Speaking to a friendly crowd in New York City on Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in boast mode telling an audience of supporters and amnesty activists how she successfully appealed to President Trump to delay plans to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramp up efforts to remove illegal aliens with final deportation orders.
“One [deportation]is too many,” she told an audience of supporters at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York, adding that “you cannot be ignoring the rights of immigrants in our country.”
What Pelosi is willfully ignoring is that immigration judges only issue final orders after an alien has exhausted every right to appeal and has received full due process.
“It is a false narrative. These are families that have had full due process. We are not breaking up families,” acting ICE director Mark Morgan said in blasting Pelosi’s rhetoric in a Fox News interview.
Morgan further criticized Congress for continuing to delay action on the administration’s request for supplemental funding for ICE and other agencies responding to the border crisis. While the Senate has taken initial action on moving a bill that would provide the minimum funds to address the immediate humanitarian needs at the border, the Democrat-controlled House just rolled out a $4.5 billion border bill on Friday evening.
Pelosi insisted during her remarks at Elmhurst Hospital that this week the House would pass a bill that “will meet the humanitarian needs,” but “will have the minimal interior enforcement, and no wall.”
By the time Pelosi had returned to Capitol Hill on Monday evening, her promise was in doubt as radical members of the Democratic caucus were demanding no funding for ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and she was struggling to contain the revolt.
Leading the charge of the amnesty brigade were Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), who pledged to oppose a bill that “gives even more money to ICE and CBP and continues to support a fundamentally cruel and broken immigration system.”
Instead of providing the additional $1.2 billion to CBP and $128 million to ICE, the trio said, “We must abolish ICE. We must invest in community-based alternatives to detention. We must end the system of mass detention and deportation of immigrants.”
The demands were not new, as the threesome demanded much the same in February.
By the end of the month, Border Patrol agents had processed and housed 76,533 migrants who’d been apprehended on the southern border. By the end of May, that figure had nearly doubled to 144,278 – an increase that was not met with more funding for detention beds, border agents or changes to the asylum laws that are driving the crisis.
By Tuesday, the House Rules Committee still had not moved the Democratic funding bill because Pelosi and her leadership team had failed to garner enough support. It remains unclear whether either the House or the Senate will pass a supplemental spending bill by the time ICE and CBP funding is exhausted. If they do not, already overworked agents will not get paid, the private organizations that have contracts to care for migrant children will receive no funding, and the crisis on the border will get, unbelievably, worse.
If Congress fails to do even the basic, bare minimum, what hope can anyone have that they address the root causes of this man-made disaster.