When President Biden recently signed executive orders effectively rolling back efforts by the previous administration to reduce the 2019 surge in unlawful crossings at the southern border, he proclaimed, “I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy.” The obvious intent of the declaration was to dispel any suggestion that the newly elected president was trespassing on...
Do you think France, Canada or Great Britain would be OK if the Americans detained their defense secretary without telling them?” a Mexican official asked rhetorically in the January 2, 2021, issue of The Economist. Anyone versed in the Mexican criminal underworld might respond by noting that cabinet officials in Europe and Canada generally don’t...
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently sued the Biden administration over immigration policies. It’s the first lawsuit from Texas, and it surely won’t be the last. But Paxton won’t be alone. The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for the American Future, where I am lead counsel, will also challenge unconstitutional federal government overreach through the courts. Three areas...
Our country has clearly become more divided during recent years. From politics to the pandemic to religious beliefs, this is evident in all areas of our lives. Media stories of public discourse and events appear to further drive the tensions between the left and the right. Even facts and truthful reporting are now often disputed....
President-elect Joe Biden is already backpedaling on a dangerous campaign promise that pleased advocates of open borders, but would create a humanitarian and national security crisis on our border with Mexico. While he pledged during the election campaign to roll back President Trump’s policies that have reduced illegal immigration on his first day in office on Jan. 20, Biden...
Well, that didn’t take long. A border crisis is brewing before President-elect Joe Biden takes office. Migrant caravans are forming in Honduras, where residents were hit with a pair of devastating hurricanes last month, adding to the economic hardship caused by COVID-19. Faced with ruin, many Hondurans have decided to defy local travel bans and head...
The Department of Homeland Security announced this week it will begin accepting applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the program earlier this month. The ruling briefly put DACA back in the headlines, with most news outlets framing the judge’s order as a defeat for...
Joe Biden has promised that if he’s elected president, he will set in motion on Day One the largest dismantling of U.S. immigration law enforcement in the history of the republic. On the very day he’s sworn in as president, the oath for which includes a constitutional obligation to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed,”...
As election day approaches, the polarization of our political climate has been on full display. It’s easy to fall victim to the temptation to lose hope that our increasingly divided electorate will ever be able to reach consensus on many of the most challenging issues faced by our nation. Yet, as Americans, we are united...
While the coronavirus pandemic and the upcoming election overwhelmingly dominate the nation’s attention, other critical challenges facing the nation continue to be dangerously ignored. One such issue is our country’s chronically dysfunctional asylum system which, a little more than a year after having provoked one of the most severe crisis on our southwestern border in...
Following the drastic spike in migrant apprehensions along the U.S. southwestern border early last year, the federal government implemented measures resulting in an equally steep decrease of unauthorized entries into the country. These measures demonstrated their effectiveness in securing the border and deterring illegal migration—which enhances the safety of not only American residents, but also that of that of thousands of migrants who undertake such dangerous journeys and land in the hands of human smugglers and traffickers. However—and while...
Though illegal immigration has come to a virtual standstill in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, decades of dysfunction in America’s immigration system continue to have deleterious effects in communities throughout the nation. As is often the case, developments in Texas, which shares almost two-thirds of the U.S. border with Mexico, provide some of the...