by Brian Lonergan
When Joe Biden conducted his campaign for president largely in absentia last year, his value proposition to voters went something like this:
I’m Lunch Bucket Joe from Scranton and I’m for the little guy. I’m gonna fix all the mistakes of the last four years and bring transparency, competence, and compassion back to government.
Almost a year into the Biden presidency, that proposition has been exposed as snake oil. If “the little guy” refers to working-class American citizens, Biden has treated them with utter disdain, if not contempt. He clearly prioritizes foreign nationals from impoverished countries, as he is bringing them here in record numbers.
Not only does Biden prefer foreigners over his fellow Americans, he lacks the integrity to be transparent about it. How else could one explain the fact that his administration is dispersing illegal aliens throughout the country via secret flights under cover of darkness?
If Americans supported allowing unchecked numbers of foreigners into the country, this kind of subterfuge would not be necessary. To land these planes in broad daylight, however, would invite protests and images that would embarrass the Biden White House, like those from the shameful Afghanistan retreat and the more than 10,000 Haitians under that bridge in Del Rio, Texas. So instead, untold numbers of foreigners are being dumped into communities while their citizens are asleep and none the wiser. That is neither transparent, competent, nor compassionate.
Such chicanery creates another battle over states’ rights versus federal authority, and the anti-border crowd’s duplicity on the issue is predictable. During the Trump Administration, “the resistance” was all-in for the cause of cities and states with sanctuary laws that harbor illegal aliens from deportation. The leaders of these communities sued Trump when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited the Supremacy Clause and tried to deny them federal law enforcement grants for refusing to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deport criminal aliens.
The Trump years saw a flood of moves by pro-illegal immigration activists to demonize ICE agents by invoking the rights of cities and states to defy federal authority. Prosecutors in two of the largest counties in Massachusetts sued ICE to outlaw the practice of courthouse arrests of criminal aliens.
Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland, California, became a hero on the Left in 2018 when she made a public statement alerting illegal aliens in her city about an imminent ICE raid. Immigration Reform Law Institute Senior Fellow and former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan likened Schaaf’s actions to those of a “gang lookout” and said that more than 800 criminal aliens were able to escape the raid as a result of her warning.
In a sane world, Schaaf would have been eviscerated for preventing dangerous criminals from being removed from her community and for defying federal immigration law. Instead, the agenda-driven establishment media gave her a platform to frame herself as a latter-day Harriet Tubman.
Now that the Left has one of their own signing orders behind the Resolute Desk, however, its philosophy on federalism has changed dramatically. They now support the authority of the federal government to offload illegal aliens into any community they desire, with no input from community residents or leaders who will bear the consequences.
Prior to January, a Trump executive order required Washington to cooperate and consult with state and local governments on refugee resettlement, “to take into account the preferences of State governments, and to provide a pathway for refugees to become self-sufficient.” Sounds very democratic and respectful to local communities, right?
Those days of populism and power-sharing ended on February 5 of this year, when Biden issued a diktat that rescinded Trump’s previous order. While the Biden order contained flowery language about providing “a beacon of hope for persecuted people around the world,” the bottom line is that local communities now have little, if any, say about whether refugees of questionable origin, health status, or allegiance are forced upon them.
Then there is the matter of Biden’s team strategically resettling refugees in swing states that will help Democrats’ chances in future elections, which is undeniably taking place. Senator Ted Cruz has an inspired remedy for that problem: creating new ports of entry for refugees in tony, progressive enclaves like Palo Alto and Martha’s Vineyard. Then maybe our rulers in Washington will be impacted by the same destructive policies they impose on their subjects.
It has been said that a true test of a person’s character is what they do when they think no one is watching them. The Biden White House has revealed their character by what they are doing in the dark of night. Local leaders can show their character by standing up to it.
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Brian Lonergan is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute, a public interest law firm working to defend the rights and interests of the American people from the negative effects of mass migration.
