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President Donald Trump has taken the handcuffs off of law enforcement, according to acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Thomas D. Homan, and is allowing the organization to target so-called sanctuary jurisdictions.

The president recognizes that youve got to have a true interior enforcement strategy to make it uncomfortable for them, he said in an interview with the Washington Examiner published on Tuesday. In the America I grew up in, cities didnt shield people who violated the law.

The Department of Homeland SecurityhasgreenlightedHoman to hire an additional 10,000 ICE agents, many of whom will be involved in the efforts to find and remove criminalaliens shelteredin sanctuary cities.

Advocates of strict enforcement of immigration laws hailed the moveas one that would empower law enforcement.

"With those resources in place, and immigration enforcement officers who are no longer being forced to sit on their hands and look the other way, ending most illegal immigration has become a truly attainable goal," Dave Ray, communications director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), told LifeZette.

Clearly, President Trump has shown the American people that our nation can not only regain control of its borders it can do a much better job of removing dangerous criminal aliens, who had near immunity under the Obama administration," Ray said.

Henoted that progress the administration has already madeonreducing illegal entrywill make a domestic crackdown more doable.

"Deploying the resources freed up by decreased illegal border crossings and using them to target the nations illegal sanctuary cities, while adding additional immigration enforcement agents, will create an interior enforcement environment that will not only deter future illegal immigration, but restore the publics confidence in the governments ability to do its job," said Ray.

Homan, in hisinterview with the Examiner, also suggested the boosted manpower and new direction would improve the agency's ability to do its job.

"What I want to get to is a clear understanding from everybody, from the congressmen to the politicians to law enforcement to those who enter the country illegally, that ICE is open for business. We're going to enforce the laws on the books without apology,we'll continue to prioritize what we do. But it's not OK to violate the laws of this country anymore,you're going to be held accountable," hesaid.

Homanalso told the Examiner that illegal crossings have plummeted by almost 70 percent to a new "historic low."

He also reportedthat arrests of illegal aliens within the interior have risen by 40 percent. Significantly, there has also been an 80 percent increase in local jails' demands for ICE detainers.

"You can like President Trump, not like him, like his policies, not like his policies, but one thing no one can argue with is the effect they've had," Homan said.

The acting ICE directoralso indicated he was surprised that this Trump effect hasn't been touted more widely. "You'd think everybody would be celebrating these policies," he said. ICE and Border Patrol agents, however, are certainly celebrating.

"Now they have meaning to their jobs," said Homan. "What this president has done is taken the handcuffs off of law enforcement officers who are charged with enforcing immigration laws."

Read this article:
Enforcement Advocate: Under Trump, End of Illegal Immigration a 'Truly Attainable Goal' - LifeZette

National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd reports a miraculous drop in illegal immigration under President Trump beforeany construction has even begun on the proposed border wall. Judd addressed those who might use that information to make the case that aborder wall is unnecessary, telling the FOX Business Networks Stuart Varney, We do need a wall, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

When Varney reiterated that many Democrats will say his comments support their opposition to a border wall, particularly if it uses taxpayer money, Judd reacted, The left has already picked up on that and they are saying that. Unfortunately they are incorrect. You have to look to the future, we have to be prepared for whats going to come.

According to Judd, it is not just about the wall though, there needs to be enforcement of U.S. immigration law as well.

As long as the catch and release program ends, as long as there is a consequence, a proper consequence, applied to violating U.S. law, illegal immigration will continue on the downward spiral.

When asked about the decline in arrests along the US border, Judd said, Its over 50%, no president in modern history has overseen such a drop in border security.

Continued here:
Illegal immigration under President Trump seeing 'miraculous' drop: Border patrol union head - Fox Business

Photo Credit: Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock

Thank you, Mr. President, Vice President Mike Pence tweeted July 15, celebrating the one-year anniversary of candidate Donald Trump naming him to the 2016 ticket. Will ex-president Trump get to say the same thing to Pence when the new president pardons him?

Despite the I love it salivated by Donald Trump Jr. at the prospect of Kremlin help with the campaign, his fathers impeachment is a long shot. Unless Democrats retake Congress in 2018, the chance that elected Republicans will admit theyve been enabling a liar and an idiotwords that polled AmericanscallTrumpare just about nil. But I give even odds to Trumps resigning for health reasons.

Hell never admit to any of the crimes that congressional committees or special counsel Robert Mueller may fillet him for, and even if he fires Mueller, no amount of incriminating evidence uncovered by investigative journalists will awaken our man-baby-in-chief to grownup skills like telling true from false, reality from delusion and news from Fox News.

But bullies like Trump are cowards at heart. However appealing he finds sliming his prosecutors like a stressedhagfish, the thought of running away to spend more time with his 9-iron might prove irresistible. Would Pence trade the Oval Office for Trumps holding his resignation hostage to a pardon?

Pence could use the same reason Gerald Fordgavefor pardoning Richard Nixon in 1974: To write the ending of a nightmarish chapter in our history. When Ford lost the 1976 presidential election, he believed it was the pardon that doomed him, and most historians agree. You can imagine Pence wondering the same thing about his own fate in 2020.

Pence, though, may not have a choice. Trump has the goods on him.

Trump knows Pence lied when he claimed to be in the dark about the footsie former national security adviser Mike Flynn was playing with the Russians, the Turks and who knows who else. Trump also knows Pence knew how deep in the tank were Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Trump Jr. (and Ivanka? Steve Bannon? Bueller?) with Russian hackers, oligarchs and Vladimir Putin. As Trump might put it, many people aresayingthat Pence is either lying or wildly incompetent, or either a sucker and a dupe or a liar. Trump knows its all of the above, leaving Pence no alternative to paying the ransom of a pardon.

I have to believe that Pences political rise,like Sarah Palins, has been powered at least in part by his looks. If Pence, a right-wing talk radio host for an Indiana station, had looked like Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones, he might never have made it to Congress. In the 2016 vice presidential debate, Penceliedthrough his teeth, claiming Trump never uttered the falsehoods Tim Kaine quoted. If Pence didnt look like central castings idea of Midwestern rectitude, he would have been laughed off the stage.

In May, at the U.S. Naval Academy graduation, Pencesaidthe most important quality of leadership is humility, a point hemadeagain July 12 to high school students attending the National Student Leadership Conference at American University, where he went on, with no irony, to cite Donald Trump as a paragon of that very humility. Really. He actually said that. He invoked Trump to illustrate other leadership virtues, too: integrity (!), self-control (!!) and respect for authority (?). How did Pence get away with it? Tonsorial integrity, Id venturethe proxy for honesty that his headful of snowy white hair absurdly confers on the blatant bull that comes out of his mouth.

Pences current priority, selling Mitch McConnells health care bill to wavering senators, isnt going very well. The damage he did to his credibility by lying about Flynn, Russia andwhyTrump fired FBI director James Comey is ananvilaround his neck. His approval ratings, atplus-11as recently as March, have fallen, like Trumps, toall-time lows. No wonder he bombed at the National Governors Associations meeting on July 14. When he lied about Medicaid (he said its expansion under the Affordable Care Act hurt developmentally disabled Americans and put far too many able-bodied adults on the program), he wasnailednot by a Democrat, but by the Republican governor of Ohio, John Kasich. Pence also scored zero points with three other Republican governors whose states expanded Medicaid: Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas. When Republican senators from those states vote on McConnells bill, theyll take their lead from their governors, not from Pence.

If youre dreaming of an abbreviated Trump administration, you need to reconcile yourself not only to a Pence presidency, but also to a Pence pardon. That would make Trump even more insufferable, but as many people are saying, at least Pence would be a normal Republican. You know, the garde-variety Republican whowantsto kill Planned Parenthood and end gay marriage, who calls global warming a myth and longs for the day that Roe v. Wade is sent to the ash heap of history.

We have to keep reminding ourselves not to get used to Trump, that hes not normal. Pence may be normal, but so is poison ivy.

Read the original post:
Will Mike Pence Pardon Donald Trump? - AlterNet

Since taking office, President Trump has routinely touted stock market gains and positive jobs reports as evidence that he is succeeding.

Economists say that while he can take some credit for the stock market, it's far too soon for his policies to have affected the job market.

That's because the stock market tends to react to expectations as much as reality, so it's reasonable to assume that traders responded to some of Trump's campaign promises, such as cutting taxes. But employers make hiring decisions based on fundamental factors like the health of the economy, which a president can only influence indirectly.

In the short term, presidents do have a major impact on the rise and fall of the stock market, said Bob Bruner, current economics professor and former dean of the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Presidents can declare intentions to adjust taxes, impose antitrust enforcement on industriessuch as Jack Kennedy diddeclare war, or undertake military actions without the sanctions of Congress. All of those things dramatically affect the expectations of the capital markets.

The growth in the stock market during Trumps first 100 days was the most under any president during that period since 1989the first year of George H. W. Bush's presidency. This boomwhich has been coined the Trump Bumpwas likely driven by Trumps promises to slash taxes and pass an infrastructure bill.

No one ever knows why the stock market does what it does, says Alan Binder , an economics professor at Princeton University. But its not an unreasonable supposition that the election of Donald Trump had something to do with it. Maybe a lot to do with it.

However, despite the success of the stock market under Trump, its gains are somewhat contingent on the president actually getting that agenda signed into law, something he has struggled with. "Markets react to sentiment but they are sustained by facts and commitments," added Bruner.

Trump has yet to succeed on getting any major part of his agenda passed. The Obamacare repeal recently died in the Senate, and little to no progress has been made on passing an infrastructure bill or tax reformtwo other signature parts of Trump's agenda. If nothing continues to get done, the gains in the stock market ignited by Trump could disappear.

Binder says that in terms of economic policy Trump has "basically done nothing," besides cutting back regulations in a "minor" way. However, Binder also noted that Trump has "not done anything bad macro-economically either."

The president's ability to influence economic growth is sometimes overstated, economists agree.

Presidents can affect the economy through the decisions they make, but it often takes years to gauge the impact. For instance, most economists now say President Obama's stimulus package helped pull the U.S. out of the recession, even though a majority of Americans at the time believed it didn't work. Likewise, President George W. Bush's decision to launch the Iraq War could have contributed to Great Recession, economists note . But, even so, the president, Bruner says, is just one of the "many cooks in the kitchen" that influence the economy.

So, while Trump may deserve some credit for the boost in the stock market, his impact on job creation and overall growth remains to be seen. Yet the president, on Twitter, has repeatedly taken credit for the positive jobs reports.

"It's premature," said Stephen Moore , a visiting fellow at the Project for Economic Growth at The Heritage Foundation, of Trump's tweets on jobs growth. "It takes a while for policies to translate into jobs. Stock markets react instantaneously to things. For jobs to come backthat takes longer."

Job growth has increased steadily under Trump . Through the president's first five full months in office, employers added 863,000 jobs and the unemployment rate decreased from 4.8 percent to 4.4 percentan indication the economy is doing well. But the job growth under Trump is also similar to the last five months of Obama's presidency, when 908,000 jobs were added, showing that the increase is likely just a continuation.

The jobs results are the outcomes of many people," said Bruner. "Trump is merely basking in the afterglow of solid economic news. The roots of which extend well back in time."

Also, by taking credit for a robust economy so early in his presidency, Trump may be digging himself into a hole if there's an economic downturn later on in his four year term.

"If you want to own the economy, you own it," added Moore. "And that can be hazardous."

See the article here:
Donald Trump Keeps Taking Credit for the Economy. How Much Should He Get? - Fortune

Our Louis XIV. Photo-Illustration: Daily Intelligencer; Photos: Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV, Louvre Museum; Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images (Trump)

In his bizarre New York Times interview, Donald Trump expresses his characteristic assortment of fever-dream assertions. The president believes Hillary Clinton was totally opposed to any sanctions for Russia, that a properly amortized health-insurance plan would cost $12 a year, that Napoleons one problem is he didnt go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and that Trump has somehow either carried out or reversed sweeping land reforms (Ive given the farmers back their farms. Ive given the builders back their land to build houses and to build other things). Yet a consistent idea manages to poke through the delirious rambling. Trump repeatedly affirmed his conviction that the entire federal government ought to be operated for his personal benefit.

Trump expressed this idea by returning several times to the phrase conflict of interest. Trump himself is of course the most personally conflicted president in modern American history. He has maintained a vast, undisclosed business empire and openly used his powers in office to enrich himself. But he does not mention this conflict of interest. Instead he applies the phrase to any law-enforcement official who might potentially get in his way.

The headline of the story was Trumps anger that Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from an investigation into the Trump campaigns connections to Russia. The cause of the recusal flows self-evidently from basic legal principles. Sessions played a key role in the Trump campaign, so obviously he cant conduct an investigation into it. In Trumps mind, though, it is obvious that managing the investigation into the Trump campaign is the very thing his handpicked Attorney General ought to do:

Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, Thanks, Jeff, but I cant, you know, Im not going to take you.

It is not as if the job of overseeing the Russia investigation is not being done. What Trump objects to is the fact that he was deprived of the chance to choose the official who is overseeing it.

Trump goes on to explain or, to put it more accurately, gesture at his belief that everybody else in government is fatally conflicted. Robert Mueller is conflicted because he interviewed to be the head of the FBI to replace James Comey. The acting FBI director is conflicted because his wife ran for state Senate as a Democrat. Muellers staff is conflicted. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is conflicted because hes from Baltimore There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any. (Rosenstein is not from Baltimore, and was appointed as a U.S. Attorney by George W. Bush.) In contrast to Trumps notion that he is surrounded by officials fatally conflicted by loyalties to causes other than Donald Trump is his belief that he possesses the legitimate authority to control law enforcement as he pleases. He paints the role of the FBI director as his personal subordinate. The FBI person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting, he says.

It is true that the FBI director reports to the president. That is one half of a delicate but vital constitutional arrangement designed to ensure that neither the FBI director nor the president can amass completely untrammeled power over law enforcement in a way that would invite political abuse. That is why the FBI director has a ten-year term, rather than serving as a political appointee like other Executive branch officials. And it is why the bureau has the foundational creed that elected officials cannot interfere with any investigation. Instead, Trump reaffirms his view that he has the right to stop any law-enforcement investigation at will: I could have ended that whole thing just by saying they say it cant be obstruction because you can say: Its ended. Its over. Period, he states.

Six months into his presidency, foundational republican concepts remain as foreign as ever to Trump. He believes the entire federal government owes its personal loyalty to him, and that the office of the presidency is properly a vehicle for personal and familial enrichment. If the rule of law survives this era intact, it will only be because the president is too inept to undermine it.

A four-member parole board voted unanimously to set Simpson free as soon as October.

Surprisingly, a trash can is a decent shield against a giant blade.

A tough reporter and a lovely person, gone way, way too soon.

The latest version of Trumpcare would cost 22 million people health coverage, just like its predecessor, but McConnell has some room to maneuver.

Mujtaba al-Sweikat, accepted to Western Michigan University, was arrested for attending pro-democracy protests.

Doctors discovered a brain tumor during surgery to remove a blood clot last week.

Youd expect a presidential tirade against a top appointee to lead to a firing or resignation. Not with Donald Trump but the optics are terrible.

On Wednesday, Trump said Mueller shouldnt probe his business dealings. On Thursday, a report says Mueller is already doing it.

The president seems to think more time and effort will overcome the divisions among Senate Republicans on health care. So far, no signs hes right.

Heres a fun theory.

Last year, Trump promised universal health care. Now, to build support for throwing millions off insurance, his team is trying to make Obamacare fail.

The president explains his belief that a conflict of interest is any loyalty to anything but Trump.

Republicans took Obama to court over the presidents duty to take care that laws be faithfully executed. Democrats should do the same.

A former staffer for now-retired Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on the Trumpcare debacle.

Trumps former campaign chairman is set to testify before the Senate next week.

He says he wouldnt have hired Sessions if he knew hed recuse himself, suggesting he wanted the attorney general to control the Russia probe.

CBO says a straight repeal would cost 32 million their health coverage while doubling premiums.

Putin won in Syria, one anonymous official told the Washington Post.

See more here:
Donald Trump: L'tat, C'est Moi - New York Magazine