We asked the question in the title on July 13.  Now we know the answer.

No.

President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala today told President Trump he cannot go along with what had been announced as a virtual fait accompli: that Guatemala would consent to the “safe third country” designation, thus providing an alternative to the U.S. for migrants seeking asylum.  As we reported in that earlier post, “Under its provisions, the U.S. could send any asylum seeker straight to Guatemala, regardless of whether that would-be asylee has ever set foot there.”

That will apparently not be the case, as Morales has now declared that his country’s high court has blocked the plan.  Furthermore, a spokesman for Morales denied there was ever a deal.  “Guatemala never talked about signing a safe third country agreement,” he insisted.

Trump, not at all pleased, tweeted the following:

Just a couple of days ago, after a meeting with Secretary of State Pompeo, Mexico’s  Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard announced that he had told Pompeo that Mexico would not agree to safe third country status either and that the issue was non-negotiable. This is their position in spite of the fact that, to avoid a threatened tariff, Mexico has agreed to increase its cooperativeness in reducing the migrant traffic to the U.S. border, with another 45 days to go on the agreed-upon timeline.

Thus, again, what seemed like deals have evaporated. President Trump and this country will have to solve with this crisis on our own. The countries to our south are not part of the solution; they are part of the problem.

For more, see Yahoo News.

Breitbart writer John Binder described in a recent article how mass immigration is pushing U.S. politics leftward and shifting power to the Democrat Party. He observed that:

“The New York Times and Axios admit that legal immigration at its current rate will continue shifting the American electorate more towards Democrat control. University of Maryland, College Park, researcher James Gimpel has found in recent years that more immigrants to the U.S. inevitably means more Democrat voters and, thus, increasing electoral victories for the Democrat Party.

“The 2016 presidential election between then-candidate Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton underscored this trend.

“For example, among native-born Americans, Trump won 49 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent, according to exit polling data. Among foreign-born residents, Clinton dominated against Trump, garnering 64 percent of the immigrant population’s vote compared to Trump’s mere 31 percent.”

Read more at breitbart.com

The Trump administration today announced changes to its policy of the “expedited deportation” of  illegal aliens. Currently, an illegal can be immediately deported, without judicial review (1) if  he is apprehended within 100 miles of the border,  (2) if he arrived here by land, and (3) if he has been in this country no longer than two weeks. (Illegals who arrived by sea, to avoid expedited deporting, must have been here more than two years.)

Under the provisions of the new policy, an illegal can be immediately deported if located anywhere in the U.S. and if he has been here less than two years.

The actual order, which will be officially published Tuesday, says in part:

[T]he New Designation will enable DHS to address more effectively and efficiently the large volume of aliens who are present in the United States unlawfully, without having been admitted or paroled into the United States, and ensure the prompt removal from the United States of those not entitled to enter, remain, or be provided relief or protection from removal.

As the document says, the number of such aliens is indeed a “large volume.” The backlog of cases in America’s immigration courts is approaching one million. The  Migration Policy Institute estimates that 297,000 unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. could be affected by the new policy.

As expected, pro-illegal-immigrant groups immediately attacked the announcement.  The ACLU, for example, declared, “The current policy is already unconstitutional in our view. This expansion will only increase the illegality.” It has promised to sue.

For more, see the Los Angeles Times. For the text of the announcement, see the Federal Register.

The U.S. Border Patrol issued the following press release on Friday, July 19:

Del Rio Border Patrol Sector African Arrests top 1,100

We’ve commented on this before, most recently in our July 12 post entitled “With Europe Blocked, the African Exodus Turns to America.” The problem is growing, and it is accompanied by another, potential problem that could make the first a nightmare.

Health Care Workers Learn Safe Disposal of Ebola Victims’ Remains

A few days before the CBP announced, the World Health Organization declared the ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”

Alexandra Phelan, a global health expert at Georgetown University, said the declaration was long overdue. “This essentially serves as a call to the international community that they have to step up appropriate financial and technical support,” she said.  Nevertheless, she still warned against the implementation of travel restrictions, claiming that they might “restrict the flow of goods and health care workers into affected countries.”

Of course, common sense would suggest that travel into affected countries need not be restricted, only travel back out.  And surely health care workers could be adequately managed in both directions. The Congolese epidemic was declared nearly a year ago, on August 1, 2018.  Since that time nearly 1600 victims–out of 2297 afflicted– have died, making this the second deadliest outbreak in history.

Unfortunately, the open-borders mania that has the West in its grip seems to be more powerful even than the real threat of a global pandemic of a disease that is invariably fatal in at least half of cases.

As Krutika Kuppalli, MD,  of Stanford University School of Medicine pointed out, “With our increasingly connected world, infectious diseases are only an airplane ride away, making it possible for a person exposed to Ebola in rural Africa to be in a major metropolitan city within 36 hours.”

A July 15 article on the medical profession website Medscape, apparently giving up as well on travel restrictions,  stresses the importance of travel screening.  (Travel screening is when you go to the doctor and they ask, “Have you recently traveled to Africa?” relying upon your giving an honest answer.) Quoting Dr. Kuppalli, the article says, “‘Northeastern DRC has been plagued by years of violence, leading to mass displacement of Congolese fleeing the area. Owing to the mobile population, there is an increased risk of individuals who have been exposed to Ebola crossing the border into one of the surrounding countries.'”

We know from the Border Patrol reports cited above that it isn’t just the “surrounding” countries at risk. Every place in the world is just “a plane ride away” from ground zero of the epidemic.  Without a travel ban, the U.S. is currently relying on screening of patients, which Amy Arrington, MD, of the Texas Children’s Hospital believes  is the “weakest link in US-based Ebola prevention efforts.” She says flatly, “What keeps me up at night is potentially missing a patient just by not being able to travel screen.”

That should keep us all up at night, as screening alone is not the answer. Regardless of the collective mania for open borders, travel and immigration restrictions are vital. All of our lives may depend upon them.

CBP Training

In the past few weeks on a number of occasions, large groups of migrants along our southern border have attempted to rush the border and overwhelm border guards. So far, the attempts have been thwarted by the CBP, but not without effort.

• On Wednesday, July 3, Border Patrol officers temporarily closed  the Hidalgo International Bridge at McAllen, Texas, with concertina wire and barricades after several groups of migrants attempted to rush the port of entry.
• The next morning, July 4, the Border Patrol closed the Gateway International Bridge at Brownsville after receiving a tip that a group of Cuban migrants were planning  to cross the border by force.  Immediately prior to the closing, Mexican officers had dispersed a crowd of 300 that had gathered on the Mexican side.
• On Monday, July 15, border guards at the Ciudad Acuna-Del Rio Port of Entry in Texas used heavy machinery to set up a series of concrete and metal barricades and barbed wire to prevent a rush by migrants that was being arranged over social media.
• On Friday, July 19, shortly after 4 a.m., a group of approximately 47 migrants tried, in three waves,  to rush the border at the Pharr International Bridge near McAllen.  The CBP made the following announcement: “Ignoring commands to stop, the group suddenly rushed the temporary barricades, bent metal poles and disabled the concertina wire affixed to the barrier.”  The migrants fought with CBP officers, attempting to rip away the agents’ protective gear.  Sixteen were arrested but only two charged.  Migrants on the Mexican side were dispersed by Mexican officials.

The uptick in these attempts represents an increasingly emboldened attitude on the part of illegals attempting to gain entry to our country in any way possible. These are not humble “asylum seekers” fleeing real or imagined threats in their home country. They are would-be invaders who see the reports of  how our border agents have been reduced to the level of  nurse-maids for illegals,  and they correctly perceive a collective  lack of American will.

Unless something is done, sooner or later, the charges and the rushes will begin to break through.

For more, see Breitbart News.

For decades, Latin American countries have had to deal with the problem of gangs or militias being active within their own police departments.  The city of Los Angeles, California, is 47.5 percent Latino. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department employs 10,000 officers,  and 45 percent of them are Latino, closely corresponding to the city’s overall demographics.

We are not shocked, therefore, to learn that the FBI is now investigating reports of gang activity within the L.A. sheriff’s department. Going by such names as Banditos, Spartans, Regulators, and Reapers, the gangs tend to adopt identifying tattoos. The Banditos, for example, employ a tattoo design of a skull accompanied by sombrero, bandolier, and pistol.

Gangs in L.A. law enforcement are no more recent than those in Latin America, and not all gangs are exclusively Latino.  Twenty years ago, for example, the L.A. Times published a story regarding the “Lynwood Vikings,  a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.”  But circumstances today point primarily to a Latino origin.

On July 10, the Times reported that the Banditos, attached to the East L.A. station have been using “gang-like tactics to recruit young Latino deputies” into their gang.  The Times states that the FBI investigation began earlier this year when another, non-gang group at the East L.A. station filed a complaint charging the Banditos, who control much of the station’s day-to-day  work, with endangering the lives of officers “by not sending backup to help on dangerous calls,  [enforcing]  illegal arrest quotas and [carrying] out other forms of harassment.”

One specific charge had to  do with a fight that took place last September between Banditos and an out-numbered group of non-gang officers, some whom suffered injuries.

Latin America is the world’s most violent region. The Washington Post reports that “just four countries in the region — Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela — account for a quarter of all the murders on Earth,” a staggering fact. Importing actual criminals into the U.S. is surely bad enough, but to import a culture that breeds criminal gangs within law enforcement is madness.

For more, see Breitbart News.

A poll by the Mexican newspaper Reforma and the Washington Post found that a majority of Mexicans (55 percent) favor deportation of Central American migrants who cross Mexico to reach the U.S. Sixty percent believe that the migrants are a burden on Mexican society.

Read more at nationalreview.com

We are sorry to learn of the  passing of John Tanton, a pioneer in the area of immigration control and a man who foresaw early on the need for serious immigration policy changes in the U.S. His death, at the age of 85, came Tuesday at his home in Petoskey, Michigan.

Peter Brimelow of Vdare Tweets on Dr. Tanton’s Death

Daniel Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said in a press release: “John exemplified what it means to be a citizen of a free country. The relentless need to inquire, to understand, to shape and guide – all in the service of the greater public good. He always used to say, ‘a good deal of life is trying to figure out what to do until the undertaker comes.’”

Dr. Tanton (he was an ophthalmologist by profession) knew instinctively what to do during that time. Over the years, he created, co-founded, and/or chaired a remarkably large number of influential organizations, among them:

• Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)
• Center for Immigration Studies
• NumbersUSA
• U.S. English and ProEnglish
• The Social Contract Press
• U.S. Inc.

Dale Herder, chairman of the board of U.S. Inc, made the following announcement on behalf of the family:

“Dr. Tanton’s long illness ended Tuesday, July 16th, shortly after 1 p.m. local time. He will be missed by everyone in our office and by our community.  His leadership as an environmentalist, and as a population and immigration expert, has inspired thinkers and leaders in our nation for over half a century.”

For the 2017 Vdare article mentioned above, see “Univision Discovers John Tanton.”