Jeff Landry: Despite Media’s ‘Shameful Propaganda Effort,’ Congress Must Stop Illegal Immigration
Throughout the 2016 Presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump was clear that he intended to enforce our nation’s immigration laws.
As commander-in-chief, President Trump and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions have dutifully kept that promise. But now that the laws are being faithfully executed, we are witnessing just how broken our system truly is.
The way our immigration laws are currently constituted, they provide for two enforcement options: full enforcement or no enforcement. For the safety of our children, no enforcement is not an option.
The Obama policy of catch and release served as a notice to all illegal aliens that they could violate our laws without consequence. And the flawed policies that Congress has allowed to remain in place have encouraged illegals to bring their children, or those claimed to be their children, because it would more likely secure their release. In effect, children have been used as get out of jail free cards.
The major influx of unaccompanied minors entering through our Southern border and the family separation policy went largely unnoticed and unreported before President Trump took office. And the hysteria we have witnessed over the past week was non-existent during the Obama administration, by the public and the press.
There are facts and there is hyperbole; and the mainstream media has recently chosen to go with full-blown hyperbole by deceptively showing videos of unaccompanied minors as though they were children separated from their parents after illegally crossing the border together. They have repeatedly played videos edited for dramatic effect and audio yet to be authenticated as infallible. This propaganda effort by the mainstream media is shameful.
The mainstream media has failed to fully report how the Trump administration is spending $1 billion dollars per year to provide food and education to unaccompanied minors while providing them with an unprecedented level of dignity and security. They have ignored the Trump administration’s unmatched compassion and use of this money that could have been spent on the welfare of American children.
The mainstream media has also failed to mention that many unaccompanied minors were separated from their families in their countries of origin by their parents’ choice to send them on the dangerous trek north with drug smugglers and sex traffickers.
The mainstream media has glossed over the fact that the separation policy only applied to a small fraction of people who willfully broke the law and violated the sovereignty of the United States. Had these relatively few families gone to a port of entry, there would have bene no separation.
Furthermore, the mainstream media has diminished MS-13’s use of the child loophole to perpetuate their drug smuggling, human trafficking, and other criminal enterprises. They have rarely reported that this terror organization’s motto is “kill, rape, control” or that it has taken over schools.
So while Rachel Maddow and other coastal elites feign tears of sadness – I join the American parents who have taught their children to follow the law, salute the flag, and love their brothers and sisters who are wailing at funerals of those whose dreams were ended by unaccompanied minors not in federal custody.
And I refuse to play another game with feckless leftists who repeatedly use serious issues like illegal immigration as political weapons against the Trump administration rather than fix crises they claim to care about.
So I call on Congress to take action. Stop kicking the can down the road. Stop the political gamesmanship and make the hard decisions. Close the loopholes necessitating executive action. Build the wall. Beef up our border security. And defend our sovereignty. American children are counting on you to do so.
Jeff Landry is the elected attorney general of Louisiana and a former U.S. representative.
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