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Commentary

Democrats’ Immigration Values ‘Out of Step with Most Americans’: Trump Border Official

October 9, 2024

The biggest problem with America’s broken border policy is that it perfectly reflects the values of the Biden-Harris administration, an immigration expert told a group of Christian conservative leaders.

“They’ve said for three years now that they have designed an immigration system that comports with their values,” explained Chad Wolf, acting secretary the Department of Homeland Security in the Trump administration and now executive director of the America First Policy Institute, at the 2024 Pray Vote Stand Summit (PVSS) in Washington, D.C., last Saturday.

While a values-based immigration policy may sound appealing, especially to people of faith, Wolf told PVSS that the devil’s in the details. The Left’s anti-American “values” clash radically with the views of most Americans.

The Left’s first immigration-based “value is anyone and everyone should be able to come to the United States, full-stop,” said Wolf. If someone can reach American shores, they should be able to emigrate. Since America is a proposition nation — a “nation of immigrants” with no historic roots in Western Christian culture — the United States should serve as a home for anyone of any background or viewpoint.

Secondly, the Left believes that “anyone should be able to seek asylum here in the United States — and we may be the only country that people seek asylum in, which is a crazy notion. There’s a lot of other safe countries around the world that a lot of these illegal aliens actually travel through to get to the United States,” he said. Numerous alleged “refugees” from Nicaragua, Honduras, or Guatemala pass through Mexico en route to the United States. “Why aren’t you seeking asylum there?” asked Wolf. “They’re forum shopping. They want to come here to the United States for other reasons,” primarily for economic reasons, “and they’re using the asylum system to get there.”

Immigration experts have long documented the abuse of the asylum system, as Western liberals coach economic migrants on what to say in order to obtain asylum status, making them harder to remove.

The Left’s final values-based immigration policy, said Wolf, is that once illegal immigrants “get here, they shouldn’t be removed, that it’s okay that under almost no circumstance should they be removed from the United States.” You can see the results playing out today, he said. “There’s 1.5 million people with a final order of removal today who have said, ‘Nope. You know what, I’m not going to listen to that immigration judge. I’m just going to stay here in the United States.’ And we’re not removing them. There’s no deterrence in our immigration enforcement posture right now. And I think that needs to change, because otherwise, it’s going to continue to be abused.”

“Their values seem to be out of step with most Americans,” Wolf told PVSS. Indeed, polls show a majority of Americans favor mass deportations.

Instead, this administration has incentivized a mass influx of illegal immigrants, said Wolf. “During three-and-a-half to four years, you have about 12 million folks who have illegally come across that border: 10 million have been encountered, and about two million are what we call gotaways — these are folks that don’t come into contact with law enforcement. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know why they wanted to come to the United States. And most importantly, we don’t know where they are today. And this is only increasing.”

“It’s not because Congress passed any bill, because they didn’t. It’s because” the Biden-Harris administration “took certain actions that incentivized people to come here,” he said. “You saw about 94 executive actions taken by the Biden-Harris administration that caused this crisis. Now they have been in overdrive trying to explain that they didn’t cause the crisis, that it was either Republicans or it was the weather cycles, or it was all these other global migration … concerns or reasons, but it’s actually their actions that that” brought about the historic illegal immigration crisis.

“This is all by design. This isn’t because they’re incompetent. This isn’t because they’re bad at their job,” Wolf told the Christian conservative audience. “They have put a plan in place from day one, and they continue to execute that plan.”

The moderator, Jody Hice, senior vice president of Family Research Council, agreed U.S. immigration policy represents “a self-inflicted injury.”

FRC Action President Tony Perkins thanked Wolf for helping Americans in “accurately defining the problem.” He reminded Americans that “personnel is policy. We need to make sure we have the right people in place to have the right policies.”

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.



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