By: Senator Bill Hagerty
September 11, 2023
Link here.
President Biden says he wants simple, status-quo legislation to prevent a government shutdown, but hidden in the fine print of his actual funding request is one of the most radical, anti-policing, pro-criminal proposals of his Presidency.
The Biden White House is trying to exploit the fog of a ginned-up government-shutdown crisis to strike a final, fatal blow against immigration law enforcement—by slipping in a loophole that would allow the White House to effectively abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) by defunding it.
Last week, President Biden called on Congress to pass a short-term spending bill to keep the government open beyond September 30, when current funding runs out.
Throughout September, Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies will claim that this funding proposal is “clean”—which in Washington-speak means it simply extends current funding without any significant new provisions. Nothing to see here, they’ll say. A careful read reveals that nothing could be further from the truth.
Biden’s “clean” proposal includes a provision that allows him to totally defund ICE, the federal law enforcement agency tasked with protecting the United States from cross-border crime and illegal immigration.
If you read page 51 of the White House’s draft legislation, you will find a provision that would allow all ICE funding to be redirected to “fund community-based residential facilities, and to provide services and support to refugees, asylum seekers, or other migrants,” including through “contracts or through the award of grants or cooperative agreements to non-governmental organizations.” This would effectively convert ICE from a law enforcement agency into a U.S. travel agency for illegal aliens and into a grant-making bureaucracy for sanctuary cities.
Remember, ICE is the agency that breaks up Mexico-U.S. cartel trafficking of humans and drugs. ICE is the agency that detains violent criminal aliens and returns them to their home countries. ICE is the agency that does the most to deter cross-border crime and illegal immigration by enforcing immigration law in the United States.
Instead of protecting American communities, this provision would allow all past, present, or future ICE dollars to be used to buy airplane tickets and hotel rooms for illegal immigrants as they are permanently resettled across the United States. Airplane tickets that ICE had been buying to return violent criminal aliens to their home countries will be converted into airplane tickets to fly them to a community near you.
Biden’s scheme would also specifically allow ICE’s remaining resources to be sent to sanctuary cities for resettlement. These ICE taxpayer dollars will only add to the $104.6 million mountain of federal funds that New York Senator Chuck Schumer and New York Congressman Hakeem Jeffries slipped in earlier this year for New York City Mayor Eric Adams to resettle illegal aliens.
Despite being among the most radical immigration proposals ever cooked up, Biden’s request has received little attention from major media outlets. How?
Because the Democrat party has been hijacked by its radical wing, which has been setting the stage in plain sight, and without scrutiny from a compliant media, for a dramatic “transformation” like this since Biden took office.
Immediately upon taking office, President Biden dismantled the commonsense border security measures put in place by the Trump Administration. These actions included halting construction of the border wall, eliminating the “Remain in Mexico” or Migrant Protection Protocols,” lifting prohibitions on sanctuary cities. Biden has even proposed legislation granting U.S. citizenship to illegal immigrants. He has removed enforcement and removal tools from law enforcement agents and blatantly disregarded requirements for detaining and removing criminal illegal immigrants in the United States. All this while dramatically cutting the deportation of illegal aliens.
In place of immigration enforcement measures, President Biden launched the Case Management Pilot Program (CMPP), which diverts funding from immigration law enforcement to provide “services” to “noncitizens in removal proceedings.” It’s managed by Church World Service, a left-wing organization that supported the “Abolish ICE” movement, a close cousin of the “Defund the Police” movement.
Similarly, Biden secured record funding for the Emergency Food and Shelter Program – Humanitarian Relief (EFSP-H), which then used the good reputations of well-meaning charities to launder hundreds of millions of dollars—not just for food and shelter—but to purchase bus, train, and plane tickets to resettle illegal aliens throughout the United States. One of the program’s only limitations was that aliens couldn’t be transported by limousine.
Addressing the record-shattering illegal immigration crisis that these measures unleashed, the Biden Administration’s pending funding request replies: “The Administration’s plan is working as intended.” What’s the next step?
Biden, serving as a Trojan Horse for the radical left and having set the stage for the abolition of ICE since taking office, is now using the chaos of a government-shutdown fight to sneak it across the finish line.
As Democrats have learned from the “Defund the Police” movement, you need not always literally eliminate the police. Sometimes, destroying morale and diverting funding away from law enforcement will do the job just as well.
The White House took a page from this playbook and slipped it into draft legislation marketed as noncontroversial and routine. Just sign here, and the government won’t shut down.
Biden is demanding the ability to totally neuter ICE in exchange for simply keeping the government open for several weeks. This is unthinkably radical brinkmanship and political exploitation.
Ironically, these are the very words that Democrats will use against Republicans in the coming weeks as they try to lay blame for a possible government shutdown.
So when President Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries straighten their ties, straighten their faces, look directly into the camera, and tell Americans that the radical Republicans should stop using a routine government funding bill to extract policy outcomes—and that they should instead agree to Democrats’ “clean” proposal—they ought to look in the mirror instead.
