ICE raids just a fraction of what's needed

Reality aside, whether or not something is actually happening in the minds of the public depends, in large part, on the media coverage. That may sound strange but it’s true. For example, ice has been melting and reforming in the Arctic for millions of years. It wasn’t until 1979 when satellite technology advanced to a point that we could see it that it became big news. That news coverage changed the perception, but it did not change the reality.

The same can be said for a different kind of ice, the recent ICE raids. The media are in hysterics over Trump’s 680 criminal illegal alien arrests last week. However, Obama averaged 1,250 arrests per week in his last year in office according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). An average of 1,250 arrests and the media hardly noticed.

And, yes, I said criminal illegal aliens. It’s already a misdemeanor to break into this country the first time. The second and subsequent times are felonies. Those people targeted by ICE are illegals with criminal records for crimes other than merely coming here illegally. The sad reality is we’re only arresting a fraction of those people who need to be kicked out of the country.

According to the current acting ICE director, there are 950,062 illegal aliens in the country with active deportation orders. These people have been convicted of crimes in the United States and ordered to self-deport. The Trump raids constitute just .07 percent of those with deportation orders. ICE currently has in custody 11,006 criminal illegals. The vast majority of those were obviously arrested under Obama. Still, that’s only about 1 percent of those with active deportation orders.

It gets worse. There are about 3 million criminal illegal aliens just walking around our country. The ones we have in custody make up only .37 percent of those who should be in custody. If there are 20 million illegals in the country then about 15 percent of them are bad actors. That’s a pretty alarming rate, and that’s just the ones we know have criminal records. Countless crimes by illegal aliens go uncounted because we have no idea who they are.

If you knew that 15 percent of any group was statistically criminal would you feel good about letting them on an airplane without going through security? Then why on earth are we letting people come unvetted to this country?

The Washington Examiner cites immigration experts as saying the reason most of these criminal illegal aliens aren’t in custody is because of sanctuary cities. So many of these criminal illegals are jailed in sanctuary cities then set free. Many of the ICE raids would be unnecessary if cities simply did their jobs and held criminals until ICE agents arrived. And we only need look to the Kate Steinle case in San Francisco to see what happens when they don’t.

I hear all sorts of excuses for illegal aliens. It takes too long to get here, or it cost too much to come here. The figure that’s now taken hold in the pro-illegal movement is $7,000 for a green card. It’s actually $1,000 for a green card. If your home loan takes too long or the fees are too much does that mean you rob the bank?

It’s time we stopped making excuses for illegal immigration. Two-thirds of the people coming up from Mexico come legally. Two-thirds come the right way! There is no excuse for coming any other way.

So, what do you call 680 criminal illegals arrested in one week? A good start.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Flynn's departure emboldens the media

The media smell blood in the water. There are four people in Trump’s orbit who they’ve been trying to take down and they just got their first kill. General Mike Flynn, the now-former national security advisor to the president was the first. They hope he won’t be the last.

Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer are all on their hit list. Unfortunately, Flynn gave them the rope to hang him. In the end, it wasn’t some ridiculous violation of some arcane law (the Logan Act), it was the fact that Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence which caused Pence to repeat the lie.

And it was all so unnecessary. Flynn was talking to a Russian ambassador about all sorts of issues, including the Obama sanctions against his country. Trump’s position had been that he would take a look at those sanctions once he became president. Telling the ambassador that was neither illegal nor improper. Misrepresenting the conversation apparently damaged Flynn’s credibility, and credibility is crucial to a national security advisor.

It’s a dangerous game to give the media their pound of flesh. Thus far in this administration, they have been relegated to mere spectators. They’re accustomed to driving the narrative. They’ve convinced themselves that Flynn, Conway, Bannon, and Spicer drive the narrative in the Trump White House. What they fail to realize is that Trump drives the narrative in the Trump White House. They seem to believe if they can destroy his inner circle they can destroy him.

With the Flynn kill it’s even more than that. To a journalist, Watergate is the gold standard. It’s the Pulitzer. It’s journalistic immortality. Before Flynn’s resignation, I predicted you’d hear the famous question crafted by the late Senator Fred Thompson and uttered by Senator Howard Baker: What did the president know, and when did he know it? Now it’s on every reporter’s lips.

Russia has been made the bogeyman. Seems like I remember not too long ago Hillary Clinton was hitting a reset button with her Russian counterpart. What happened? Well, what happened was Hillary was desperately searching for a vehicle to derail the Trump train and cloak-and-dagger intrigue reminiscent of the Cold War era seemed to be the only option. Vladimir Putin had made Obama look like a White House intern by comparison. His KGB ties and sinister looks made him the perfect personification of the leader of SPECTRE.

The left-wing media ran with the narrative. Any type of contact with Russia was suddenly an act of treason, despite the fact that since the fall of the Soviet Union they ceased to be our mortal enemy. Meanwhile, fraternizing with the true enemy of the United States—China—was not only tolerated but encouraged. China is a country that has hacked into defense contractors, social media outlets, and countless other American companies. They’ve manipulated their currency to our detriment. They’ve employed slave and near-slave labor to unfairly compete against American businesses, and they’ve killed or imprisoned millions of their own people.

But don’t look over there. Look over here at Putin and the Russians. Putin may have ordered the murder of somebody, somewhere. He rides a horse shirtless and snarled at Obama as a weak and ineffective leader. God forbid a future national security advisor was trying to build a diplomatic bridge with the likes of him.

No, let’s cozy up to the brutal butchers of Beijing instead.

Flynn’s departure was probably necessary, but it breathed new life into the left-wing media who were all but relegated to irrelevancy. Now it gets interesting.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

84 Lumber fumbles the Super Bowl ad

There are three things we’ll remember from Super Bowl LI. The greatest comeback in the history of the big game, Brady winning a record five Super Bowls, and the day 84 Lumber went all in on supporting illegal aliens and lost.

A couple of weeks before the Super Bowl I was alerting my listeners that Fox had nixed the long version of 84 Lumber’s commercial. The network found it too political because the beautiful young mother and the beautiful young girl make it to the border only to find a large wall in their way. In the version we all saw on TV they catch a freight, walk for days, and cross a river to finally arrive in the Promised Land. It was promised by the last several administrations, a promise that was expressly against the law. 

President Trump has a new promise, only this one is for the American people. He promises that illegal aliens will no longer cross our border at will. Illegal aliens will stop taking American jobs. Illegal aliens will stop killing American citizens and draining our coffers of valuable resources.

84 Lumber chose only to show you illegal immigration in the most positive light. What they didn’t show you was the MS-13 gang member getting up early in the morning, stealing his way across Mexico, hauling illicit drugs across the border, then killing Americans on the other side. What they didn’t show you were the 25 Americans killed, on average, each day in America by illegal aliens.

Sure, there are plenty of people coming across the border who just want a better life. The problem is we don’t know who’s who. That’s the whole point of legal immigration. Proponents of illegal immigration love to point out that our country was built on immigration. That’s true, but it was also built on the rule of law. There is a right way to come into the country and there’s a wrong way. Two-thirds of those coming up from Mexico into the United States come legally. Two-thirds. It’s the other third that’s breaking in. It’s the other third that we have no idea who they are.

You don’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat to recognize common sense. If two-thirds of the people coming up from Mexico are coming legally, what’s up with the other third? Why are they breaking in? The short answer is a disproportionate number of them couldn’t come the legal way because of shady backgrounds, disease, gang affiliations, terrorist ties, or myriad other reasons.

Someone on Twitter told me “human beings should allowed to travel without fear.” My response was that Americans should be allowed to live without fear. Right now we can’t.

I’ve traveled quite a bit in my life. I’ve never assumed that I have a right to break into someone else’s country. If France or Canada or any other country I travel to decided they no longer wanted Americans, I wouldn’t break in. And I darn sure wouldn’t sue to get in. I recognize that countries have a right to control their borders and their people. That means they, and they alone, get to decide who comes in and who doesn’t.

Too many people believe it’s a God-given right to travel freely wherever they please. It’s not. The reason we have borders in the first place is to protect the people within them. A country without borders is not a country at all. These days the stakes are so much higher. It’s literally a matter of life or death. Which side are you on?

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Trump takes national security seriously

It’s interesting, isn’t it? A guy makes a campaign promise. He gets elected on that promise. In the first two weeks he keeps the promise. And people lose their minds.

Let’s get a couple of things straight up front. President Trump’s executive order is not a Muslim ban. There are roughly 49 Muslim countries in the world. The ban only affects 7 of them. In other words, citizens from 42 Muslim countries still freely travel to the United States. Secondly, the ban is far from unprecedented. President Obama banned Iraqi refugees for six months in 2011. Critics of Trump’s ban will tell you the two are different, but they’re only different in their scope. Trump’s ban casts a wider net, something that’s been needed for a long time.

I was reading a so-called ‘Politifact’ analysis and it argued that comparing the two is flawed. They had to admit that the two policies are similar. However, they argued, “Obama’s suspension was in direct response to a failed plot by Iraqi nationals living in Bowling Green, Ky., to send money, explosives and weapons to al-Qaida.” They act as if there’s no threat to the United States now. Let’s take a look.

In June of last year, 3 Somali men in Minneapolis were found guilty of trying to join ISIS. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Too many Somalis have been arrested to name here. Remember the mall attack in Minnesota where nine people were stabbed? An off-duty copy shot the man dead. He was a “soldier of the Islamic State,” according to a news agency linked to ISIS. He was also Somali. Somalia, by the way, is on the travel ban list. 

Mahmound Amin Mohamed Elhassan pleaded guilty last October for his involvement in international terrorism. He’s from Sudan, another country on the list. He was also a barista at Starbucks. Interestingly enough, Starbucks has blasted Trump’s travel ban and has vowed to make a special effort to hire refugees from these countries. Can’t imagine that I’ll ever set foot in another Starbucks.

This list of seven countries wasn’t pulled out of thin air. The Department of Homeland Security compiled a list last year following passage of the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act. Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Syria were placed on the list in January of 2016. The DHS later added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. That’s how Trump got the seven countries. These were seven countries already under great suspicion during the Obama administration for being state sponsors of terror.

Anyone who’s followed the news understands why these countries are suspect. Large swaths of Syria and Iraq are under ISIS control. In fact, ISIS controls some passport offices in Syria. The other passport offices are controlled by Bashar al-Assad. Can you imagine either one of those not wanting to send undesirables to the West?

Al Qaeda is big in Yemen. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has tried to smuggle bombs aboard aircraft bound for the United States. Somalia is headquarters for Al Shabaab, another al Qaeda affiliate. They’re constantly trying to launch attacks on the West. ISIS has set up shop in Libya over the last two years, thanks to Obama’s failed Arab Spring. Sudan has been designated a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. for over 20 years. Iran? You need to ask?

Basically, Trump is taking all the intelligence we’ve gathered over the last decade or so and is actually doing something with it. For the first time, a president’s actually trying to keep us safe.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.