90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, April 28, 2022

‘Load of Bulls—’: Career Immigration Officials Rip Mayorkas’s Plan

ROMA, Texas—Customs and Border Protection officials and Department of Homeland Security staffers ripped DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s immigration plan as unserious and ill-equipped to handle the unprecedented surge of migrants on the border.

"I don't even know where to start," said one Border Patrol officer stationed along the southwest border, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. "Nothing in this plan Mayorkas says he’s going to do has even been started, and he’s not going to do it anyway."

Mayorkas released a 20-page report on Tuesday entitled "DHS Plan for Southwest Border Security and Preparedness" the night before he testified in front of Congress on the Biden administration’s handling of the border crisis. The report outlines six initiatives the agency is taking to stem the "increase in migration being experienced by the United States" and prioritizes migrant processing over border security.

But those with decades of experience working in immigration expressed skepticism at—or outright mocked—the plan in comments to the Washington Free Beacon. Their reactions demonstrate how Mayorkas has lost the faith of career personnel, many of whom complained of long hours and staffing problems.

"The plan looks like an absolute load of bullshit," said one senior DHS staffer. "Mayorkas is filled with excuses and his solution is to let them in. If you look at the plan there is an inordinate amount of focus on processing ‘vulnerable migrants’ compared to the lip service of securing the border. This administration has always been set to release as many migrants as possible and then make excuses as to why illegal aliens continue invading our country."

Mayorkas’s solutions to the crisis include providing migrants with "an updated information package to distribute to all noncitizens released from federal custody." Mayorkas also blamed Title 42, a federal law that gave immigration authorities power to rapidly deport migrants during a public health crisis, for exacerbating the migrant crisis by claiming it encouraged illegal crossings outside of legal ports of entry.

Both lines earned criticism from Michael Salinas, a former Border Patrol agent who was stationed for more than 30 years on the southern border.

"How naïve do you have to be to actually believe this? No illegal in my experience had ever planned to show up at the ports of entry to get processed," said Salinas. "All aliens are well aware that crossing the river will be...

An astonishing but largely forgotten story in Time Magazine explains why there is so much leftist concern today about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.

“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,” he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”

You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”

“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.”

And they wanted credit for it, Ball continued, “even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

Their aim, they insisted, wasn’t to rig the election but to “fortify” it against then-President Donald Trump and his allies, whom they believed to be a threat to democracy itself.

“Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

The final piece was critical, especially in the waning days of the campaign, when an October surprise in the form of Hunter Biden’s laptop threatened to derail his father’s candidacy and undo the...

Visage à trois #205

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #376

Biden’s DHS Sets Up Orwellian ‘Disinformation Governance Board’

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced on Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security has set up a new board designed to counter what it deems to be “misinformation and disinformation” threatening the homeland.

The “Disinformation Governance Board” that will be tasked with patrolling the speech of Americans, will reportedly be headed by “disinformation expert” Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington who formerly worked as an advisor to the Ukrainian government.

During a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing on DHS’s budget Wed. afternoon, Mayorkas said, “Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers is co-chair with our Principal Deputy General Counsel, Jennifer Gaskell, in leading a just recently constituted misinformation disinformation governance board. So we’re bringing — the goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat.” Jankowicz’s focus will reportedly be on “irregular migration and Russia.”

This news comes two days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk secured a $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, promising to return the platform to its free speech roots.

Although Jankowicz professes to be an expert at spotting online disinformation, these skills seemed to elude her during the final presidential debate on Oct. 22, 2020. In a tweet, she highlighted Joe Biden’s contention that “50 national security officials, and 5 former CIA heads” said in a letter that they believed the Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian influence op.”

In fact, the letter was part of a Democrat influence op designed to discredit a very damaging story that was threatening Biden’s campaign. The “laptop from hell” was a very real, and extremely relevant story.

Jankowicz also previously fretted about Twitter’s decision in early 2022 to stop limiting speech from users about the 2020 presidential election, saying she was “dismayed about this decision” “considering the long-term damage these lies do to our democracy.”

She revealed her pro-censorship stripes in another tweet, in reaction to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter: “I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities… which are already shouldering… disproportionate amounts of this abuse.”

Conservatives like the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reacted to the Biden regime’s new “disinformation” board with alarm, calling it an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”

“People who support censorship of their political opponents are the biggest threat to...

US Border and Customs agents check IDs of people crossing from Tijuana, Mexico into San Diego, California.Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A judge this week temporarily delayed the Biden administration’s announced intention to lift Title 42, the public-health measure that allows the Border Patrol to turn away illegal border-crossers without a hearing.

In a year of record illegal immigration (with more than 200,000 illegal-immigrant “encounters” last month alone), Title 42 is the only thing preventing today’s Biden Border Crisis from turning into tomorrow’s Biden Border Catastrophe.

But despite the judge’s temporary reprieve, Title 42 is going to end at some point, just like other COVID restrictions.

And then what?

Many critics of ending Title 42 — both Republicans and Democrats — have hit the White House for not first developing a plan to deal with the inevitable surge (on top of the current surge) in illegal crossings. Actually, there is a plan — it just doesn’t deal with the problem you think.

When most people imagine an appropriate response to the post-Title 42 tsunami at the border, they naturally think of ways to stop people from coming across. In other words, the problem they think needs to be addressed is the excessive number of foreigners trying to get in.

To the White House, the problem is not illegal immigration. It’s how to hide it.But President Biden’s administration is opposed to all the measures that might address that problem — it’s against Remain in Mexico, against keeping illegal immigrants in detention, against deporting illegal immigrants who are here, against even using ankle monitors to keep track of them.

A surge in crossings at the border is OK with Biden and his people; what they fear is how it will look to the public: the additional disorder, the crowding in holding centers, the news photos like those of Haitians camped under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas, last fall. It’s a political problem, not a policy one.

And so the White House plan for a post-Title 42 border isn’t focused on how to prevent the illegal flow but, in the words of press secretary Jen Psaki, how to “more efficiently process migrants” into the United States.

The Biden administration doesn’t want to limit illegal immigration — it wants to make it...