Thousands of mostly young males from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, have joined together in caravans and are trying to get into our country through our southern border. Yes, there are some women and children too, and they are inevitably the ones CNN and others interview, and put in their news coverage of unfolding events. But most of the people coming are young, and male, and without accompanying children.
Why do they come? Well, they’ve usually been told what “magic words” to say when stopped by our border agents. They’re coached by coyotes (smugglers) or by family members or friends to claim that they “fear to return to their own country.” If this claim is made on American soil, they’re given a court date years down the road, and very few ever bother to show up for that hearing, because by then, they’ve disappeared into our country. They could be, literally, anywhere.
In order to avoid this pointless exercise in futility, the Trump Administration has decided to work with the Mexican government to keep the caravaners off U.S. soil, and on the Mexican side of the border. This will prevent them from merely disappearing into the U.S. population. President Trump, by executive order, has declared that in order for a person to claim asylum, they must do so at a “port of entry”, not at any random spot anywhere along the border. A federal judge in the reliably liberal 9th Circuit (California), not surprisingly, called a halt to President Trump’s common sense proposal, and we’ll have to wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately decide where we end up on this.
But in the meantime, some of the caravaners have decided to take the law into their own hands, and try to force their way into the U.S. It worked for them when Mexico tried to keep them out at Mexico’s southern border. They pelted Mexican police with rocks, bottles, and other projectiles, and tore temporary fencing and barriers down, and streamed into Mexico. Then they made their way through Mexico, and now some of them are trying to force their way through our southern border. Our border agents were pelted with rocks, bottles, and other projectiles, and the appropriate non-lethal response to such aggression was used – tear gas and pepper spray – to push back the mob. To watch CNN and other fake news coverage of the incident, you’d think it was Kent State or the My Lai Massacre all over again. It should be noted that when tear gas was used during the Obama Administration against border crashing mobs, there was no criticism by the mainstream media at all. Trump, by comparison is made out to be some kind of war criminal.
The bottom line is this. We are a sovereign nation, and have a right to determine who gets to come into our country, and who doesn’t. The previous Administration, and many before that, had been, for the most part, far too lax in enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. Donald Trump was quite clear when he was a candidate for the presidency, that he intended to enforce our immigration laws and protect our borders. In my humble opinion, it’s about time.