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The federal government, even after almost six months with President Donald Trump at the helm, continues to allow tens of thousands of illegal immigrant children into the country taking them to relatives across the land.

In a sweeping executive order on immigration in January, Trump ordered changes to the way the federal government deals with unaccompanied minors from Central America crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. A memorandum by then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly the following month called for prosecuting would-be sponsors in the United States who themselves are illegal immigrants.

But it does not appear to have changed much on the ground. When U.S. Border Patrol officers encounter non-Mexican youths alone on the U.S. side of the border, they turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who in turn transfer them to the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

"I confirmed with our HQ people, and we have not changed anything," Customs and Border Protection spokesman Roger Maier told LifeZette in an email.

Department of Homeland Security officials told The New York Times about two months ago that some illegal immigrants sponsors who had paid smugglers had been arrested. But statistics from the Office of Refugee Resettlement suggest the overall numbers have been unaffected. The agency from October through June placed 37,586 children with sponsors in the United States. That roughly equals the 38,845 youths who either got apprehended after sneaking across the border or turned themselves in a border-crossing station.

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said decision-makers in the Department of Homeland Security have failed to carry out Trump's will.

"The problem with that is we're seeing a pickup of traffic again The rhetoric worked, but the powers that be didn't follow though in the president's promises," he said.

Again, statistics bear that out. After plummeting from 4,407 in January to 997 in April, illegal border crossings by unaccompanied children in the southwestern United States have climbed two straight months. The 1,961 figure in June, the most recent month available, was 1,961 the highest since January.

That trend mirrors an overall increase in border crossings by illegal immigrants. Apprehensions increased from 11,126 in April to 16,089 in June.

Concern Over 'Catch and Release' The failure to change procedures involving children is part of a larger concern that the Trump administration has not fully turned away from the "catch and release" policies of former President Barack Obama.

Judd said immigration enforcement officers have altered the way they deal with adults caught crossing the border, but he added that the changes have been hampered by a lack of detention space. That is not an issue with youths, he said.

Unaccompanied Children in America

Source: Office of Refugee Resettlement

"There is space to hold them, but they've made a policy decision not to hold them," he said.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the statistics and comments by Judd are troubling.

"It is not much different, maybe not at all different, from what the Obama administration did," she said.

Research sponsored earlier this year by the Center for Immigration Studies found that more than a third of youths placed with host families failed to show up for immigration hearings. The Associated Press reported that 80 percent of the children 106,802 went to sponsors who are illegal immigrants themselves.

"And I think it's terrible policy to encourage the government to complete the job of the coyotajes It's just a funnel and encourages this flow."

Sporadic raids targeting unaccompanied minors with final deportation orders, including one last month, have resulted in a handful of arrests. But experts contend it would represent a monumental task to locate and remove all of them.

Part of the justification for the policy has been the need to comply with the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2000 law designed to help children who are victims of trafficking and violence. Critics, however, contend that the children arriving at the border from Central America are coming because relatives have paid smugglers; they are not trafficking victims.

"If that's all it is, it's not governed by anti-trafficking law," said Christopher Hajec, director of litigation at the Immigration Reform Law Institute. "And I think it's terrible policy to encourage the government to complete the job of the coyotajes It's just a funnel and encourages this flow."

Crisis First Flared in 2014 The unaccompanied minor crisis flared in the summer of 2014 the result, many argue, of a misinterpretation of Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which granted quasi-amnesty to illegal immigrants whose parents earlier had brought them to the United States.

The surge waned in 2015 and then picked up again the following year. Arrivals are now on a pace to nearly equal fiscal year 2016. Vaughan said families and smugglers are responding to the credible belief that U.S. authorities will not block the youths from staying once they arrive.

"A few of us have been saying that all along The smugglers know our policies better than Americans do," she said.

Vaughan said the federal government could send counter signals by aggressively prosecuting parents who pay smugglers to bring their children to America.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the government could learn from the way former President Bill Clinton responded to a similar challenge in the 1990s, when travelers began flushing passports down airplane toilets and then claiming asylum. Clinton sent adjudicators to major airports to make quick determinations about those claims and return people whose claims were baseless.

The Trump administration could do something similar at the border, Mehlman said. He also said Congress could change the trafficking law to make a distinction between true victims and the clients of smugglers.

"This was legislated by Congress; the change should come from Congress," he said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions agreed, noting that unaccompanied minors sometimes are MS-13 gang members and sometimes get exploited by the gang.

"It can be ended, and it must be ended," he told Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week.

Trump's initiatives to crack down on "sanctuary" jurisdictions and temporarily bar travelers from six terrorism-compromised countries already have ended up in court. Vaughan said any move against the Central American youths would bring a similar fate.

"There's certainly going to be a legal challenge, and maybe they think they have about enough of those right now," she said.

(photo credit, article image: Pride Immigration)

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'Catch and Release' of Unaccompanied Illegal Immigrant Minors on the Rise - LifeZette

The News Tribune

Paging Vice President Mike Pence The News Tribune It's an aggressive attempt to stop the persistent leaks coming out of the White House, leaks so bad the roof is threatening to cave in. Trump isn't the first president to take a combative stance, claiming leaks compromise national intelligence and ...

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Paging Vice President Mike Pence - The News Tribune

Months after he left office to become Trump's running mate, former Indiana governor Mike Pence is finally releasing emails from his personal AOL accounts. This sort of thing would normally be reserved for only the wonkiest of public records wonks, but the Trump campaign spent a great deal of time deriding Hillary Clinton for using a personal email account to handle official State Department email.

It's slightly more of a big deal, thanks to Pence's efforts to keep these emails from becoming public. He went to court late last year to protect the content of certain emails from being released. Pence's lawyer actually argued the court had no business telling the governor's office what can and can't be redacted. So much for the idea of checks and balances.

As the result of multiple requests and multiple lawsuits, Pence is now releasing most of what [his lawyer says] is contained in his AOL accounts.

Pence attorney Karoline Jackson said in a recent email to the state's legal counsel that a complete electronic production of state records" from Pence's time as governor had been delivered to the state as of June 23.

The office of Pence's successor, Gov. Eric Holcomb, said the records consist of state-related emails from two AOL accounts Pence used as governor.

"Our office is now in the process of reviewing the records, and we anticipate being in a position to provide copies of records that are responsive to pending (public record) requests soon," Holcomb spokeswoman Stephanie Wilson said.

So, according to his own spokespeople, Pence will finally be complying with the state's public records law. Not that he didn't try to be a dick about it.

Previously, Pence had only provided some of his AOL emails to the state, and those he did provide were in paper form, making them difficult to search.

Fortunately for those requesting the emails, the new, full batch will come in electronic form, which will greatly assist them in finding the contents they're interested in. According to the WHAS11 report, there are more than 50 open records requests targeting Pence's AOL emails.

While this doc dump will result in far more transparency than Pence is used to, there are still some concerns about what's being withheld. Rather than have his former office review the emails before turning them over to requesters, Pence had his private lawyer take a look at them instead. That's not really the way things are supposed to work for public officials. This will make redactions and withheld documents more difficult to challenge, as there's another layer -- a non-government layer -- of vetting separating requesters from their requested documents.

There's also a good chance whatever's being looked at is incomplete. Public officials who use private email for official business are supposed to forward all work-related emails to government servers for storage. At this point, there appears to be no indication Pence has done that. Instead, a privately-employed lawyer has been picking through what's left in two private AOL accounts and everyone involved is claiming, without supporting evidence, they're living up to the letter and spirit of Indiana's open records laws.

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Months Later, VP Mike Pence Ready To Turn Over Private Emails, Explain What An AOL Account Is - Techdirt

Police were called over the weekend as hundreds of angry teens rampaged through Philadelphias Germantown suburb for the second time in three weeks.

According to local reports, Philadelphia police officers descended upon the intersection of Chelten Avenue and Anderson Street at about 8:30 p.m. in order to close it off. At least three individuals were arrested for vandalizing police cars.

By 9:30 the group swelled to nearly 500 young people, reported WPVI-TV. Officers blocked off intersections as teens ran up and down main roads, jumped over fences and onto residential properties, the station reported. A police chopper hovered over the chaos. A police SUV was damaged.

Police responded to a similar scene in the same neighborhood less than a month prior, on July 16. Once again roughly 500 agitators, the majority teenagers, descended upon the neighborhood, causing chaos and attacking police officers.

Such scenes have become regular occurrences in the City of Brotherly Love. On October 21, 2016, a group of nearly 200 teens descended on Temple University to hunt down and beat up white people for sport. The Philadelphia Tribune website has numerous articles reporting incidents of mass violence perpetrated by inner city teens dating all the way back to 2011.

"I've documented tons of black mob violence in Philadelphia," noted Colin Flaherty, author of "Don't Make the Black Kids Angry" and "White Girl Bleed a Lot" and an expert on mob violence in America.

"When people ask why, the only answer is always the same: 'Because they can,'" Flaherty told LifeZette. "One month ago, Philadelphia had an identical incident in the same place. Five-hundred black people throwing rocks and bottles and bricks at cops for two hours before dispersing," Flaherty said.

"After the riot, and no one called it that, a Philadelphia police official explained to the press that despite the violence, sometimes it was just better to let these things play out, fizzle out, on their own, instead of cops coming in with force and restoring order," he said. "It was kind of a Philadelphia version of the infamous quote from the Mayor of Baltimore during that city's riots: 'We gave them room to destroy.'"

"The official was very proud of the result: Huge disturbance. Almost no arrests. Which of course is great for the crime numbers, which show nothing really happened there," Flaherty continued. "But what he was really telling the large group of black people was they could riot any time they wanted, and they had nothing to worry about from the cops," he said. "They listened, and did it again."

An atmosphere of anti-police feeling sits heavy in the Philadelphia air. In May, Democrats selected as their candidate for District Attorney Larry Krasner, a radical leftist lawyer who has railed against America's "systemic" racism and done pro-bono work with groups like Black Lives Matter. Chants of "f**k the police" rang out at his primary victory party.

Krasner "has spent his life on the barricades of the anti-police movement. Attacking police, defending people who attack cops, encouraging others to defy police all in the name of convincing black people they are relentless victims of relentless white racism all the time, everywhere, and that explains everything," Flaherty said. The man who wants to be "chief law enforcement officer of Philadelphia ... is telling black people they are not responsible for their actions."

Flaherty also pointed out that such incidents are not confined to Philadelphia indeed, in the past month similar incidents occurred in Pittsburgh and on Long Island, he said, adding that such incidents have grown in tandem with rising anti-police and anti-white feeling in America.

"The connection is easy to see, but causality is a bit more complicated," he said. "I don't know or even care which came first, the chicken or the egg, the black mob violence and black-on-white hostility and violence so wildly out of proportion, or anti-police, anti-white sentiments that are now mainstream in so many major media outlets and so easy to find. But today, there is no doubt they feed off each other: the Left rationalizes black violence and criminality, and black criminals feel emboldened."

(photo credit, homepage image: Mefman00, Wikimedia)

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Social Breakdown: Riots in Philly Become Normal Occurrence - LifeZette

During his conversation with Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker and other staffers, Trump lied about the reaction to his Boy Scouts speech, referred to his 36-year-old son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, as a good boy, and answered a question about infrastructure by railing against Hillary Clinton.

Here are all the moments in the interview that made us reflect deeply about who we are and how we got here:

He fabricated claims about the reaction to his Boy Scouts speech.

Trump gave a strange, meandering speech to the Boy Scouts of America last month that was criticized for being too political. The group later apologized, saying that the speechs political rhetoric was never our intent.

When the Journal editors said that the speech got mixed reactions from former scouts, Trump shot back that, They loved it... it was no mix. The president then claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts personally called him to tell him that, it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them, and they were very thankful. The group reportedly deniedthat such an exchange ever took place.

Trump responded to a question about infrastructure by bragging about winning Ohio.

Asked about how he planned to work with Democrats in Congress to achieve his infrastructure goals, Trump brought up his former Democratic presidential rival Clinton.

She spent hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads, the president said. She didnt do a positive ad, virtually. And she lost easily.

And then, as if unaware his presidential campaign ended after the election, Trump said that were substantially up in swing states like Ohio.

You know, I won the state by 9 or 10 or something, by 9 or 10 points, without any governor support, OK? he said. So you have the governor of Ohio not supporting you and you win by almost 10 points, which is pretty good because Ohios not if you remember, you guys were always saying you have to win Ohio, right?

He falsely claimed that he has passed more bills during his first six months in office than any other president.

I honestly believe for six months I have done more than just about any president when you look at all of the bills that were passed, 42, 43, he said.

This is a claim hes made before. But according to The New York Times,Jimmy Carter signed 70 bills during the same time period as president, while Bill Clinton signed 50.Franklin Delano Roosevelttopped them all by signing 76 bills in his first 100 days.

Trump said there would be no other staff changes within the White House in the immediate future.

He said New Yorkers should just move across the country if they cant find work.

Im going to start explaining to people when you have an area that just isnt working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt and then youll have another area 500 miles away where you cant you cant get people, Im going to explain you can leave, its OK, dont worry about your house, he said. You know, a lot of them dont leave because of their house. Because they say, gee, my house, I thought it was worth $70,000 and now its worth nothing. Its OK. Go, cut your losses, right?

Trump hinted that he might fire the man leading the investigation into his campaigns connections to Russia.

After firing FBI director James Comey, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel in charge of the probe. But as the investigation widens, speculation has grown that Trump could fire Mueller too.

Asked by the Journal editors if Muellers job was safe, Trump said, No.

No, were going to see, he said. I mean, I have no comment yet, because its too early. But well see. Were going to see.

Trumps latest frustrations with the probe include reports that Mueller would be looking into the presidents personal finances, as well asrevelations about a meeting his eldest child,Donald Trump Jr., had with a Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer.

Several members of Congress have warned Trump against firing Mueller.

Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, unless Mueller did something wrong, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said.

Speaking of Russia, Trump also lied and said no one on his team ever spoke with Russian officials.

I was never involved with Russia, the president told the Journal. There was nobody in the campaign. Ive got 200 people that will say that theyve never seen anybody on the campaign.... theres nobody on the campaign that saw anybody from Russia. We had nothing to do with Russia.

Multiple members of his inner circle met with Russian officials during the campaign, according to a seemingly endless series of reports.Even his elder son, Donald Trump Jr., has admitted that he knew in advance that his meeting with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was related to the Kremlins support of his father.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Trump appointed Mueller as special counsel.

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The 7 Most Mind-Boggling Moments From Donald Trump's Wall ...