, hiring training, legal defense costs, and more. These costs also do not include $4 Billion sent by Biden-Harris to Central America, according to the CIS.

The July 2024 Startling Facts from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, released on August 16, 2024 to the House Committee on Homeland Security, reported the crisis “still out of control.” By July, the total of illegal encounters under the Biden-Harris administration had reached 10.1 million – 200% increase from 4 years combined (FY2017-FY2020), which didn’t include at least 2 million “got-a-ways.”

In a June 17, 2024 Cost of Illegal Immigration report, CIS said that the crisis began when Biden-Harris campaigned to get rid of President Trump’s immigration policies, such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which resulted in soaring “frivolous asylum claims.” The administration also contributed to the problem, they concluded, by ending agreements with several Central American countries that curtailed illegal migration, such as Title 42, which encouraged more people to come and overwhelm the entire system. There is now a record 51.6 million immigrants in the U.S., making up 15.6% of the U.S. population, and these low-wage workers collectively have been a net drain on our country and communities which are losing their middle-class tax base.

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On April 24, 2024, Homeland Security reported over 1.7 million illegals had entered the country in the first six month of FY2024, the greatest number in history; the majority were single young males. CBP agents also seized 10,026 Pounds of fentanyl during that period (a lethal dose is 2mg), enough to kill 2.2 billion people.

The Center for Immigration Studies testified to Congress at the Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee hearing on January 11, 2024 that the illegal alien population estimates since Ms. Harris took office had grown to 12.8 million by October of 2023. Most of the adult illegal immigrants had no education beyond high school (about double compared to U.S. born citizens) and were making extensive use of welfare. More than half, 59%, use one or more major welfare programs and receive over an estimated $42 Billion in benefits. The children of illegals (many born in the U.S.) also receive free school breakfast and lunch, WIC, many are provided Medicaid, and had cost public schools $68.1 Billion in 2019. Their analysis found the taxes paid by some illegals were not nearly enough to cover their costs to taxpayers.

According to a November 13, 2023 Special Committee on Homeland Security Majority Report, the border crisis cost Americans, already struggling under record-high inflation and a down job market, an estimated $451 billion annually. It found the net cost of illegal immigration was greater than the total annual GDP of 15 states and was costing every American taxpayer an average of $1,156.

A significant portion of those costs were going for health care for illegals, overwhelming providers, reducing access to medical care for Americans and seniors, and leaving U.S. hospitals with billions in unpaid bills.
The Report went on to document the effects on schools, law enforcement, public food and housing and childcare benefits, destruction of private property and livelihoods for farmers and ranchers along the border, and dangers to the illegals themselves and innocent children.

Title 42 was ended by the Biden-Harris Administration the spring of 2022 and media has been largely silent on the consequences. Ending Title 42 eliminated medical vetting to ensure migrants are not coming into the country with contagious and deadly diseases. Medical literature is rarely reported in mainstream media, but it reveals growing concerns among healthcare professionals. More illegals are now coming from atypical countries (Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and as far away as China an Afghanistan). It’s resulted in unprecedented surges in cases of formerly eliminated communicable diseases are now being reported by public health departments – including tuberculosis, hepatitis B and C, polio, syphilis, measles, diphtheria, and more.

The CDC reported in May, for example, that 84% of measles in a recent Chicago outbreak were linked to Venezuelan migrants, with the rest from Peru and Chile.
Syphilis has spiked to the highest seen in 70 years.
One in 50 kids have active untreated TB.
Measles, which had been officially eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, has been spreading across the country, according to the CDC, and already triple last year’s total.
Leprosy, polio, malaria and smallpox are reappearing in the U.S., brought in by illegals.
Fungal, parasitic, vector-borne and other pathogens of third-world diseases (called neglected tropical disease) have been coming through our borders and are now widespread along the S. gulf coast, especially Texas and Florida.

Infectious migrants are in our schools, grocery stores, malls, churches and communities, putting Americans, young and old, at risk.

Crime Wave

Almost daily, Americans are learning of horrific crimes by undocumented aliens, with significant increases in violent crimes, such as reported by Nexstar Media Group, a news network validated by independent watchdog groups. Local news agencies have also been unable to ignore the growing problem of gangs coming through the border and criminal activity in our cities that now occur on a regular basis.

The National Sheriff’s Association reported a record number of suspected terrorists were apprehended in 2023 and reported that the influx of people, illicit narcotics and crime were straining local resources for border sheriffs and law enforcement across the country. The head of the Association sounded the alarm of drug poisonings, comparing the number of fentanyl deaths to a large plane crashing every day. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that 64% of federal arrests in 2018 involved noncitizens, despite being only 7% of the population at that time.

FAIR has reported examples of serious crimes by illegal aliens from verified sources every year since 2007 and shares videos of their personal stories. A partial list of Americans killed by illegal immigrants is also compiled by ALIPAC (Americans for Legal Immigration) volunteers and includes 789 Americans as of March 18, 2024, with links to the full stories of each murder. The accounts of some of the legal cases are also discussed on their forum. The efforts by the victims’ families are simply to bring awareness that illegal immigration is not a victimless crime.

Arrests by Border Patrol agents of illegals at the border with criminal convictions grew to 15,267 last year and are already 14,697 so far in 2024. Newsweek reported in March that during Biden-Harris administration, there had already been 162 homicides by illegals, compared to 11 during the entire Trump Presidential administration.

Crime statistics are notoriously incomplete and difficult to compare, especially with undocumented immigrants, but undeniably, any crime by someone who has not entered our country legally would not have been committed if they hadn’t broken the law in the first place.

Yet mainstream media, such as CNN, continues to deny that illegal immigration brings crime. CNN based their claim on an old Texas Department of Public Safety study that had checked immigration status of arrest records from 2012-2018; which is not only unrepresentative of today’s undocumented migrants, but curious. Just this week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott with Texas Secretary of State, sent a demand letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services because the federal agency was refusing to provide citizenship and immigration status of people registered to vote so that Texas could verify if they can legally vote.

Mainstream media calling the illegal crime wave a myth typically base their claims on a “fact-checking” report from Brennan Center for Justice – yes, a Soros Open Society Foundation funded Democracy Program.

Brennan Center is a far-left activist group, according to Capital Research Center, lobbying for the elimination of the Electoral College, opposition to Mr. Trump, racial equity, Supreme Court reform, gun regulations, voting rights, and BLM.
Ann Coulter explained the logical fallacies and flaws behind the myth of low immigrant crime studies.
A 2018 review by sociologists in Annual Review of Criminology found significant variations in academic immigration-crime studies, with some conclusions negative, positive or null, depending on their design. In other words, reader beware. As Ms. Coulter advised, look to concrete numbers not phony studies.

Reading everything happening with immigration in our Country is overwhelming. None of this illustrates Biblical caring for Americans or for our neighbors.

God prescribed borders for his people; he sent his people out into the world to develop different cultures and languages; and called upon them to take care of their families first.

Biblical teachings are simply absent in Ms. Harris’ border policies.

In contrast, Mr. Trump is well known for his border wall initiative. Border walls are not unusual in the world. By the time he was elected, there were 77 massive border walls or fences in nations around the world.

Before elected, Mr. Trump had promised: “I will never waver from my sacred duty to defend this Nation and its people. We will get the job done.”

Was that true? From the first day in office, everything shows President Trump did work to try to follow through on that promise. Significant legislation signed by President Trump included secure the border, strengthen immigration enforcement, support ICE, provide humanitarian aid at the border, increase border drug enforcement, end discretionary federal funding of sanctuary cities; streamline and expedite asylum hearings. He launched the Family Fraud Initiative to identify crossers using children to fraudulently claim family units and curb the abusive trafficking of children; and address the crisis of cartels, drug and human traffickers, and gangs.

Other immigration actions during President Trump’s term included building over 400 miles of border wall, and illegal crossings dropped over 87% where the wall was constructed.

He ended catch-and-release, signed three historic asylum cooperative agreements with Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala; and enacted a historic partnership with Mexico called Migrant Protection Protocols, to safely return asylum seekers to Mexico while awaiting immigration hearings.
Resettlement from the world’s most dangerous terrorist regions was suspended; and national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists were instituted.
Regulations were issued to ensure migrants are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare; end birth tourism; make illegals ineligible for free federal housing funding; and direct federal agencies to prioritize hiring of U.S. citizens.
And finally, and most important he withdraw from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration.

Every American wants to feel safe and protected in their homes, communities, churches and schools. Our civil leaders are God’s servant to protect us from evildoers and punish evil. This election is our test in the larger battle for our country…the spiritual one. Of the Presidential candidates, President Trump is proving to be the lesser magistrate willing to fight the battle against autocratic and unbiblical rulers.

In Part 8, I studied what the scripture teaches on government taxes and spending. What about tithing and our role as Christians when examining God’s servants in managing the peoples’ money?