The two-thousand-mile trek of migrants from Honduras arrived to an angry reception in Tijuana, just south of the California border. It was not President Donald Trump who shouted down the illegal aliens camped there, but Tijuana’s own mayor, along with many of his Mexican constituents.
“Make Tijuana Great Again” sported the Tijuana mayor, Juan Manuel Gastélum, on his bright red hat nearly identical to the one worn by President Trump. Hundreds of Tijuana residents turned out in agreement, chanting “Tijuana First” and similar slogans.
Well, how about that! The false narrative perpetrated by liberals that only extremists who voted for Donald Trump are against illegal immigration is disproven by Mexicans in Tijuana demanding that the migrants return home.
“I would dare say that not all of them are migrants,” Mayor Gastélum observed in Spanish during an interview on the Mexican Milenio television channel. He suggested that some of the migrants are criminals.
Many tough, angry-looking young men can be seen in images of the caravan. In one photo, a construction worker is seen defying the Mexican police with a vulgar gesture at them.
The migrants seem to have been coached, because one of them claimed that he was the victim of racism by the Mexican police. The culprit is not racism but globalism: the assault on national borders, which are essential to maintaining liberty and prosperity.
These migrants should be trying to make Honduras great again rather than crashing through borders to overrun places where they are not wanted. Anyone who can walk (or hitchhike) two thousand miles, like these migrants, can use their pent-up energy to improve their own country, instead of demanding handouts from Mexico or the United States.
Many migrants undoubtedly left behind women and children who depend on the support of the able-bodied young men who comprise the vast majority of the migrant caravan. The United States should not allow these migrants to abandon their responsibilities, but should send them back home to support their families.
But a federal judge in San Francisco just interfered with President Trump’s efforts to do exactly that. Despite how border control is an issue of national security under nearly exclusive presidential authority, Obama-appointed Judge Tigar took it upon himself to issue an injunction against the presidential proclamation that limited asylum applications by Central American migrants.
That leaves Trump with no good option: either appeal to the liberal Ninth Circuit, where the deck is stacked against him, or file an emergency petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rarely interferes in cases pending in lower courts.
Often the immigrants who cross the border illegally from Mexico are not even from Central or South America. Near Laredo, Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents recently caught six young men trying to enter the United States illegally from far-away Bangladesh.
Official statistics show that 668 Bangladeshis were caught near our southern border during the twelve months ending on September 30, plus another 75 in October. There is big money in this, with the illegals or their sponsors paying up to $27,000 per person to be smuggled into the United States, as reported by Breitbart.com.
By now President Trump has appointed many judges to the federal bench, but the vetting of those nominees was cast in doubt by the ruling last week against the White House concerning CNN’s Jim Acosta. Despite how a man’s home is his castle under centuries of precedents, a Trump-appointed judge ruled that President Trump cannot promptly exclude a misbehaving reporter from the White House.
Only the most conservative judges should be appointed to federal courts for the District of Columbia, which has no U.S. Senators who might object. President Trump, acting on apparently bad advice, nominated former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Timothy Kelly to that bench.
Kelly was confirmed almost unanimously, and into his courtroom landed the lawsuit by CNN against Trump to reinstate access to the White House by the abrasive Jim Acosta. CNN sued for Acosta to retain his access to the White House grounds even after he disrupted Trump’s post-election news conference with an argumentative non-question.
If a hostile reporter had combatively resisted relinquishing the microphone during a presser held by President Obama, the reporter would have been banned. But in a stark illustration of judicial activism, Judge Kelly ordered President Trump to return Acosta’s highly desirable “hard pass” for full access to the West Wing.
Judges require journalists to treat courthouses and court proceedings with extreme deference, but President Trump has been made powerless to regulate who can roam freely inside his own home. Let’s hope the President makes the White House Great Again by posting a burly security guard next to Jim Acosta with orders to remove him the next time he misbehaves.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
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