Crime
Border Patrol officials: Violent criminals being released into US aren’t being vetted
From Heartland Daily News
Border Patrol officials say foreign nationals who illegally cross the border aren’t being vetted prior to being released into the U.S.
At a press conference in Houston Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas’ plan to target and arrest members of a violent Venezuelan prison gang, Tren De Aragua, who illegally entered the country. “I will not allow them to use Texas as a base of operations to terrorize our citizens,” he said.
Joining Abbott was National Border Patrol Council Vice President Chris Cabrera, who said, “As a federal agent, we have no way of vetting these people other than the honor system. If they tell us they’re from so and so and this is their name and we can’t check against Venezuela’s database, that they’re not going to give us access to it, so we have to let them go,” he said, referring to releasing them into the U.S. “Unfortunately, we do let them go.”
When it comes to processing people for removal, he said, “In the off chance, we’re going to deport them, Venezuela won’t take them back.” Instead of requiring them to, as was the case in the Trump administration, he said, “Our government on the federal level is kind of weak-minded. We just go ahead and say, ‘OK, well, you know, go ahead and stay here.’”
The level of violence Americans are experiencing at the hands of criminal Venezuelans is “an infestation,” he said. “It’s taking hold not just in Colorado or New York, but in Michigan, Florida, Texas, you name it.
“What people fail to realize is working on the border, we see everything come through, but it doesn’t affect us as much as it affects the rest of the United States, especially Houston. Everything that comes through our area just passes through and it ends up as your problem or a problem somewhere up north. If people don’t wake up and see it for what it is, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble in this country.”
The National Border Patrol Council has endorsed former President Donald Trump. Its union leaders credit Trump with improving border security and the current administration for obliterating it. Cabrera has testified before Congress about the toll of Biden-Harris policies on agents, including 17 who committed suicide in one year.
Retired Border Patrol supervisory agent and now Texas Border Czar Mike Banks said, “The TDA problem in Texas and the rest of the United States is a direct result of open border policies. The Biden Harris administration has sent out an ‘all call’ to the world that you can cross this border without any consequences.”
“It is a known fact that the Venezuelan government has released prisoners” with the condition that they don’t come back. “When they show up here, there’s no surprise that we have a criminal illegal gang problem in the United States,” he said.
The Biden administration maintains all illegal border crossers are being vetted. “That is an absolute lie,” Banks said, “because they cannot vet them against their criminal history in Venezuela because Venezuela refuses to share that information with us.”
No criminal database exists to capture TDA gang member data and arrests. Texas Department of Public Safety is creating one, Abbott said.
Texas Public Policy Foundation fellow and former Border Patrol agent Ammon Blair told The Center Square that because of the volume of illegal border crossers, there isn’t enough time for an individual agent to properly vet anyone.
Not all agents are trained to identify false identification and some just “want to get them out of the field as fast as possible,” he said. “That’s priority number one is getting them into the intake system, putting them on the bus and moving them out.
“There really is no vetting. The only vetting is asking them, ‘What country are you from? What is your name? How old are you? Are you a family member?’”
If they have a criminal history, it may pop up if it’s connected to their ID, or fake ID, he said. But many have no ID so they have to take them at their word for who they say they are. “They just tell us, and we have to accept that as truth,” he said.
Agents also no longer ask if they are seeking asylum or making a claim of credible fear, he said. After a foreign national illegally crosses the border, agents “immediately just get their biographical information however best we can.” They input their information and scan passports if they have them, he said. For those with no IDs, they input biometric data, including fingerprints. “That’s the only vetting we do.”
Under the Trump administration, he said, “we heavily scrutinized. The process was completely different. We adhered more towards the immigration law than we do now.”
Since fiscal 2021 through July, illegal border crossers from Venezuela total nearly 856,000, the greatest number in U.S. history, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
Another 115,000 Venezuelans were granted parole through a program that’s been directly linked to perpetrators committing violent crimes against Americans, including TDA gang members, who are being arrested nationwide, The Center Square reported.
In Texas, law enforcement officials have arrested more than 3,000 Venezuelan illegal border crossers; more than 200 are wanted, Abbott said.
Originally published by The Center Square. Republished with permission.
Crime
Joe Biden pardons son Hunter for any crimes committed in the last 10 years!
From LifeSiteNews
Outgoing President Joe Biden granted his son and business partner Hunter Biden a sweeping pardon for any federal crimes he may have committed, known or unknown, from 2014 all the way through last month.
Outgoing President Joe Biden issued a sweeping pardon Sunday evening to his troubled son Hunter for any known or unknown crimes committed over the span of a decade after repeatedly denying he would do so.
For years, the Biden family has been dogged by allegations of personal corruption and influence peddling. During the Obama years, the former vice president infamously boasted that he facilitated the firing of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who had been investigating energy company Burisma Holdings (on whose board Hunter served despite lacking experience in the energy industry), by threatening to withhold a billion-dollar loan from the U.S. to Ukraine. Defenders claim that the move was about Shokin not prosecuting corruption aggressively enough, but critics suggest it was about Shokin potentially getting too close to Burisma and, by extension, Hunter.
In the months before the 2020 presidential election, the New York Post released a series of bombshell reports about a laptop belonging to Hunter that was delivered to and abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop and contained scores of emails and texts detailing the Biden family’s international business activities, which exploited Joe’s political office by offering access to the highest levels of the federal government and the various worldwide connections made through that office. The story was initially maligned as “disinformation” but eventually acknowledged as real long after Biden was safely elected.
Earlier this year, Hunter was convicted on multiple felony counts for tax evasion and illegally purchasing a gun while under the influence of drugs, with sentencing slated for sometime this month. His father rendered sentencing moot over the weekend, however, by formally granting Hunter a “Full and Unconditional Pardon” for federal offenses “which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.”
The president insisted that he kept his word to “not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making,” but maintained that Hunter “was singled out only because he is my son – and that is wrong. There has been an effort to break Hunter – who has been 5 1/2 years sober, even in the face of unrelenting attacks and selective prosecution. In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough.”
The move, which not only saves Hunter from whatever sentence he might have received but also helps protect the president himself from future convictions against the son leading to legal jeopardy for the father, directly contradicts numerous denials by Biden and White House representatives that Hunter would be pardoned.
In a June ABC News interview, Biden answered “yes” that he would accept the jury verdict and that he had ruled out pardoning his son. “I’m extremely proud of my son Hunter. He has overcome an addiction. He is one of the brightest, most decent men I know. I abide by the jury decision. I will do that, and I will not pardon him,” he said at a press conference a week later. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeatedly said “no” to the pardon question, including last month after Donald Trump won his return to the presidency.
As recently as November 26, Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates reiterated Biden’s past denials on the subject, stating, “The president has spoken to this (…) I don’t have anything idea (sic) to add to what he’s said already.”
“Does the Pardon given by Joe to Hunter include the J-6 Hostages, who have now been imprisoned for years?” Trump reacted on Truth Social. “Such an abuse and miscarriage of Justice!”
“The pardon power was written in absolute terms, and a president can even, in my view, pardon himself. However, what is constitutional is not necessarily ethical or right,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote. “This is one of the most disgraceful pardons even in the checkered history of presidential pardons. President Biden has lied to cover up a corruption scandal that reportedly brought his family millions in raw influence peddling. His portrayal of his son as a victim stands in sharp contrast to the sense of immunity and power conveyed by Hunter in his dealings.”
Crime
What did Canada Ever Do to Draw Trump Tariff on Immigration, You Ask? Plenty
By Todd Bensman as published by The Daily Wire
Much US national security and public safety damage from: an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program and making Mexican travel visa-free.
President-elect Donald Trump bloodied Mexico and Canada with diplomatic buckshot this week by writing that, on his first day in office, he’ll levy devastating 25-percent trade tariffs on those two U.S. neighbors if they fail to crack down on illegal immigration and drug trafficking.
Much public puzzlement has filled international media coverage over why Trump would single out Canada for punishment equal to that of the far guiltier Mexico.
“To compare us to Mexico is the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard from our friends and closest allies, the United States of America,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said. “I found his comments unfair. I found them insulting. It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart.”
“We shouldn’t confuse the Mexican border with the Canadian border,” Canadian Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said.
But this narrative seems intended to deflect public acknowledgement of what the liberal progressive government of Justin Trudeau did do to draw Trump’s tariff ire. In terms of immigration policy, the Canadian offenses are indeed much different from Mexico’s opened super-highway mass migration wave-throughs during the Biden-Harris years. But what Canada has done, arguably, damaged U.S. national security and public safety interests in harmful ways that media outlets on both sides rarely report.
Canada’s massive legal immigration program as a U.S. national security threat
Much of the damage arises from an historic Canadian legal immigrant importation program of unprecedented scope. Since the program’s 2021 implementation, the Great White North has imported some 1.5 million foreign national workers (400,000+ per year for the nation of 38 million) from dozens of developing nations and hundreds of thousands more foreign students in just 2023 – the third record-breaking year of those.
Why are those programs a U.S. problem? Because a spiking number of foreign nationals are apparently abusing the Canadian programs as a Lilly pad from which to illegally enter the United States between northern border land ports of entry, among them proven threats to U.S. national security and public safety.
Why this traffic leaking into the United States is a problem – even though the total numbers illegally entering from Canada are small relative to those crossing from Mexico – arises from the fact that many hail from Muslim-majority nations and have, Canadian media reports, fueled a spate of terrorism and anti-Semitic attacks throughout Canada. As well, far too many of the Mexicans Canada has allowed in turned out to be cartel drug traffickers and killers.
Those kinds of criminals are crossing the U.S. northern border in increasing numbers due to Canadian policies that Canada could address if it wanted to.
Consider that U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions in the brush between U.S.-Canada land ports of entry jumped from 2,238 in FY2022 to 23,721 in FY2024, neatly coinciding with Trudeau’s mass legal immigration programs.
Among those crossing in illegally from Canada, for instance, were 15,827 Indian nationals in FY 2023 and 2024, 8,367 Mexicans, and 3,833 from unspecified countries listed only as “Other” on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s public statistics website.
A border-crossing terror plot foiled
Concern on both sides of the U.S.-Canada line has simmered for some years as Canadians saw the newcomers carry out terror plots, actual attacks, and probably some of the record-breaking nearly 6,000 antisemitic incidents Canada logged since the Israel-Hamas war broke out.
What’s been happening in Canada was obvious to many.
“Canada has become a hotbed of radicalization, fanaticism, and jihadism,” wrote Casey Babb, Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Newsweek shortly after the arrest. “As un-Canadian as it sounds, Canada has a terrorism crisis on its hands and that should worry the United States for a whole host of reasons.”
Concern would reach an apogee in October 2024, when a joint U.S.-Canadian counterterrorism operation thwarted a plot by a Pakistani student on a Canadian visa to illegally cross the northern border to conduct an October 2024 massacre of Jews in New York.
Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a 20-year-old Pakistani citizen legally issued a Canadian student visa in June 2023, now stands accused in U.S. federal court of plotting an illegal-smuggler-assisted northern border crossing to carry out a mass shooting of Jews in New York City to celebrate with blood the October 7 anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel. Khan hoped it would go down in history as “the largest U.S. attack since 9/11”.
“We are going to nyc (sic) to slaughter them” with AR-style rifles and hunting knives “so we can slit their throats,” Khan told an undercover FBI agent he believed to be a co-conspirator, according to an agent complaint. “Even if we don’t attack an event we could rack up easily a lot of Jews.”
His was among the record-breaking 400,000 foreign student visas Canada issued in 2023.
That alarming new terrorism prosecution in New York State should have been enough to renew Trump’s interest in turning diplomatic pressure onto Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s mass legal immigration policies and border security on its side.
But terrorists cannot be the only concern.
Mexican cartel killers and traffickers in Canada crossing too
The incoming Trump administration 2.0 will need to force resolution of another issue of U.S. public safety concern dating to an especially damaging 2016 Trudeau move that went unaddressed until only recently. Trudeau rescinded 2009 visa requirements on Mexican citizens and against the advice of his own government that Mexican criminals would abuse the policy to fly in at will and bedevil Canadian cities and northern American ones too.
That’s just what was happening again by early 2017. A sustained surge was underway of Mexican nationals who, unable to easily cross the southern border under Trump 1.0, were flying over the United States into Canada. They would claim Canadian asylum, then cross southward over the less tended northern U.S. border.
Among them were the predictable – and predicted – Mexican cartel operatives.
Leaked Canada Border Services Agency intelligence reports said Mexican “drug smugglers, human smugglers, recruiters, money launders and foot soldiers” were turning up in greater numbers than ever before. The cartels went to work building human smuggling networks to move other Mexicans south over the American border, just as they did all along the southern border.
In July 2017, Global News quoted published the intelligence reports saying the ultra-violent Sinaloa cartel had turned up in Canada to “facilitate travel to Canada by Mexicans with criminal records.” Others identified included La Familia Michoacana, Jalisco New Generation, and Los Zetas.
For instance, whereas the reports said 37 Mexicans linked to organized criminal groups had entered between 2012 and 2015, 65 involved in “serious crimes” were identified midway through just 2017, compared to 28 in 2015. By May 2019, at least 400 Mexican criminals connected to drug trafficking, including sicario hitmen, were plying their trades in Canada, at least half of them in Quebec, according to a May 24, 2019, report in the Toronto Sun and other Canadian media outlets.
All had entered through the Trudeau visa loophole for Mexicans.
By the end of 2019, Canada saw a 1,400 percent spike in the number of bogus Mexican refugee claims, the vast majority naturally rejected, and of associated detentions.
Canada finally about to face the music
Only in February 2024 did the Americans pressure the Canadians finally begin to roll back some – but not all — of its visa-free Mexicans policy, because the influx had clogged Canada’s asylum system with too many bogus claims and also sent too many Mexicans illegally over the U.S. border, which presented a politically terrible look as the 2024 presidential election campaign got underway. Now, only Mexicans who already hold a US visa or old Canadian one can travel visa-free, while most other Mexicans with neither will have to apply for a Canadian one.
But the damage that must be managed today is by now well baked into the cake.
From January to mid-October 2022, for instance, 7,698 Mexican asylum seekers took direct flights from Mexico City to Montreal, according to a November 2022 Canadian Press story. The paper quoted officials at nonprofit refugee assistance groups attesting that most fly to Canada because they found out Trudeau’s visa-free policy also got them government financial assistance while awaiting their mostly denied asylum applications.
In their October 2021 book, The Wolfpack: The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld, journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Najera established that the Sinaloa Cartel now has a foothold across eastern Canada, with “solid control of cocaine shipments in and out of Canada.” The Arellano Felix group has its foothold in Vancouver and in the state of Alberta.
The Zetas are in Canada “involved with temporary migrant workers”.
Asked in 2023 if Canada’s importance to Mexican organized crime had increased “in recent years,” co-author Luis Najera answered: “I would say it has increased since criminal cells moved up north to settle and expand operations here. It is also strategic to have groups operating north of the U.S. border, close to key places such as Chicago and New York, and without the scrutiny of the DEA and rival groups.”
Canada is not Mexico but its policies pose consequences for the United States. Any normal U.S. administration would put Canada on the hook for adjusting its policies and more robustly guarding its supposedly treasured neighboring ally, the United States, from harm. If punishing trade tariffs finally focus Canada’s attention on those policy-driven harms, let them last until Canada fixes what it recklessly broke.
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