As American government transforms itself into a concierge service for illegal aliens - the imported electorate liberals have been daydreaming about for decades is about to be delivered at last! - the importance of keeping the truth from actual citizens has grown. Remember, you weren't supposed to know about Obama's human wave assault this year. The photos of children stacked up like cargo in warehouses were leaked, provoking a crisis that sent immigration rocketing from an issue that didn't crack the Top 10 lists of voters to their Number One concern. You also weren't supposed to know about the buses and planes distributing thousands of illegal aliens to communities across the country, making it effectively impossible to deport them.
"Don't worry about all that," the American people were told, when the use of public money and resources to ferry illegals hither and yon was discovered. "They've all been served notice that they must appear at immigration hearings." President Obama went so far as claiming that he would purchase billboards across Central America, warning people not to load their children onto the coyote network headed northward, because they would be swiftly returned home, making the money spent on illegally boosting them across the border - and the hideous risk to the children's safety - all for nothing.
Obama's political rhetoric was an absolute lie, a complete inversion of reality, and while he prattled on about dastardly smugglers misinforming the poor chumps south of the border to pump up business, the dastardly smugglers were the ones telling the truth. Get across the border and you're in. The American government has little interest in monitoring you, much less deporting you.
After a few weeks of increasing public pressure to stem the tide of border violators, the Administration suddenly adopted a new tactic: gosh, you know what? There's this law from the Bush era that says the victims of human trafficking can't be deported, so there's nothing we can do, our hands are tied, this isn't one of those laws His Majesty Barack I can rewrite on a whim like ObamaCare, nosiree, this one's carved in stone. Never mind that the law in question clearly did not apply to Obama's human wave - they were not "victims of human trafficking," they were eager customers of smuggling industry. The law was bent and twisted to deflect demands for action, which should have been one of the biggest political scandals of the past century right there. The same people who assured us the illegals would be humanely detained, and then repatriated, to keep the public from exploding in outrage were suddenly saying there was absolutely nothing they could do, because of a law that had been in place for years. Obviously the first few weeks of spin control were total lies.
An expose from the Associated Press reveals those weren't the only lies the Obama Administration told us, and the truth about his manufactured border crisis is still being kept from the American people. It's not surprising to anyone who's been following this story closely, but many less engaged Americans will be stunned to learn that 70 percent of the illegal aliens simply blew off their immigration hearings.... a fact that has been kept carefully concealed from the public, but shared with "immigration reform advocates" behind closed doors.
Tens of thousands of young families caught crossing the border illegally earlier this year subsequently failed to meet with federal immigration agents, as they were instructed, the Homeland Security Department has acknowledged privately.
An official with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement revealed that about 70 percent of immigrant families the Obama administration had released into the U.S. never showed up weeks later for follow up appointments.
The ICE official made the disclosure in a confidential meeting at its Washington headquarters with immigration advocates participating in a federal working group on detention and enforcement policies. The Associated Press obtained an audio recording of Wednesday's meeting and separately interviewed participants.
On the recording obtained by the AP, the government did not specify the total number of families released into the U.S. since October. Since only a few hundred families have already been returned to their home countries and limited U.S. detention facilities can house only about 1,200 family members, the 70 percent figure suggests the government released roughly 41,000 members of immigrant families who subsequently failed to appear at federal immigration offices.
The official, who was not identified by name on the recording obtained by the AP, also said final deportation had been ordered for at least 860 people traveling in families caught at the border since May but only 14 people had reported as ordered.
The Homeland Security Department did not dispute the authenticity of the recording.
In a statement emailed Thursday afternoon, ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said the no-show rate "represents an approximate snapshot of individuals encountered beginning in May" who didn't reported to ICE. Christiansen added that some of those people may still be reporting to immigration court hearings and a "significant" number of deportation cases are still pending before judges.
There is no more room for speculation by spokespeople and idle daydreams about how some more people might consider swinging by their immigration court hearings, and heck, a significant number of them might even get deported, who knows? ("Significant" would be more than fourteen, I suppose.) This is the same $3.5 trillion hyper-government that micromanages every business in America and monitors its citizens in countless creative ways. They can't keep track of 41,000 people? That's only because they don't want to keep track of them.
When the Ruling Class wants to do something, money is no object, cost projections become fantasies, and disobedience is punished sternly. Look at ObamaCare, a tottering mountain of crushing regulations, already closing in on a trillion dollars in spending for a program that only 14 percent of Americans say has helped them at all, with twice as many saying it hurt them. One of the big economic initiatives of the latter Obama years is a crackdown on corporate inversions, which aren't even illegal. Our central government has more authority and manpower than ever before.
But border security and enforcement of our citizenship laws? Forget about it. The government doesn't even want to talk about non-compliance:
The AP reported in June that the administration would not say publicly how many immigrant families from Central America caught crossing into the U.S. it had released in recent months or how many of those subsequently reported back to the government after 15 days as directed. The AP noted that senior U.S. officials directly familiar with the issue, including at the Homeland Security Department and White House, had dodged the answer on at least seven occasions over two weeks, alternately saying that they did not know the figure or didn't have it immediately at hand.
The Homeland Security Department's public affairs office during the same period did not answer roughly a dozen requests for the figures.
This goes beyond dereliction of duty, into the realm of an organized conspiracy against the American people. It's very obviously an issue the public cares deeply about, and the overwhelming majority of them are opposed to illegal immigration, while strongly supporting very generous levels of legal immigration. The true dimensions of the crisis are being concealed from us precisely because the government knows what the people demand... but the agenda of the Ruling Class completely overrides both the will of the voters, and the letter of the law. In what sense are we still a constitutional republic, a paragon of representative self-government, if our elites can treat us this way?
This is a particularly sticky issue because it ultimately ties into the nature of the electorate itself. The Ruling Class wants to change the electorate, and the job market, into something more agreeable to its agenda. The current American electorate and workforce don't like that idea very much... so we're being manipulated, deceived, and subverted. Powerful pressure groups capable of staging impressive demonstrations, and business interests with lots of campaign money to pass around, want open borders. Average, law-abiding taxpayers toiling away in flyover country have nothing to compare with that, no matter how great their numbers might be... or how large a share of the costs of illegal immigration they are required to pay. All you've got is those infrequent trips to the ballot box, and that problem can be managed by the elite in a variety of ways.
The immigration issue is a remarkable example of bipartisan consensus. A huge bipartisan majority of the American public stands foursquare against what a bipartisan majority of the Ruling Class wants. Much of that resistance stems from the former understanding that the latter cannot be trusted - after all, they've been falling down on this particular job for decades. We also know this is one of the issues where the Ruling Class looks down at the American people with sneering contempt, believing our concerns to be illegitimate expressions of hard-hearted selfishness, nativism, and racism. Politicians who are fond of citing "the will of the people" to authorize all of their other schemes clearly view the will of the people as an obstacle to be overcome in this matter. Notice how they don't waste much effort on trying to change our minds through persuasion. Instead, they disregard their duties and lie to us for years, until they've built up a gigantic human crisis that can only be addressed by following the agenda they had in mind all along.
I've asked many times, and will ask again: what if President Obama had simply been honest with us about all this? He could have called one of those press conferences he loves so much, explained that Central America had become an impossible hell hole, and we urgently needed to grant asylum to thousands of children and their families. The government knew this huge migratory wave was coming, so there was ample time to ask the American people what they wanted to do about it. I suspect a lot of Americans would have responded with sympathy to such a plea... but of course, we'd have asked some tough questions about why malfunctioning governments in other countries justify "asylum" in the U.S. Why is that our problem, and why are we granting asylum to the citizens of failed states we're still propping up with foreign aid? If gang violence and poverty are grounds for automatic "asylum," then in what sense do we still have a border at all, given that much of the rest of the planet could cite such hardships? We would have expected tight controls over the incoming refugees. Clearly the President did not want to answer those questions, or divert resources from spending programs he likes to provide those controls.
Far from being isolationists or xenophobes, the American people are still in love with immigration. They just want it to be done legally, which means the existing citizens of the United States have something to say about it. They don't want the borders sealed, but they do expect the borders to be policed. Our will is clear, and we expect the federal government to obey. We hear a lot of talk from the Ruling Class these days about how we're supposed to obey them, or face the consequences. It's long past time to turn that around and start punishing them for disobeying us.
