Published on May 13, 2019
By Hank Berrien
Shanahan stated, according to Stars and Stripes: “The Department of Defense is fully engaged in addressing the crisis on our southwest border, with more than 4,000 servicemembers and 19 aircraft currently supporting the Department of Homeland Security. Today, I authorized the transfer of $1.5 billion toward the construction of more than 80 miles of border barrier. The funds were drawn from a variety of sources, including cost savings, programmatic changes, and revised requirements, and therefore will have minimal impact on force readiness.”
The additional $1.5 billion comes after the transfer of $1 billion for an additional 60 miles of wall in Yuma, Arizona and El Paso, Texas, that was made in March.
Fox News reports, “But the plan to divert Pentagon funding has sparked criticism from congressional Democrats, who accused Shanahan of not seeking approval to ‘reprogram’ the funds without congressional authority. Shanahan and other senior defense officials claimed in response they did not have to get permission from Congress despite the objections from Democratic lawmakers.”
The funds being transferred come from the Afghan Security Forces Fund, which describes itself as providing “assistance to the security forces of Afghanistan to include the provision of equipment, supplies, services, training, facility and infrastructure repair, renovation and construction, and funding.”
AP reported in late February that Shanahan visited the southern border and asserted, “How do we get out of treating the symptoms and get at the root of the issue? I don’t want to just add resources and not fix the problem.” AP wrote, “Shanahan said he was not volunteering the Pentagon to take over any part of border control, which is the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security. But he said his visit led him to question whether there should be a ‘wholesale redesign’ of the way border control is done by the federal government.”
The Hill reported on Friday that Democrats would fight against transferring money for the wall:
The House Appropriations Committee on Thursday advanced a bill that would prohibit using military construction funds on a border wall. The prohibition, included in the fiscal 2020 military construction and veterans affairs appropriations bill, would prohibit funds from the 2015 through 2020 fiscal years from being “obligated, expended or used to design, construct, or carry out a project to construct a wall, barrier, fence, or road” along the U.S. southern border. And House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told Shanahan during a panel hearing in March that the Pentagon would likely lose the reprogramming authority if it moved forward with the $1 billion funding transfer.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) added, “Funds for the wall should not be stolen from previously approved vital military construction projects that are a higher priority than any wall … Military construction dollars should be used only for the purpose they are provided, which is to support the Department of Defense’ mission, service members and their families.”
By
“Francisca Vargas-Castillo and Leobardo Torres-Castillo pleaded guilty last week in Sanilac County Circuit Court,” said ABC12. “Vargas-Castillo pleaded to charges including second-degree murder, while Torres-Castillo pleaded to charges including assault.”
Both are Mexican nationals.
A witness testified that Vargas-Castillo beat and stabbed 42-year-old Brica Flores-Rivera to death in late August. Flores-Rivera’s body was found on Sept. 1. Vargas-Castillo evidently believed that Flores-Rivera was attempting to poison her children and seduce her husband.
According to the Port Huron Times-Herald:
Vargas-Castillo pleaded guilty to the following charges:
Her brother, Torres-Castillo, plead guilty to the following charges:
Sentencing is scheduled for June 26.
The brutal murder highlights once again the lack of action in Washington, D.C. on the issue of illegal immigration.
Big League Politics reported:
President Donald J. Trump has declared a national state of emergency, for which several heavily-blue states immediately sued his administration. Democrats refuse to budge on the issue, unwilling to secure America’s borders. As illegal border crossings surge, they blocked a meaningful amount of wall funding in the 2019 federal budget.
In what many conservatives see as a colossal failure, the Republican Congress, led by former Speaker Paul Ryan, current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, failed to deliver wall funding to the president’s desk during all of 2017 and 2018, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the White House.
By Charlie Spiering
“The God awful tax cut has not helped anybody who’s real, anybody out there breaking their neck trying to figure out how to make the next meal,” Biden said at a fundraiser.
Since announcing his presidential campaign, Biden has continually attacked Trump’s tax cut.
“There’s a $2 trillion tax cut last year. Did you feel it? Did you get anything from it? Of course not. Of course not,” he said during his April campaign launch in Pittsburgh. “All of it went to folks at the top and corporations.”
That statement earned a lecture (and a “Four Pinnochio” rating) from the Washington Post fact checker, calling Biden’s claim “simply wrong.”
According to the Tax Policy Center, 82 percent of income earners in the $50,000 – $75,000 income range were estimated to get a tax cut of nearly $1,000.
Recently, Biden tried modifying his speech by asking his campaign audience whether or not they felt that they had benefitted from the tax cut:
Shouts of “No!” from the partisan crowd usually follow as Biden continues to rant about Trump helping the wealthy.
On the campaign trail, Biden proposes a great deal of federal spending, which he says could be paid for by repealing the tax cuts.
“Guess what, first thing I’d do is going to repeal this Trump tax cut, oh not a joke,” he said in South Carolina on Saturday.
By Adan Zalazar
Carlos Favela, president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 1929, says the number of agents affected by illnesses has reached alarming levels in recent years, with an estimated 20 to 25 agents from the El Paso sector calling in sick each day, while others come in to work sick because they’ve used up their sick days.
“I believe this is probably the record, you know, Border Patrol-wide, since ever, of agents calling in sick,” Favela told ABC-7.
According to Favela, numerous agents are filing union reports claiming they’ve contracted everything from the H1N1 virus to chicken pox to Legionnaires’ disease after coming in contact with sick illegals encountered at the border.
Favela says agents are concerned they could infect their family members with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis.
“The nightmare for the agent out in the field,” said Favela, “is that they contract tuberculosis or some kind of bacterial disease and they unknowingly take that home to their families and then their whole family is sick.”
To the border union president, the increase in sick agents coincides with the number of illegals arriving at the border.
KVIA reports, “Newly-released figures from the Department of Homeland Security reveal Border Patrol agents encountered 109,144 migrants in April 2019, the highest since 2007.”
Favela argues it’s hard to get the evidence needed to quantify the issue and prove a correlation, but he pushes back against Border Patrol officials who say they haven’t noticed the trend.
“That’s false,” he said. “Ever since the big surge of the immigrants started coming in, even as far back as September, we started seeing those numbers slightly increase – of agents calling in sick.”
The border rep is urging the CDC to implement changes to better protect agents’ health, including providing more screenings from doctors instead of nurses and new quarantine facilities for sick illegals.
By Jose Nino
The survey was conducted by the Association for Research and Social Studies and Barometro de las Americas which found that 39.2 percent of Guatemalans. 85 percent of those migrants would like to come to the United States.
Daniel Horowitz notes that roughly 5.6 million Guatemalans would like to come to America.
Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre highlighted how 58 percent of respondents claimed they had relatives in the United States. This same article attributes family reunifications and “lack of employment and poverty” as the motives for Guatemalans’ desire to migrate stateside.
The Center for Immigration Studies reports that “the number of immigrants from Central America (legal and illegal) has grown 28-fold since 1970, from 118,000 to nearly 3.3 million in 2018 — six times faster than the overall immigrant population.”
Other costs to immigration include assimilation struggles, which have been on display in immigrant communities throughout Europe.
These factors have American voters worried, with GOP voters viewing immigration as the #1 issue during the 2020 elections.
Tom's Blog 