UPDATE: Gov Kemp signed the bill described below on the last possible day, August 5, 2020.
The road to Georgiafornia
Led by a Mexican citizen, Adelina Nichols, the anti-borders Marxists at the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) are demanding that Georgia’s governor veto just-passed legislation intended to offer additional protections to law enforcement officers and other first responders for “biased motivated crimes.”
Protections for police was included in the committee process of the hate crimes legislation later passed by the Republicans, but was removed when the GOP majority caved to the Democrats and the BLM rioters.
“We’ve had ongoing discussions with the minority party for the large part of two days and within our own Republican caucus and we’ve reached a compromise that I think everybody will be pleased with,” state Sen. Bill Cowsert (R) said, ABC News reported.
Below is a Twitter post from GLAHR on the measure designed to protect police:
Photo: GLAHR Twitter
After reviewing the legislation, the ACLU has noted that it can be interpreted to actually reduce penalties for killing a police officer. The liberal AJC happily wrote that up here.
Note that the GLAHR objection to the poorly crafted bill isn’t that it a poorly crafted bill, but that it is somehow “anti-Black Lives Matter.”
We predict that Kemp will veto this one. We blame massive incompetence.
“To state it plainly, the Trump administration rescinded DACA the same way that the Obama administration created it: unilaterally, and through a mere memorandum,” he wrote, calling Chief Justice Roberts’ reasoning “mystifying” in finding that what Mr. Obama did is acceptable and what Mr. Trump did is not.” Stephen Dinan in the Washington Times.
The U.S. Supreme Cpurt has ruled that Obama’s DACA amnesty will remain in place. The ruling creates a situation in which a former president, Barack Obama, can illegally create an illegal executive amnesty but the legal system in the fading U.S.A. says the next president will not be allowed to undo the illegal act.
In May, the Center for Immigration Studies pointed out the obvious and what we have been saying for years:” Perhaps even more importantly, a generation still in Central America is waiting in the wings, their parents and grandparents waiting to see what special protections await their children if they bring them over.”
Stephen Dinan wrote it up in the Washington Times. The entire WaPo report should be read here.
Rioters across the United States have waved Mexican flags in various American cities to protest the death of George Floyd, allegedly at the hands of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, police officer.
While rioters waved Mexican flags, American flags were routinely burned at riots in Los Angeles, California, Atlanta, Georgia, Portland, Oregon; and Chicago, Illinois.
In one video posted online, a rioter with a Mexican flag can be seen helping beat a man who was carrying and waving an American flag. In another post, rioters in Los Angeles torched an American flag while rioters with Mexican flags attacked police vehicles.
Julio Rosas
✔@Julio_Rosas11
BLM protesters are trying to burn an American flag while blocking traffic in downtown Los Angeles.
Portland: A man brought an American flag to the antifa/BLM protest (later riot). He is confronted & then sucker-punched by a man wearing a “F— Trump” shirt. The mob rushed in to beat him. He never let go of the flag. @PortlandPolice did not help. #Antifa#BlackLivesMatter
United States Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donahue says it is “crucial” that businesses be allowed to continue importing foreign visa workers even as 30 million Americans remain unemployed due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis.
Donahue sent a letter to President Donald Trump asking that he not halt foreign visa worker programs — such as the H-1B visa, the L visa, the H-2B visa, and the OPT program — claiming businesses need the foreign workers to fill American jobs. Read the rest here at Breitbart News.
Photo: College of Liberal and Creative Arts, San Francisco State University
(Note: Atlanta’s mayor has already signed legislation to close the city’s jail)
The letter pasted below was sent to the mayor of Atlanta recently and distributed on May 28, 2020. I have added a few educational links to the letter. My links are noted with an *asterisk.
Photo: CBS 46
The letter below:
Dear Members of the Atlanta City Council:
We, as *immigrants’ rights organizations, write this letter to urge you to support an upcoming budget amendment that will finally close the city jail and redirect the $18 million currently allocated to the Atlanta Department of Corrections (ADOC) in theproposed 2020-21 city budget to services to promote the health and wellness of all Atlantans.
To date, while *the City of Atlanta terminated the contract with ICE, ACDC to this day still incarcerates our community members, primarily on minor or petty offenses. It is time to end the cruel, unnecessary, and unhelpful incarceration of all human beings at ACDC. The city’s commitment to close and *repurpose the jail cannot be reconciled with allocating millions of dollars to its operation in the coming year. At a time of public health crisis and a loss of millions in the City’s revenue, it is unconscionable for the City of Atlanta to spend $18 million to continue to operate a jail that sits mostly empty and is already slated for closure and repurposing.
We ask that you support the amendment to zero out the FY21 budget for the Department of Corrections and announce a date certain for the jail’s closure.
Just two years ago, many of our organizations testified before the City Council on the human rights violations occurring at the Atlanta City Detention Center (ACDC), and called for terminating the contract with ICE and closing the jail altogether. These violations, described at length in Project South and Georgia Detention Watch’s 2018 Report titled, Inside Atlanta’s Immigrant Cages, highlighted: lack of medical care and mental health care, unsanitary living conditions, lack of edible food, abusive labor practices, lack of religious accommodations, verbal abuse by officers, overuse and abusive use of solitary confinement, and more.[1]
After years of advocacy from community organizations to close the detention center and end immigration detention in Atlanta, the Mayor created an advisory committee to make a recommendation as to whether the City of Atlanta should end the contract with ICE that allowed for the detention of immigrants at ACDC. After hearing from directly impacted individuals who *testified to the horrid conditions at the facility and urged the Mayor to shut the facility down, the advisory committee recommended that the mayor end the contract to detain immigrants with ICE. The committee recognized that detaining immigrants at ACDC was inhumane.
*Terminating the contract with ICE was an important step towards Atlanta becoming a more welcoming city – one that prioritizes community-based care and support over punitive spaces for warehousing human beings. In the year that followed, we heard from organizers and residents throughout the city of Atlanta who are ready to see the jail closed, and the Mayor committed to shutting down and repurposing ACDC. Over the past two years, we were proud to see Atlanta praised, both locally and nationally for the collaborative development of a bold and compassionate plan to divest from incarceration and invest in real solutions for Atlanta’s marginalized communities.
Now more than ever, we must put an end to locking people in cages for petty offenses such as jaywalking and disorderly conduct, wasting desperately needed resources, criminalizing people for being poor, and making us all less safe.
We respectfully ask that you support our proposal and vote to zero out this year’s budget for the Department of Corrections and set a date for the jail’s closure.
05/27/202HOUSTON — Officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in Houston, Texas, removed a Salvadoran fugitive Tuesday wanted for aggravated homicide and terrorist organizations.
Digna Del Carmen Medina, 29, a citizen of El Salvador who was unlawfully present in the United States, was escorted from Houston, Texas, to the Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport in San Salvador, El Salvador, where she was presented to Salvadoran law enforcement authorities.
Immigration officials first encountered Medina Sept. 15, 2016, after she illegally entered the United States near Hidalgo, Texas. She was released from ICE custody Sept. 28, 2016, while she awaited her immigration proceedings.
An immigration judge ordered Medina removed from the United States to El Salvador on Aug. 22, 2019, and she was taken into ICE custody. On April 24, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) dismissed her appeal of that decision.
ICE is focused on removing public safety threats, such as convicted criminal aliens and gang members, as well as individuals who have violated our nation’s immigration laws, including those who illegally reentered the country after being removed and immigration fugitives ordered removed by federal immigration judges. In FY 2019, ERO Houston removed more than 12,620 aliens with criminal convictions and another 1,699 with pending criminal charges.
Members of the public who have information about foreign fugitives are urged to contact ICE by calling the ICE Tip Line at 1 (866) 347-2423 or internationally at 001-1802-872-6199. They can also file a tip online by completing ICE’s online tip form.
Soon, the nation will know the fate of the so-called “Dreamers”, the 800,000 or so recipients of President Barack Obama’s 2012 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) work-permit program. As my colleague John Miano discussed earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on a legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s revocation of the DACA protections for these hundreds of thousands of illegally present adults who came to the U.S. before age 16.
The DACA generation at issue is all grown now, acculturated to life in America with their DACA work permits and finding fairly broad sympathy, some of it quite bipartisan. About to become front and center again on the national stage are great political, moral, and policy questions as to whether the Dreamers will be cut a special path-to-citizenship break or sent packing to countries some may not remember.
But lost in the discussion of the old DACA generation is the brand new DACA generation, just imported, that almost no one has acknowledged as the spinning political football it is heading fast and hard into Washington. Today’s policy-makers, political candidates, and advocacy groups that don’t appreciate DACA ought to be thinking ahead about what to do about them, while they are still children, if Democrats win power in November. To even start to do that, acknowledgement is the prerequisite.
The mass-migration crisis of 2018-2019, when more than a million mostly Central Americans crashed the southern border, was largely fueled by media-powered mass discovery of the previously obscure “Flores Settlement” loophole, by which adults knew that crossing with at least one child entitled them to be quickly released into the United States, where they could permanently join the nation’s illegal immigrant population.
Children poured in, hundreds of thousands of them. No one seems to have measured the parameters of this next DACA generation. But U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehension data shows that, at the very least, 722,700 children crossed into the United States in fiscal years 2018, 2019, and through April 2020.
I say “at the very least” because that 722,700 number is the sum of unaccompanied minor aliens sent over the border and family units. CBP defines family units as “the number of individuals (either a child under 18 years old, parent or legal guardian) apprehended with a family member by the U.S. Border Patrol”. I’m only counting one minor per family. So the 722,700 figure would balloon considerably if, say, half of the 622,692 families came in with a second child. Many more came through at ports of entry as “inadmissibles”, for example 53,430 family units in just 2019.
It’s safe to say that the next DACA generation is well over one million.
Republican Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan has endorsed a candidate for state senate who is a former board member of a leftist organization that lobbies against immigration enforcement, voter ID, ICE holds and official English for government.
State Senate District 31 hopeful Jason Anavitarte served on the board of directors of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO) from 2006 to 2009. During that time, GALEO lobbied against passage of the nationally noted SB529, the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act which established a requirement that public employers and their contractors sort out newly hired blackmarket labor with use of the federal employment verification system now known as E-Verify.
The legislation also required state use of the federal 287(g) program that allows local law enforcement to screen jail inmates for immigration status and report illegal alien prisoners to ICE for deportation proceedings. The bill, now law, that GALEO vehemently opposed also requires that local and county governments verify the legal status of people applying for local, state and federal public benefits.
GALEO Executive Director and former Democrat fundraiser, Jerry Gonzalez, drew much attention during the lobbying frenzy against the 2006 state immigration enforcement measure when he escorted self-described illegal aliens into the gold-domed state Capitol telling legislators they should regard the illegal aliens as “constituents.” Gonzalez described the illegals as merely “immigrants.” The staged and pre-announced GALEO transporting and encouragement of the illegals made a memorable note for pro-enforcement groups and news in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
A February Twitter post from Lt. Governor Duncan describes Anavitarte as a “proven conservative…”
Photo: @GeoffDuncanGA Twitter feed
The endorsement from Duncan has raised eyebrows in conservative quarters of the state’s Republican Party not only because GALEO is well known for its corporate-funded opposition to immigration enforcement, but because candidate Anavitarte, now running as a Republican, filed to run for state House in 2006 as a Democrat.
The Lt. Governor also serves as president of the state senate.
Jason Anavitarte. Photo: Rome-News Tribune
Perhaps the most jarring surprise for pro-enforcement voters in Duncan’s endorsement is the fact that in 2016, U.S. Senator David Perdue terminated the Judiciary Committee’s confirmation process of another former GALEO board member and State Court Judge, Dax Lopez, who was nominated for a federal judgeship by former President Barack Obama. Perdue made it clear that his office investigated the nominee’s ties to the controversial GALEO and ended the chances of confirmation because of that relationship.
“After a thorough review of the professional and judicial record of DeKalb County Judge Dax Lopez, I have become uncomfortable with his longstanding participation in a controversial organization including his service on its board of directors” Perdue wrote in his statement on the matter.
The obvious – and many say troubling – difference in judgment between Georgia’s Republican Lt. Governor and its senior U.S. Senator is not going un-noticed by grassroots GOP voters.
According to the left-leaning Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than green card holders.
Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, snared a primary endorsement from President Donald Trump in 2018 due in large part to Kemp’s tough talk and campaign promises on illegal immigration. Kemp has not mentioned immigration since the November, 2018 election.
Ballotpedia lists four Republican candidates for Georgia’s senate District 31.
