As has been reported a week or two ago, the vaccine passport systems in various American cities
Since that time, the system in Boston has also been removed. That holds special significance for those people as I’m sure they could not bear to see their city placed under those useless, cruel, and unscientific orders.
Here’s a chart you can try to stump your friends with.
These are two neighboring counties in California: Los Angeles County, which has a widespread vaccine passport system, and Orange County, which has no passport system at all.
These people live right next to each other. It’s a perfect test.
We are told that the shots are supposed to reduce hospitalizations. So let’s have a look.
Hospitalizations in Los Angeles County vs. hospitalizations in Orange County.
There had better be a huge difference in Los Angeles County’s favor to justify all this.
And yet….
And yet.
Here is the chart, generated from covidactnow.org
I haven’t labeled the counties. Can you tell them apart?
Can your friends?
Shouldn’t they be able to?
The answer almost doesn’t matter, since the curves for the two places are essentially indistinguishable. But if you’re really curious, I’ll tell you that the blue line, which is slightly worse, is Los Angeles County, the place with county-mandated vaccine requirements to participate in normal life, and the orange line, which is slightly better, is Orange County, which has no such requirements.
They’ve destroyed businesses, torn families apart, turned people’s lives upside down — and it’s all for nothing.
Nothing at all.
I know there are those who will say that this has never been about a virus.
If you’ve doubted that, doubt no longer.
It is about compliance and control. The chart speaks for itself.
The same goes for the rest of the alleged mitigation measures. There’s no evidence masking children (or anyone) does anything, and yet they’re going to die on the hill of keeping masks on kids.
What are masks doing to little children who are still learning language and human communication in general?
We know it’s much easier to learn a new language from birth than it is to try to learn it later. So instead of building on that principle, our overlords are putting masks on everyone’s faces.
You have probably heard that Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, just invoked something called the Emergencies Act in response to the trucker protest.
I want to share with you a Twitter thread on the subject by Ezra Levant, who publishes the heroic Rebel News, one of the very rare Canadian sources that isn’t official state propaganda.
Here goes:
1. Trudeau has no legal justification for invoking the Emergencies Act.
It has never been invoked before — not even on 9/11, or the 2014 terrorist attack on Parliament.
Trudeau called the truckers “terrorists,” but everyone can see that’s a lie.
2. Tonight Trudeau called the truckers, and the countless citizens cheering them on, “dangerous” and “not peaceful.” But in fact there has not been a single act of violence committed by any of them in two weeks.
3. The Emergencies Act is to made to defend against a genuine threat to the security of the nation. The definition of “threat” in outlined in the CSIS Act. It has an extraordinarily high bar: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/PDF/C-23.pdf
4. There is no espionage threat; no foreign clandestine coup plot; no “serious violence”; no covert act “intended ultimately to lead to the destruction or overthrow by violence.”
And the act specifically excludes “lawful advocacy, protest or dissent.”
5. This is a coup — from within government. A desperate, flailing politician who bungled the pandemic, antagonized millions of Canadians and sits at just 16% in the polls [source: Maru Public Opinion Survey, February 9-10 — TW]. Three of his own MPs have broken ranks. This is a panicky power grab.
6. There was loud honking in Ottawa. A judge ordered truckers to stop and they complied. The Ambassador Bridge was cleared without incident by local cops.
None of that needed emergency powers.
But Trudeau wants to rule, like his father figure, Castro.
So he made his move.
7. Trudeau’s obsession with vaccine mandates exceeds any public health rationale. He wants the biomedical security state — the database, the power to control, the power to surveil.
8. $20 million has been raised for the truckers. The first $10M was through GoFundMe. Trudeau pressured them to cancel the campaign. The next $10M was through GiveSendGo. An Ontario court — in an ex parte (secret) hearing — ordered the money frozen. And then GSG was hacked.
9. About a million dollars was disbursed to a Canadian bank for the truckers, but that was seized, too.
Not a dime has actually gone to the truckers. But Freeland claims that those funds are tantamount to financing terrorism.
10. This is the Canadian version of Biden’s disgraceful memo instructing the FBI to investigate parents who show up to complain at school board meetings. Trudeau and Freeland have criminalized grassroots, peaceful political activism.
11. Freeland announc[ed] that anyone who donated to the trucker crowdfunds is a terrorist financier, and can have their bank accounts seized without a court order. Freeland will “share relevant information” about her enemies list with the banks.
12. There’s more; the bizarre notion of not only commandeering tow trucks, but also “directing” tow truck drivers themselves to work for the government. (What — at the point of a gun? On pain of jail?)
13. It’s hard at first to understand the idea of a coup by someone who is already in office. But recall, Trudeau only won the election with 32% (he lost the popular vote). He’s been increasingly erratic and enraged. Even his former admirers are shocked.
14. He was losing support from his own MPs. The polls were tanking. The truckers were winning — not just in the court of public opinion, but actually convincing provincial premiers to hurry up and end their lockdowns. The public were laughing at him. And he can’t stand that.
15. By shocking the country with a form of martial law, and the suspension of due process and civil liberties, and granting himself the power to unilaterally seize the bank accounts of his enemies, Trudeau consolidates power, thrills the media and silences critics within his party.
16. I mean, it’s “war time” and there are “terrorists” afoot — you must rally behind the prime minister. It stops the dissent in his own party. But more importantly, it criminalizes the Conservative opposition party.
17. Most political fundraising is done online now through crowdfunding. Most of the donors to the trucker convoy are opponents of Trudeau. Trudeau will now use the State of Emergency to build a “terrorist” database of all of the people who donated to support the peaceful protest.
18. Trudeau says this will be the law for “just” 30 days. But he also said we’d be out of lockdowns in two weeks. The Castro model is the permanent emergency and a permanent revolution against the enemies of the movement. Trudeau’s twist is using banks to make his enemies list.
19. And in the background — Trudeau’s new bill to regulate the Internet. That’s the final piece of the puzzle, isn’t it?
Inicidentally, I just sent a donation to Rebel News out of appreciation for their excellent convoy coverage.
Now let me add one more thing: even though it’s February, there’s never a wrong time to pull your children out of a bad educational situation.
Justin Trudeau campaigned on diversity and rainbows, and is forcing his crazy views on everyone with an iron fist.
The same goes for your kids’ teachers. It’s all diversity and rainbows, until it isn’t.
Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation isn’t just imposing accountability for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 political trick to dirty up Donald Trump with the FBI; it’s also encroaching on the credibility of President Biden’s current chief foreign policy adviser and point man for the current Russia-Ukraine crisis.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was a senior adviser to Clinton’s 2016 campaign and, by his own admission, spread the word to reporters back then that Democrats believed Trump was colluding with Vladimir Putin to hijack the election and had a secret computer channel to the Kremlin. Neither proved true.
But long before that Russia collusion narrative crumbled like a stale Starbucks muffin, Sullivan gave sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee disputing that anything the Clinton campaign spread around Washington was misinformation.
“Are you aware of any collusion, coordination, or conspiracy by yourself or by any other members of the campaign that you were working with to procure fake Russian information to harm Donald Trump?” Sullivan was asked in December 2017.
Sullivan responded without ambiguity. “I mean, you will forgive me if I want to say more than just an emphatic ‘No’ to that answer, because I find that totally absurd,” he answered.
But Durham’s court filings in two cases last fall — one against Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann and the other against the primary source for the discredited Christopher Steele dossier — call into question that assertion. Both defendants are charged with lying to the FBI.
Sullivan is not accused of wrongdoing. But court filings in those cases state that Sullivan — identified in the Sussmann indictment only as a Clinton “foreign policy advisor” — engaged in email traffic with other Clinton campaign officials and lawyers about a story leaked to the news media suggesting Trump had a secret communications system with Russia via a computer server at the Moscow-based Alfa Bank.
“On or about September 15, 2016 Campaign Lawyer-1 exchanged emails with the Clinton campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that Sussmann had recently shared with Reporter 1,” the Sussmann indictment stated.
“Campaign Lawyer-1 billed his time for this correspondence to the Clinton campaign with the billing entry ’email correspondence with [name of foreign policy advisor], [name of campaign manager], [name of communications director] re: Russian Bank -1 article.'”
That revelation places Sullivan squarely in the loop of conversations designed to spread a story that the FBI, former Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and Durham’s team all have deemed false.
A month after those email conversations — with the Trump-Clinton presidential race coming down to the wire — the story containing the Alfa Bank allegations surfaced in the mainstream news media in late October 2016.
And it was Sullivan who jumped into action, issuing a statement adding legitimacy to the article’s claim. “This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan said in the statement. “Computer scientists have uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.”
“Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” Clinton crowed in an effort to get the media to cover the allegations.
By the time Sullivan issued the statement, there was already substantial reason to doubt the article. The FBI was already telling this reporter and the New York Times that it had ruled out the secret communications channel and that the pings the computer researchers allegedly found could be explained by basic marketing communications.
Durham’s recent court filings reveal that some of the very computer executives who were advising the Clinton campaign and its lawyer on the allegation strongly doubted the conclusions themselves.
Durham refers to emails between the various players who assisted the research that said they were looking simply for “an inference” or a “very useful narrative” that could make it look like Trump was in bed with Russia.
But the tech company executive who led the effort himself wrote an email two months before the stories were published casting doubt on the evidence.
“Tech Executive-I expressed his own belief that the ‘trump-email.com’ domain (referring to the subject of the allegations that SUSSMANN conveyed to the FBI) was not a secret communications channel with Russian Bank-1, but ‘a red herring,'” Durham wrote in the Sussman indictment.
Other participants in the research expressed similar doubt. “How do we plan to defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic,” one wrote in an Aug. 22, 2016 email.
So Durham court fillings not only establish the story was proven false, they also show there was reason to doubt it even before Sullivan lent his name and foreign policy credentials to it.
The court filings so far provide no evidence Sullivan was told directly about the concerns, but experts told Just the News that as the senior national security adviser to the Clinton campaign he had an obligation to check it out before spreading it to the media.
“If you’re the national security adviser, or you’re the foreign policy advisor for presidential candidate Secretary Hillary Clinton, you got to be able to look at the information and vet it before you make a conclusion,” said Daniel Hoffman, a respected CIA officer who was the agency’s station chief in Moscow.
“He never challenged his own assumption, and he never challenged the information he was receiving,” he added.
Former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said he has concerns about the accuracy of Sullivan’s testimony back in 2017 and the fact that today he serves as Biden’s national security adviser. Nunes recently retired to become head of Trump’s new tech and social media company.
“Well, it sure doesn’t look like it,” Nunes said when asked about whether Sullivan’s testimony was accurate. “Because he was one of the propagandists that was out there all through the 2016 election that was promoting this, promoting this in great detail.
“Look, that seems like everybody who was involved in the Russia hoax was actually promoted. So if you were in the Obama White House, and you participated in this hoax, you got a major promotion, you got a new job.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), another lawmaker who played a role in exposing falsehoods in the Russia collusion narrative, said Sullivan should face investigation to determine what he knows.
“Just because you’re getting paid by Hillary Clinton, just because you are Hillary Clinton, or you’re associated with Hillary Clinton, you don’t get some free pass from the justice system,” Zeldin told Just the News.
Brian Stekloff, the attorney who represented Sullivan at the 2017 deposition, did not immediately return a call Monday seeking comment.
In his 2017 testimony, Sullivan argued he was justified in pushing the Trump narrative because the Clinton campaign felt under attack by Russia after allegations of hacked emails surfaced in the summer of 2016.
“We feared that we were under attack, not just by the Russians, but by a coordinated, with the Trump campaign as well,” he said at the time.
In the end, every investigation that looked at the collusion allegations concluded there was none between Trump and Russia, although U.S. officials believe Moscow on its own did engage in hacking and leaking of Clinton-related emails.
Beyond the legal implications, experts said Sullivan’s role in spreading a now-disproven allegation against a campaign rival could undercut his credibility with U.S. allies in his current role as Biden’s national security adviser, especially during the current Russia-Ukraine crisis.
“I can’t say what the leadership in Ukraine is thinking about this White House and the various characters who populate it, as well as the State and Defense Department. But I’m sure based on what you’ve just said, they have a lot of questions about pronouncements coming out from those very people about intelligence that relates to their life and death,” former State Department adviser Kiron Skinner told Just the News on Monday. “I think that that would absolutely be the case.”
A Big Tech executive conspired with a top research university and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to spy on presidential candidate Donald Trump.
That, all on its own, is bad enough. But it is much worse that the spying continued into Trump’s term in office. It included the exploitation of data from the Executive Office of the President. That this could occur, and that it should go unpunished so long, should frighten everyone.
Joffe then enlisted researchers at a “U.S.-based university” (reportedly Georgia Tech) who were working on a “federal government cybersecurity research contract” (reported to be the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) that helped Joffe analyze the stolen data. Joffe and his researcher friends then produced a white paper, with Sussmann’s help, that made the (later debunked) allegation that Trump was involved in a nefarious relationship with “Russian Bank-1” (reported to be Russia’s Alfa Bank).
Sussmann then took this white paper to the FBI, allegedly claiming that he was not working for any client — he was only coming to the FBI as a concerned citizen. In reality, Sussmann had been billing both Joffe and the Clinton campaign for his work in writing and disseminating the white paper to the press. The goal of both Joffe and the Clinton campaign was to use the white paper to further the “narrative” that Trump had been compromised by Russia and, in turn, to use any official investigation he could initiate to legitimize the white paper.
As bad as the original indictment was, Durham filed a new motion Friday alleging that even after Trump was sworn into office, Joffe continued to collect data not only from Trump’s private properties but also from the EOP. Joffe’s firm, Neustar, had a contract with the EOP to provide DNS resolution services. Joffe then shared this data again with Sussmann, who this time took his “narrative” against Trump to “Agency-2” (reported to be the CIA).
The specific motion that Durham filed Friday is unusual, but it speaks again to the breadth of institutions tied into perpetrating and now covering up the theft of sensitive and private data and its attempted exploitation for partisan political purposes.
Durham asked the court to procure a waiver from Sussmann acknowledging that the firm now defending him, Latham & Watkins, has defended the Clinton campaign and the DNC in the past and therefore may have a conflict of interest between Sussmann’s interests and the interests of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Over seven pages, Durham details how intimately involved Latham & Watkins has been in representing other members of Joffe and Sussmann’s conspiracy.
While Sussmann’s alleged crimes are concerning by themselves, the public should be even more worried about the ease with which the power of elite institutions was so easily co-opted into this scheme. The people in decision-making roles at Big Tech, Big Law, higher education, and the Defense Department all allowed this nefarious activity to go unnoticed and unpunished until the Durham investigation brought it to light.
Where is Neustar’s review of its company’s failure to safeguard clients’ data? Where is Georgia Tech’s review of how its researchers were enlisted in this scam? Where is DARPA’s review of Georgia Tech’s contract?
The scariest part about the Sussmann conspiracy is not the depravity of the Clintons and their minions — that has been obvious for years. No, the scariest part is the hyperpolarization of the country’s most powerful elite institutions and their willingness to conspire together against democracy.
Big Tech, Big Law, higher education, defense contractors, the Democratic Party — the Durham indictment shows that the nation’s elites have no respect for democracy or the rule of law.
In the summer of 2020, Gretchen Whitmer praised not just Black Lives Matter but also the “spirit” of the “defund the police” movement. Two years later (and facing a nail-biter of a reelection campaign), the Michigan governor has changed her tune when it comes to the Canadian truckers conducting their Freedom Convoy. Whitmer called upon the growing demonstration, which is currently stalling transit between Michigan and its northern neighbor, to end the “unacceptable” protest.
Left-wing politicians and their agents in the media haven’t hidden their ever-shifting standards, drawing a false equivalency between the race riots of 2020 and the convoy up in Canada today, but beyond sheer hypocrisy, the two aren’t the same.
For starters, independent of how inadvisable disrupting traffic for any reason is, where is the property damage in Canada that we saw from Minneapolis to Manhattan two years ago? But more importantly, what is the point of either of these demonstrations? There is where the difference lies.
After George Floyd was horrifically murdered by officer Derek Chauvin, nearly 7 in 10 Americans believed that the killing of George Floyd was a sign of broader problems in the treatment of black people by police, including almost half of all Republicans. Tapped specifically by then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican Tim Scott had legislation ready to ban chokeholds and regulate no-knock warrants. Chauvin was ultimately and correctly convicted of murder, but a bipartisan bill in Congress was ready to prevent the sort of slips through the cracks that allowed Floyd’s death in the first place.
Yet Black Lives Matter rioters lit up Kenosha, Wisconsin, after the entirely justified police shooting of alleged rapist Jacob Blake the exact same way they did Floyd’s Minneapolis. The terms of the BLM riots weren’t unclear. They were nonexistent.
That doesn’t matter to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is definitely not the illegitimate love child of Fidel Castro. The prime minister explicitly said that he participated in protests like BLM when he “supported the people expressing their concerns and their issues.” The truckers, who have a simple demand to end the second-class citizenship of unvaccinated Canadians, were accused by Trudeau of expressing “hateful rhetoric, violence towards fellow citizens, and a disrespect, not just of science.”
In Trudeau’s logic, truckers opposing vaccine mandates in a country that is nearly entirely vaccinated constitute “violence” and “disrespect” toward “the science.” But burning buildings down just for kicks? That’s just an expression of a valid concern! Got it?
A protest is only effective when the goal of the demonstrators is clear. The truckers have an obvious demand and are exercising their power to achieve it. BLM, on the other hand, had no specific demand. They wanted catharsis and chaos, and they squandered their opportunity for actual progress to do so. Say whatever you want about the truckers, but they’re using the power they have with as little force as possible to exact a sole, defensible goal. You may not endorse it, but it’s nowhere near as egregious as destroying a city for the thrill of it all.
Above, from video of an arrival at Westchester County Airport, tweeted by a New York Republican with subtitles quoting a U.S. contractor off-camera regarding such “ghost flights” from the southern border.
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations February 10, 2022
After months of delay, the Department of Homeland Security replied late last month to a Congressional demand for information about the number of illegal migrants the department has flown from border towns to communities around the country. In 2021, it said, 71,617 were dropped off in nearly 20 cities including locales as far from the Mexican border as Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.
Todd Bensman: “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”
Center for Immigration Studies
Immigration experts critical of the Biden administration’s permissive immigration policies believe those numbers are incomplete, especially regarding the most vulnerable migrants, those under 18, whom DHS classifies as “unaccompanied children.” The agency says some 40,000 of the total transported are such minors, but that number is only a fraction of the 147,000 “encounters” the agency reports having with unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border between January and October 2021.
Paramount among the questions raised by the transports is what happens to the unaccompanied children once they leave the airport? The major cities DHS lists, the experts say, are probably simply way stations rather than final destinations.
“Everyone wants to know where they’re going, but nobody knows,” said Todd Bensman, a national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “Well, somebody knows,” he adds. “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”
The lack of information raises a host of questions regarding the health and welfare of the children, and more:
What security checks are being performed — and background checks to ensure these minors are going to safe homes? How can checks be conducted on family members in the U.S. illegally who wind up taking custody of the children (a problem highlighted in a 2019 study)?
What processes are in place to ensure that these children have enough to eat, are receiving any necessary medical care, or are enrolled in school?
What traumas or crimes have they suffered along the way, at the hands of human traffickers, for example, and how are the cases being handled? (Through a public records request, Judicial Watch last year obtained a list of 33 incidents of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month period in 2021.)
What pandemic precautions have been taken, beyond masks seen in some furtively taken images of the transportees, by an administration that professes to be aggressively dedicated to eradicating COVID-19? (Illegal immigrants dispersed on commercial flights in 2021 were not tested for covid, and agencies did not follow preventive procedures, according to preliminary findings of a DHS Inspector General’s report reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.)
Who is responsible for making sure the migrants, children in particular, check in with the government and show up for court immigration hearings?
The difficulty of getting answers from the Biden administration is frustrating many state and local officials who say that tracking the thousands of illegal immigrants apparently melting into their communities is a maddening endeavor.
Larry Keefe, adviser to Florida’s governor: It’s “a clandestine, covert, middle-of-the-night, special ops mission.”
Department of Justice
“The Biden administration is running a clandestine, covert, middle-of-the-night, special ops mission using the same tradecraft the military does in operations against foreign enemies,” said Larry Keefe, a senior policy adviser to Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We don’t know what’s going on because the states are not designed to mount intelligence-gathering operations against our own government.”
The situation is complicated by the layers of groups involved. After a gumbo of federal agencies – CBP, DHS, DHHS, ICE, ORR – the government largely relies on nonprofit contractors to handle unaccompanied minors. While those groups present a rosy picture on their websites, it is unclear how they can handle what has proved a massive increase.
In 2021, DHS shelters near the border and further inland took in 122,000 unaccompanied children, according to its figures, which shattered the previous record 69,000 in 2019. The unaccompanied children are but a portion of the illegal immigrants who flooded across the southern border in 2021. For the fiscal year ending last October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 1.6 million “encounters” — an all-time record and four times the figure the previous year. Although the number of encounters does not equal the number of people who crossed, given that some are repeat offenders, the actual figures are even higher, because CBP does not release the number of “got-aways” it records.
Single minors: 2021 was a record year and the barely new year already surpasses all of 2020.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Neither Homeland Security nor Health and Human Services nor the Office of Refugee Resettlement would answer questions about the resettlement process from RealClearInvestigations.
But the huge increase in numbers means the organizations dealing with them are swamped. In many cases, responsibilities for placing unaccompanied children with families or sponsors are subcontracted through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. In 2020, the most recent year for which figures were available, under the far more restrictive immigration policies of the Trump administration, taxpayers spent more than $1.5 billion among 42 various non-profit and religious groups that offer help with housing, educational, medical, legal and other services.
More than $1 billion of that 2020 total was paid to six groups. The major recipient, Southwest Key Programs, received $400 million and a global nonprofit called BCFS received at least $253.1 million, according to tracking of ORR contracts by Maya Pagni Barak, a professor of criminology and criminal studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
None of the six groups would answer questions from RealClearInvestigations, instead referring them back to federal agencies in the kind of loop that has bedeviled others seeking information.
Rosemary Jenks, NumbersUSA: “This is all being done under the cover of darkness.”
“This is all being done under the cover of darkness and no one really knows what is happening,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, a group that favors immigration limits. “Plus, there’s so much confusion over who has custody over which groups.”
The groups handling unaccompanied children have sites scattered across the U.S., according to their websites. Southwest Key, for example, says it runs such shelters in 18 states, while BCFS lists shelters in a dozen states, from California and New York, to Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee and elsewhere. A fact sheet from ICE notes that altogether there are sites for unaccompanied children in 22 states.
Regarding shelter conditions, the operators’ blanket silence beyond rosy website depictions is not a new development. In 2018, when the Trump administration’s border policies were under scrutiny, Southwest Key barred Democratic Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley from inspecting its Casa Padre facility in a former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas. At that time, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared the system “barbaric.”
In an effort to shed some light on the situation in Florida, Gov. DeSantis issued an executive order in September that told state law enforcement and other officials to begin gathering information on the number of illegal immigrants federal agencies were bringing to Florida and where they wind up.
DeSantis took that step after accusing President Biden of abandoning any pretense of protecting the southern border.
Gov. Ron DeSantis: Opposing resettlements in Florida.
Orlando Sentinel via AP
In the face of what Keefe and other Florida officials described as continued intransigence on the part of federal agencies flying and busing illegal immigrants into the Sunshine State, DeSantis has proposed a package of laws now pending before the legislature in Tallahassee that would codify the steps laid out in his executive order. The proposed measures would also “prohibit state and local agencies from doing business with any private entities that facilitate the resettlement of illegal aliens in the state of Florida from the southern border.”
Florida’s Department of Children and Families published an emergency rule in December that directly addresses the various non-profits and religious groups that contract with the federal government. The rule “prohibits the issuance or renewal of any license to provide services to UAC who seek to be resettled in Florida,” unless the state and the federal agencies can craft some “cooperative agreement.”
Keefe said the governor’s moves will also put a crimp in human smuggling. Because the children lack documentation to board international flights from Central American airports and others, someone is paying to have them brought from their country of origin to the U.S. border. These are often criminal organizations that are most likely paid by family members – with whom the children may be eventually reunited – or human trafficking syndicates posing as legitimate sponsors that might exploit them for nefarious purposes.
“We don’t have laws in place to investigate the federal government,” Keefe said. “We’re being kept in the dark by our own country on something that’s definitely contributing to human smuggling because this is about bringing their kids here. Somebody drops the kids off at the border and then HHS is handing off to taxpayers the cost of flying them to illegal immigrant parents.”
Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania state senator: “There is something fishy going on with all of it.”
Senator Doug Mastriano
Pennsylvania lawmakers are facing a similar situation. Keystone state senators remain dissatisfied with answers they have sought on flights packed with immigrants from the southern border that landed in the middle of the night in Scranton and other Pennsylvania airfields.
In December, there were at least two so-called “ghost” flights into the Lehigh Valley, a tiny fraction of the more than 900 such domestic or “lateral” flights ICE’s air arm flew around the U.S. in 2021.
Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano and others sought answers from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, both Democrats. While Wolf said Scranton was simply a transit point, he offered no information on passengers that landed in the early morning darkness in Scranton. In a familiar refrain, the state lawmakers were told to direct their questions to the feds.
Record of a Lehigh Valley “ghost flight.”
Lou Barletta
Mastriano has now filed a series of FOIA requests of DHS and ICE, but he remains perplexed and angered at the reluctance of those involved in the system to provide clear answers.
“On two flights from El Paso to Scranton there were 120 passengers, many of which were minors,” Mastriano said. “Imagine that. I don’t know who pays for their schooling or the impact on our community, and there is something fishy going on with all of it.”
The scant information that has been provided is unlikely to offer a complete picture, Mastriano told RCI.
“I think these findings are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “We need to further examine the total number of illegal immigrants being sent [here] by plane and bus. It’s not just minors they are sending to Pennsylvania, its adults, too.”
fox files 
Written
on 19.February.2022.