Search Results for: politics georgia

“…Republicans reduced access for Americans and legal immigrants by including the illegals.”

Pyler v Doe Reality

“Although Plyler was a seminal case concerning undocumented students’ access to education, it had several significant shortcomings. Most notably, it applied only to K-12 public education, so federal and state laws that bar undocumented students’ access to postsecondary college education remain in place today.” From the Columbia Law Review, September, 2018.

The landmark 1982 Plyer v Doe Supreme Court decision began when a Texas school district tried to exclude illegal aliens from an education by charging tuition in K-12 public schools. Without getting into eye-glazing detail, as referred to above, the decision requires American taxpayers to fund a K-12, public school education regardless of student’s immigration status. School districts cannot ask about immigration status.

Mostly from people who want to continue the lunacy of including illegal aliens in Georgia’s Dual Enrollment (DE) program, we are hearing the ridiculous assertion that the Plyler v Doe SCOTUS ruling somehow prevents excluding illegals from DE “because we can’t ask them about immigration status.” Nonsense.

For one thing, we dont need to ask – merely require that all DE beneficiaries be either U.S. citizens or Lawful Permanent Residents (aka “green card” holders). An application for DE is handled by the Georgia Student Finance Commission. And they make it clear no SSN is required.

According to the Georgia Department of Education “Dual Enrollment is designed to prepare students for college and career opportunities leading students to postsecondary institutions for an industry-recognized certification or licensure, an associate and/or higher college degree, and successful employment.”

• Related reading from the U.S. Dept. of Education: “School districts may not request information about the citizenship or immigration status of students or their families with the purpose or result of denying them access to educational opportunities.”

Georgia taxpayers are paying 100% of the college tuition — and books and fees for DE recipients – including the illegal aliens. Here, all concerned need to be reminded that illegal aliens are not eligible for employment under federal law. Why are we prepping them for a career?  Is it a nod to an upcoming amnesty attempt?

College classes are not K-12. The very fact that tuition is involved clearly separates Dual Enrollment from K-12. Nothing in Plyler v Doe applies to DE. It’s true that school districts are prohibited from asking K-12 students about their immigration status. But again, it is not necessary to ask about immigration status to keep illegal aliens out of DE – just as Georgia excludes them from the recently instituted K-12 “school choice” benefit (*see line 342 of 2024’s SB 233).

The 2025 state budget has more than $91 million ready to go for the DE program.

In a cost reduction move several years ago, the Republican-ruled General Assembly put a limit on the number of class hours any DE student could take instead of excluding the illegal aliens. Put another way, Republicans reduced access for Americans and legal immigrants by including the illegals.

• Related reading: Model language for DE reform in Georgia

About 4000 illegal aliens graduate from Georgia high schools each year according to recent figures from the leftist “The Guardian” news outlet.

How many illegal aliens are getting a no-cost college education courtesy of our tax dollars from the DE benefit? Including this writer, for most pro-enforcement conservatives, one is too many. Judging from the absence of loud and fearless pushback on the Dual Enrollment arrangement, that sentiment apparently does not apply to most Republicans.

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A version of this column was also published in the December 9, 2024 edition of the Glynn County newspaper The Islander.

*Updated with a correction on the year SB 233 “school choice” bill passed which was 2024.

• Unlike American veterans when they apply for medical care at the VA, illegal aliens do not undergo a means test for taxpayer-funded, no-cost care in U.S. emergency rooms.

A version  of the below commentary was originally published in the Washington Times newspaper in 2006 and is republished here with permission. While the income eligibility thresholds have been adjusted since then, VA priorities remain about the same. Readers can see the current requirements for Category 8 g  vets at “VA Priority Groups” on the VA.gov website.

In 1966 my friend Fred was sent to Vietnam and survived a year as a door gunner on a U. S. Army “Huey” helicopter gunship. You won’t hear it from him, so I will tell you that Fred had one of the most dangerous jobs possible in that long ago and divisive war. While Fred’s ship went down more than ten times in action, he came home without a scratch.

Welcome home Fred Dague — and thank you.

Unlike Fred, in 1970, after observing my 18th birthday in Marine Corps boot camp, I was drew duty in sunny southern California.

We both kept our promises to our nation.

Like our fathers, as young recruits, both Fred and I were promised lifetime free medical care by our government as a benefit of our service.

We are learning that this is not our father’s America.

As “50 somethings,” Fred and I have both applied to the Veteran’s Administration for those promised medical benefits.

In 2004, both of our applications for that promised free health care were denied.

The response from the VA reads in part: “Each year, the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs determines which priority groups will be enrolled in the VA health system.  You are not eligible for enrollment or VA health care for most conditions.”

Fred and I have been placed in the “Priority Group 8g, which means that we applied after January 2003, earned over $31,000 last year, and have no service related ailments — thereby disqualifying us for the free medical care we were promised as young men.

Priority Groups are the result of the federal government’s budgetary shortages. Veterans without service-connected health problems are now held up to a means test to determine eligibility for VA medical benefits. For now, we can both make do without the promised care, but many of the approximately 200,000 other category 8g veterans cannot.

So much for the promise. So much for priorities.

For Fred, myself and the other vets who are denied or offered limited medical care from our government, these priorities are difficult to accept while we watch millions of illegal aliens not only demanding, but receiving taxpayer funded free medical care at American emergency rooms and clinics.

• Related reading: Illegal Immigrants Leave US Hospitals With Billions In Unpaid Bills

There is no “means test” for the free health care provided for anyone — from anywhere in the world — who can illegally cross our intentionally unsecured borders and get within 250 yards of an American emergency room. It’s the law.

The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 (EMTALA) is a law that is vigorously enforced.

We are taxpayers, Fred and I, so to us, it is a little more than ironic that as veterans, we are paying for health care for millions of illegal aliens while we are not eligible for that same promised free care from our own Veterans Administration.

The Medicare Prescription Drug Modernization Act of 2003 included one billion dollars to help reimburse American hospitals for the federally mandated health care that they must provide to illegal aliens. It included nothing to help Priority Group 8g veterans.

Priorities indeed.

Because illegals and their criminal employers seem to have a better lobby than American vets in Washington, our nation is keeping the promise to the illegal aliens.

The same people who have decided which promises to keep have also made a decision on which of our laws are enforced. Not that anyone asked, but if it is a matter of priorities, in our own search for a better life, Fred and I would much rather see the laws that apply to border security and illegal immigration enforced and the VA Priority Groups ignored.

If it is a matter of priorities.

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Mr. King is president of the Dustin Inman Society, a Georgia-based coalition dedicated to educating the public on the consequences of illegal immigration.

On the Web: NewDustinInmanSociety.org    —  X/Twitter: @DAKDIS

*  Washington Times coverage here.

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‘DEFAMATORY’: Conservative Demands Swing-State Newspaper Retract ‘Hate Group’ Smear

From the Daily Signal

Tyler O’Neil

October 22, 2024

D.A. King, an immigration enforcement activist whose defamation lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center is proceeding in court, sent a legal demand letter to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, requesting a correction when the newspaper called his organization an “anti-immigration hate group.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper of record in and around Georgia’s capital city, mentioned King’s group, the Dustin Inman Society, as an aside in an Oct. 7 article about Katy Stamper, who won the Democratic primary in Georgia’s 11th Congressional District. Democrats now support a write-in candidate, claiming Stamper won the primary on false pretenses.

“A search of activity under her birth name, Karen Sacandy, which Stamper legally changed in 2019, showed that she previously was aligned with a Marietta-based anti-immigration hate group,” The Journal-Constitution’s Washington correspondent, Tia Mitchell, wrote. Mitchell went on to include links to the Dustin Inman Society’s website, without mentioning the society or explaining why the paper characterized it as an “anti-immigration hate group.”

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The Dustin Inman Society, which advocates enforcing immigration law and combats illegal immigration, has three legal immigrants on its board of advisors: Mary Grabar (from Slovenia); Maria Litland (from Austria); and Sabine Durden-Coulter (from Germany). The society takes its name from a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed in a 2000 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant.

“This smear is an ongoing and retaliatory habit for the staff at the AJC,” King told The Daily Signal in a written statement Friday. “They know it’s false and have had to run corrections many times over the years telling readers that we are aimed at illegal immigration and are not somehow ‘anti-immigration.’”

Where Did AJC Get the Idea?

King is already fighting to restore his reputation in court after one left-leaning organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, branded the Dustin Inman Society a “hate group.”

The SPLC, which routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups” and puts them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, branded the society an “anti-immigrant hate group” in 2018. Yet back in 2011, the SPLC told The Associated Press that it didn’t consider the society a “hate group.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates lessening immigration restrictions, registered a lobbyist to oppose a bill the society supported. The SPLC marked the society as a “hate group” around the same time.

King sued the SPLC for defamation, and a federal judge allowed the lawsuit to move to the discovery process.

As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” a terrorist used the organization’s “hate map” to attack a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., in 2012, and a former SPLC staffer called the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.” Many defamation lawsuits against the SPLC have failed, however, in part because few plaintiffs before King could prove that the organization had reason to suspect the “hate group” label was false.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution didn’t cite the SPLC in its attack on the Dustin Inman Society, and it didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this story.

King told The Daily Signal that the newspaper is echoing the Southern Poverty Law Center’s attack but setting itself up as a separate arbiter of “hate.”

“Since we began our battle against illegal immigration here in 2005, the AJC has migrated from merely being biased, liberal and agenda-driven to blooming into apparent competition with the despicable SPLC,” he said. “They have now apparently taken it upon themselves to bypass the leftist establishment smear artists and classify pro-enforcement political opponents who talk back as operating an ‘anti-immigration hate group’ themselves—including those who are immigrants.”

King said the newspaper was engaging in a double standard: condemning his organization as a “hate group” while celebrating those on the Left who advocate amnesty for illegal aliens. He cited the Georgia Association of Elected Officials, which goes by the acronym GALEO and describes itself as focusing “on increasing civic participation of the Latinx community and developing prominent Latino leaders throughout Georgia.”

“In the meantime,” King said of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “they label anti-enforcement, far-left groups such as the notorious GALEO that publicly protest against immigration enforcement as ‘civil rights groups.’”

King also noted that the AJC paid to sponsor the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund gala in 2004. Mario Obledo, MALDEF’s co-founder, had suggested that non-Hispanic, white California residents should move “back to Europe.”

When then-President Bill Clinton gave Obledo the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, a man in the audience asked, “You also made the statement that California is going to become a Hispanic state and if anyone doesn’t like it they should leave. Did you say that?”

“I did,” Obledo replied. “They ought to go back to Europe.”

“The AJC has promoted open borders and helped this far-left, anti-borders group with fundraising,” King told The Daily Signal. “Just because MALDEF founder Mario Obledo called for Americans who didn’t agree with his plan for California and saying those who didn’t ‘ought to go back to Europe’ didn’t stop AJC from serving as ‘dinner chair’ for a MALDEF funder gala here.”… please read the entire article here.