Border Under Siege: Illegal Immigration Surges

August 16, 2016

Experts say rush ahead of election just the beginning if Clinton wins the White House

An alarming surge in illegal immigration has taken the Southwest border by storm and serves as a sobering reminder of what is at stake in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.

Border Patrol statistics from July — released last week — showed nearly 34,000 illegals were caught at the Southwest border in just one month — up more than 5,000 when compared to last July’s results, or nearly 15 percent. The total number of illegal immigrants caught at the border with only two months left to go in this fiscal year has climbed to 332,000. That 10-month figure has already exceeded the total recorded during all 12 months of 2015.

“We’re going to become an even more lawless country … And unfortunately, the people that end up paying for it are the citizens of this country, the taxpayers of this country.”

And these massive increases are only the beginning if the U.S. undergoes four or eight more years of open-borders policies under a Hillary Clinton administration, according to experts.

“Secretary Clinton has said that President Obama has not gone far enough with his executive orders and that if she is elected president she will go even further.

So we’re going to become an even more lawless country. And that’s wrong,” Brandon Judd, the president of the National Border Control Council, told LifeZette.

“And unfortunately, the people that end up paying for it are the citizens of this country — the taxpayers of this country. We bear the burden of what our legislators are forcing upon us … or in this case, president.”

Indeed, neither Obama nor Clinton has addressed the undue burdens that lawful U.S. citizens bear as this surge of illegal immigration takes its toll on the economy and local communities.

"The biggest costs are education, healthcare, social services — the vast majority of which are paid for at the local levels. So this amounts to a huge unfunded mandate for the local communities, and Washington doesn't seem to be taking any sort of responsibility for this," Ira Mehlman, the media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has focused a major portion of his campaign around the issue of clamping down on illegal immigration and securing the border — in stark contrast with Clinton's campaign.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director for the Center of Immigration Studies, predicted that if Clinton is elected, there will be a "pretty strong reason to come here and get in while the getting's good" and that there will be a "significant uptick" in attempts at illegal entry.

"If … Trump wins, during the two or three months before his inauguration, I think you're likely to see a big, big spike in people trying to get in before, getting in under the wire," Krikorian said. "And frankly, I think you'd see the Obama administration kind of opening the flood gates too, in other words, giving documents to as many people as they possibly can."

So much hinges on which presidential administration takes the reins from Obama and initiates and sets policies for how to handle the illegal immigration problem. The issue of which candidate will be able to nominate a replacement for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — as well as any other openings that will happen in the next four to eight years — will also be a major issue.

If Clinton is elected, she is widely expected to reintroduce an executive amnesty similar to President Obama's. While the president's executive amnesty was halted by a lower court and faced a split-decision at the Supreme Court, a newly confirmed Clinton justice could sway the court to give Clinton's amnesty a legal stamp of approval.

The promise of executive amnesty made legal would even further incentivize immigrants to attempt illegal entry.

"The people coming are rational people. They understand that our laws are not being enforced. People respond to the signals that we send. When people are convinced that we are serious about enforcing our laws they respond rationally and fewer come," Mehlman said.

Judd agreed, adding, "What's interesting about the policies is through executive order, the president is able to completely bypass Congress and bypass the will of the public … But the president, by executive order, is saying, 'Well, you know, hey, I appreciate Congress passing the laws, but I'm just gonna ignore them and I'm gonna do what I want and what's expedient for me and my party politically.'"

udd, who has worked in law enforcement for 19 years — 15 of which were spent working on the United States' Southwest border — said that those immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally are often tacitly encouraged to commit more crimes if they think they won't be prosecuted. Nearly monthly, Judd said that immigrants charged with murder, rape, and robbery were often found to have come to the U.S. illegally.

"Now, I personally believe, and being in law enforcement for 19 years, when you ignore the laws and you tell people that, 'Hey, our laws don't matter,' they're gonna break more laws. If the immigration laws don't matter, why would any other law of the United States matter?" Judd said. "And so what you're doing is you're basically in essence telling them that, 'Hey, look, you can break these laws and you're going to be rewarded for it, so why not come and break other laws?'"

Michael Cutler, a retired criminal investigator for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told LifeZette that the Obama administration has done a marvelous job of finding new ways "to give aliens who shouldn't be here justification to be here," which "runs contrary to letter of the law and the spirit of the law."

"So you've got a president who's doing everything he can to encourage illegal immigration. You have Hillary Clinton saying that Obama has been too tough on immigration, saying that she would also resort to executive action and executive orders, making a mockery of our laws," Cutler said.

And if Clinton does become the next president of the United States and enacts her agenda of lawlessness and permissiveness, the average legal American citizen will suffer for it.

"So everyone is getting what they want except for the average American who well may lose his or her life — or at the very least his or her job," Cutler said.

"This is the political agenda that's trumping what the law says, and if Hillary gets her way, and they appoint Supreme Court judges that back up her lawlessness, then her lawlessness will become the law of the day. And that's a very dangerous situation. That's a very slippery slope that I don't want this country standing on."

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