Earlier: After GOP Candidates’ Debate, Trump Still Has Immigrant Patriot Edge
I watched VDARE.com’s supercut of all the times immigration was mentioned at the August 23 GOP candidates’ debate. As polls have shown, and Ann Coulter pointed out, immigration is a prime concern among Republicans. Knowing that, we could expect every candidate to spout off about being tough on border security. (Read the whole thing here: Transcript: GOP presidential hopefuls debate in Milwaukee, CQ Staff, RollCall.com, August 24, 2023.) The question: Which candidate is lying and who is telling the truth? I have my own thoughts on that.
Chris Christie was very tepid on cracking down on illegal immigration. He did say that those who came here illegally should be deported, which is a sharp improvement for him, but only when Fox moderator Martha McCollum pressed him on it. We can expect him to be squishy.
Former Vice President Mike Pence appears to want to take credit for everything done during the Trump administration to secure the border. He may have been part of it, but there was a whole team of people working on the problem. One achievement he cited had to do with getting the Mexicans to place troops on their southern border. But why did Mexico even need to be pressured to do that if it was in Mexico’s own interest?
Mexico is not the ally Pence would have you believe. Early in my Border Patrol career, I was taught that any time I saw Mexican military camped on the south side of the border, that’s where we could expect to see drugs crossing. Incredibly, Pence does not seem to know this.
Governor Burgum gave a very tepid answer on immigration. Sure, we need more Border Patrol Agents, as he suggested, but that action is meaningless if the policy doesn’t change. They will be nothing more than border greeters.
Nikki Haley’s claim that “It’s not that Israel needs America, America needs Israel” was so laughably wrong and untrue that it will likely overshadow anything else she said at the debate. She interrupted DeSantis by saying “We can do both at the same time”—support Ukraine and secure our border. Hogwash! (DeSantis reasonably replied that right now we’re not doing either.) This someone who is clearly not focused on our own border.
I actually like Vivek Ramaswamy ’s rhetoric—adroitly bringing up Israel’s border wall and national unity.
"You know what I love about Israel? I love their border policies...I love that they have a national identity..."
— ib (@Indian_Bronson) August 24, 2023
Interesting statement from Vivek Ramaswamy! pic.twitter.com/PSjHpXhWsy
But It does bother me he’s never served in government at all. If there’s anything the Trump experience proved, you’d better know the inner workings of the government if you want to change it. Personnel is policy—who will Vivek get to help him implement the policies? On the plus side, he’s brown, so, the inevitable charges of racism will fall a bit flat … presumably.
Ron DeSantis has a track record of sending illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard, and of implementing E-Verify in his home state, despite so much of the construction trade and restaurant trade relying on illegal labor. That takes at least some guts. Plus, he was smart enough to humanize the border catastrophe by bringing up an Angel Mom who lost her son to one single fentanyl-laced pill the son thought was a Percocet. “One million people dead is a statistic. One person dead is a tragedy.” Now, multiply that tragedy by about 300,000. I think DeSantis being governor and a former Congressman gives him an advantage in implementing policies.
.@RonDesantis As president, would you support sending U.S. Special forces over the border, into Mexico, to take out fentanyl labs, and drug cartel operations?
— MRCTV (@mrctv) August 24, 2023
DeSantis: Yes I will do it on day one pic.twitter.com/ueVvV89jMC
The worry is that he will be compromised by big donors.
The candidate who positively ticked me off: Asa Hutchinson (Asa is an acronym, email me and I’ll tell you what it really stands for).
Hutchinson started by boasting about how he had served in the Bush administration (he headed the DEA and then was sent to head a division of DHS. Sounds like a demotion to me).
But let me tell you about the Bush administration as someone who was there on the ground. That snake in the grass opened the southern border on his watch. He let the money for dealing with Other Than Mexicans (OTMs) dry up, so, anyone who was not Mexican could neither be detained nor deported and was getting released into the United States. In South Texas, we stopped patrolling the border and simply did paperwork to release people into the U.S.
Hutchinson claimed ”We had the global war on terror and we protected the border at the same time.” THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is a BALD-FACED LIE! We were finding Iraqi currency left behind in the brush, but no Iraqis. Texas DPS (Texas State Troopers essentially) found Iraqi currency stuffed between the seats on a smuggling load vehicle. They didn’t find the Iraqis. Those vehicles were typically used three or four times before they got busted.
As a result of Bush’s policies, we began to get waves of Brazilians and Chinese coming through. We would give them a Notice to (dis)Appear and release them.
After I left the southern border in disgust, my former station stopped sending out Agents into the field. This was because when the junior Agents were sent out into the field, they would drive away from the aliens so they wouldn’t have to handle the onerous processing paperwork. Instead, one senior Agent would be assigned to transportation duty: he would go pick up the illegals being held in local police stations and take them back to the station where the junior Agents had to process them. (The senior Agent was too, well, senior to have to do the processing himself.)
The smugglers helped! They taught the illegal aliens to find a pay phone and dial 911. Once the local police had picked them up, our Agents couldn’t get away with ignoring them.
Hutchinson is another “Invade the world, invite the world” candidate. My personal request: If as an immigration patriot you take nothing else away from this article, don’t vote, and don’t donate money to awful Asa.
Tim Scott? Thanks for showing up to prove the Republicans are not all racist, I guess. Again, Scott talked of hiring more Border Patrol Agents and sending our military down there. But, again, unless policy is changed, that’s a meaningless gesture. All they will be doing is helping to let people in more rapidly.
I would have liked to hear talk about reducing legal immigration. I would have liked to hear about the United Nations’ role in encouraging the invasion, how the candidates propose to address the Sanctuary Cities’ treason, and that of the NGOs [Non-Governmental Agencies], i.e., the Refugee Racketeers, who are essentially human smugglers.
Perhaps most importantly, why did no one bring up Birthright Citizenship?
But, hey, at least no one proposed Amnesty or said illegal immigration was “an act of love.”
The author [Email him] is retired from the Border Patrol.
