Patriots in Murrieta
By Matthew Vadum
When President Obama began dumping busloads of newly arrived illegal aliens on small town America to force so-called immigration reform he probably didn’t expect residents of a small California city to take a heroic stand against his lawless assault on the nation’s immigration system.
But grassroots activists in Murrieta, California, near San Diego, have been using the Left’s own playbook against the Community-Organizer-in-Chief’s efforts to force an unprecedented loosening of the nation’s largely unenforced immigration laws. Last week the protesters used the tactics of civil disobedience by blocking federal authorities from bussing in hundreds of illegal immigrants who snuck into south Texas. The feds have vowed to don riot gear in order to transport the illegals to Murrieta but that has not happened yet.
The illegals turned back by angry crowds were bound for what federal authorities called a “housing facility,” but local residents say such a facility doesn’t exist in Murrieta.
Longtime Murrieta resident John Henry said it appeared federal officials intended to place the aliens in the local Border Patrol station, which has only five holding cells.
“There are no showers, and there’s only one toilet in each cell. There’s really no place to give them hot food and no beds. There’s nothing here for them–we literally don’t have any way to take care of these people.”
Henry added, “We additionally don’t have any places for these people to go after they are processed.”
Henry told Breitbart News that the illegals, unaccompanied minors and women from Central America, are being sent to Republican-supporting communities like his city to send those opposed to open borders a political message.
“The administration thinks that if it floods our streets, in small town America, they can force us into immigration reform,” he said. “These immigrants should not be here. The only reason that they are coming here is for political reasons.”
“This is a small town – it’s mostly conservative – and the federal government knows that. The main reason a lot of us are out here protesting is because we do not want these people being dumped into our small town where we do not have programs or the resources to take care of them properly.”
Henry and his fellow protesters have been attacked by left-wingers who prefer hurling epithets to answering arguments.
In a Huffington Post op-ed, commentator Raul A. Reyes smeared the protesters as “anti-immigrant.” The protests themselves were motivated by “racism and xenophobia” and constituted “a shameful, sickening display of anti-immigrant sentiment.”
Except there is no evidence the activists were motivated by anything other than disgust at the Obama administration’s failure to enforce federal law. Nor is there proof that the activists were “anti-immigrant.” Anti-illegal immigrant, sure, but that’s an altogether different thing.
A group calling itself the Tequila Party is demanding the activists be jailed for daring to protest.
California attorney Ruben Salazar, pro-amnesty activist Dee Dee Garcia Blase, and Nebraska attorney Shirl Mora James wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey asking for an “outside investigation” of local politicians and law enforcement officials in Murrieta.
They accuse activists in Murrieta of being “homeland domestic terrorists (masquerading as patriots),” and claim that they were “obstructing federal law enforcement from performing their jobs and terrorizing small refugee immigrant children from Central America with racial slurs.”
Apparently civil disobedience is only acceptable when left-wingers do it.
Moreover, the Tequila Party doesn’t understand the meaning of the word refugee.
A refugee, under the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a multilateral treaty that was ratified by the United States, is:
“A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country … ” [italics added]
Barring evidence of persecution under any of the five specific grounds, these people are in fact economic migrants, as opposed to refugees. The fact that life is less than optimal in countries like Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador doesn’t make those who leave their countries to sneak into the U.S. legitimate refugees.
The chaos on the U.S.-Mexico border that is now being swamped by uninvited visitors has been a long time coming.
Obama and generations of leftist politicians before him have been using immigration to subvert the American system. In the 1960s the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) shepherded reform of that era’s immigration laws through Congress. The concept is simple: Flood America with people who don’t share Americans’ traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets, in order to force changes in society.
It’s the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis as applied to immigration policy.
In the Sixties, Marxist academics and activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven called upon activists to pack the welfare rolls in order to spread dependency, bankrupt the government, and cause uprisings against the capitalist system.
Overburdening government bureaucracies would cause “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level,” they argued in their seminal 1966 Nation article.
Overwhelming local and state governments with illegal immigrants, who qualify for taxpayer-supplied benefits such as free health care, education, and housing aid, might make those governments so desperate that they throw their political support behind the kind of so-called comprehensive immigration reform that the Left favors. After all, when was the last time Congress refused a bailout to anybody?
Although the disorder at the border has been building over time, President Obama gave a green light to would-be illegal immigrants when he indicated he has no interest in enforcing U.S. immigration laws.
Obama has provided executive amnesty and work permits for illegal immigrants covered by the proposed “DREAM Act” that Congress has repeatedly rejected. That legislation, if enacted, would cover individuals who claim to have entered the U.S. as minors under their parents’ guidance.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a directive in August 2013 expanding that amnesty to illegal immigrant relatives of “DREAM Act” beneficiaries. DHS issued another directive in December 2012 reinforcing the existing policy under which almost all immigration offenses were deemed unenforceable absent a separate criminal conviction.
Meanwhile, local media reported late yesterday that no new arrivals are expected to fly into nearby San Diego for the rest of this week: “Murrieta police say Border Patrol officials notified them late Wednesday afternoon that there will be no flights of immigrants from Texas arriving in San Diego on Thursday or for the rest of the week.”
It’s a small, and likely temporary, victory.
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