Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Immigration Cartoons





Immigration violations are majority of federal cases for first time


For the first time, immigration violations now make up more than half of all federal prosecutions, easily outpacing drugs, fraud, organized crime, weapons charges and other crimes.

In the last fiscal year, 52 percent of all federal prosecutions - 69,636 cases - involved an immigration violation, compared to 63,405 prosecutions for all other federal crimes, according to a new study by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Clearinghouse, which sued the Justice Department to obtain the information.

"Imagine the other crimes that are not being prosecuted because immigration is such a priority," study co-author Susan Long told Fox News.

The two most common charges pursued by prosecutors relate to illegal entry or re-entry to the U.S. The penalty for a conviction on either charge can range from a few months to typically two years in federal prison for a person who re-enters the U.S. after being deported.

However, a more serious outcome from a conviction isn't jail, but a 10-year prohibition from entering the U.S.

"The worst consequence isn't that you go to jail for six months, but you are legallly barred from entering the U.S. for a decade," said Peter Nunez, a former U.S. Attorney for San Diego. "It really screws up immigration status. If word got out, from the White House on down, that the goal is to prosecute every single person who enters the U.S. illegally, and we don't care if you go to jail for an hour or a month, we want the conviction on the record - because that is the greatest deterrent you can achieve to prevent further illegal entries not only by those people but other people."

A study by the Congressional Research Service found that criminal prosecution was the number one factor in reducing recidivism, or illegal immigrant re-entry. The Border Patrol calls it "consequence delivery" and it was first rolled out in 2005 on a pilot basis called Operation Streamline.
Since the operation requires the cooperation of Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the courts, its use was not widespread and immigrants quickly moved to other sectors to re-enter.
The Syracuse study found that Texas saw the most prosecutions, with almost 44,000, compared to just under 3,000 in California.

"When they say half of all criminal prosecutions are immigration related, I say 'so what'," said Jessica Vaughn, a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies. "These are bread and butter, slam-dunk cases. It is not a big deal to prosecute an illegal alien when you catch them in the act. To me, it is a dog-bites-man story. Most immigration cases are handled on an administrative basis."

While Long questioned the expense of prosecuting so many low -level offenders, Nunez said the cases are not complicated and do not represent say '50 percent' of a prosecutor's office budget. Under Operation Streamline guidelines, up to 40 defendants can be tried simultaneously before a judge in a trial lasting as little as an hour because typically the facts are not in dispute.

"If you are a previously deported immigrant and return to the U.S., it's a pretty easy prosecution," said Nunez. "The role of the prosecutor is to convict people as quickly and easily as possible. There is nothing wrong that."

Trump's pick for HHS could be the key to dismantling ObamaCare


President-elect Donald Trump’s announcement Monday that he'll nominate longtime ObamaCare nemesis Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services is perhaps the clearest and most concrete sign yet from the incoming president that he is serious about dismantling President Obama’s signature health care law.
Price, R-Ga., a former orthopedic surgeon, has been one of a number of physicians who has worked to form a Republican Party alternative to the Affordable Care Act amid claims by Democrats that the GOP has no realistic plan to replace the law.
Trump has made the repeal-and-replace of ObamaCare a signature issue of the campaign, although he has rarely gone into specifics. Through the primaries and campaign, he said that he would remove restrictions that prevent insurance companies from competing across state lines, a move he claims will lead to greater competition and therefore lower premiums.
Since his election, Trump has appeared to shift somewhat on the issue, saying there are elements of the Affordable Care Act he may keep – including provisions preventing insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions, and allowing children to stay on their parents’ health care plans until the age of 26.
Conservatives, grass-roots and congressional Republicans immediately welcomed the Price pick, with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., calling him the “perfect choice.”
“As a legislator, he has played a leading role in developing conservative health care solutions that put patients first. We could not ask for a better partner to work with Congress to fix our nation's health care challenges,” Ryan said.
The reason for the excitement among conservatives at the Price pick is that he has a proven record of being committed to replacing ObamaCare, and has even spearheaded what some experts call the Republican’s best idea to replace it in 2017.
“He’s a fabulous choice, a visionary leader who gets down in the details and really does the hard work,” Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, told FoxNews.com. “He’s an incredible spokesman for free market ideas.”
“There’s no question, this guy is a serious guy,” Robert Moffit, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former senior official at HHS during the Reagan administration, told FoxNews.com.
Price’s plan, the Empowering Patients First Act -- which he has introduced regularly since 2009 -- offers free-market solutions that include providing tax relief for individually-bought health insurance, and would offer customers the ability to own and control their health care policies, taking it with them from job to job. It would also allow those in government programs Medicare and Medicaid to opt out and receive tax credits with which to buy a private plan instead.
Price’s fundamental principle is to mix transparency with competition in order to give customers greater choice, and subsequently bring down premiums.
Experts say that Price’s experience not only as a physician, but in Congress, where many of the features of his plan were included in the House Republican’s official plan to replace ObamaCare, will make him a a secretary who can get things done.
“For sheer compatibility, collegiality and competence in terms of grasping the nuances of what has to be done in health policy, I can’t think of a better candidate,” Moffit said. “He’s best understood by his legislative record, he is author of a lot of amendments and bills, but especially the Empowering Patients First Act, because it’s a highly detailed legislative proposal.”
Turner said that because he has been so deep in policy, he will not merely be a foot soldier for the White House, but will know the powers and options available to him to act right away.
“When they wrote the Affordable Care Act, they gave the HHS secretary 2000 powers about how the law was to be implemented, so the secretary now has enormous power,” Turner said. “He understands the law and the powers the law gives him to protect people right away from things such as the individual mandate.”

Carrier says it has deal with Trump to keep jobs in Indiana


Air conditioning company Carrier said Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with President-elect Donald Trump that would keep 1,000 jobs in Indianapolis.
Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, Indiana's outgoing governor, planned to travel to the state Thursday to unveil the agreement alongside company officials.
Details of the agreement were not immediately available. A Trump transition source told Fox News that Carrier executives went to Trump Tower Tuesday to hash out the deal.
Trump spent much of his campaign pledging to keep companies like Carrier from moving jobs overseas. His focus on manufacturing jobs contributed to his unexpected appeal with working-class voters in states like Michigan, which has long voted for Democrats in presidential elections.
In a September debate against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, he railed against Carrier's decision to move hundreds of air-conditioner manufacturing jobs from Indianapolis to Mexico.

"So many hundreds and hundreds of companies are doing this," Trump said. "We have to stop our jobs from being stolen from us. We have to stop our companies from leaving the United States."

In February, Carrier said it would shutter its Indianapolis plant employing 1,400 workers and move its manufacturing to Mexico.
The plant's workers would have been laid off over three years starting in 2017.

United Technologies Electronic Controls also announced then that it planned to move its Huntington manufacturing operations to a new plant in Mexico, costing the northeastern Indiana city 700 jobs by 2018. Those workers make microprocessor-based controls for the HVAC and refrigeration industries.

Carrier and UTEC are both units of Hartford, Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. -- which also owns Pratt & Whitney, a big supplier of fighter jet engines that relies in part on U.S. military contracts.

Carrier wasn't the only company Trump assailed. He pledged to give up Oreos after Nabisco's parent, Mondelez International, said it would replace nine production lines in Chicago with four in Mexico. He criticized Ford after the company said it planned to invest $2.5 billion in engine and transmission plants in Mexico.
Trump tweeted on Thanksgiving Day that he was "making progress" on trying to get Carrier to stay in Indiana.
Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, which represents Carrier workers, said of Tuesday's news: "I'm optimistic, but I don't know what the situation is. I guess it's a good sign. ... You would think they would keep us in the loop. But we know nothing."
Thursday's event will mark a rare public appearance for Trump, who has spent nearly his entire tenure as president-elect huddled with advisers and meeting with possible Cabinet secretaries. He plans to make other stops later this week as part of what advisers have billed as a "thank you" tour for voters who backed him in the presidential campaign.

Trump to nominate Steven Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary, sources say


President-elect Donald Trump will nominate former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin to be his Treasury Secretary, two sources close to the transition told Fox News late Tuesday.
One source told Fox that a formal announcement of Mnuchin's nomination could come as early as Wednesday.
Mnuchin had long been considered a favorite for the Treasury position. Two weeks ago, businessman and close Trump associate Carl Icahn tweeted that Trump was considering Mnuchin for the post.
Mnuchin, 53, was appointed Trump's campaign finance chair this past May. Through his work, Mnuchin grew close to Trump's children and son-in-law, Jared Kushner -- a top adviser to Trump -- and worked with them on fundraising events.

The campaign raised at least $169 million, in addition to the $66 million Trump spent out of his own pocket. Though that was far short of what Hillary Clinton raised, it represented an impressive haul given that Trump didn't begin fundraising in earnest until the end of May.
If approved by the Senate, Mnuchin would follow in the tradition of two previous treasury secretaries -- Robert Rubin in the Clinton administration and Henry Paulson in George W. Bush's. All had vast Wall Street experience gained from years spent working at Goldman Sachs.

Yet unlike Rubin and Paulson and unlike President Barack Obama's two treasury secretaries, Timothy Geithner and Jacob Lew, Mnuchin would bring no government experience to Treasury, something that could prove a hurdle in navigating the tricky politics of Washington.

After graduating from Yale in 1985. Mnuchin worked for Goldman Sachs for 17 years. His father, Robert Mnuchin, had himself worked for Goldman for three decades, becoming a partner in charge of equity trading.

The younger Mnuchin amassed his own fortune at the firm and then left in 2002. He worked briefly for Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund led by George Soros, before starting his own investment firm, Dune Capital Management.

As head of this firm, Mnuchin and other investors participated in the purchase of failed mortgage lender IndyMac in 2009 and renamed it OneWest. The failure of IndyMac in 2008 with $32 billion in assets was one of the biggest casualties of the housing bust.

Mnuchin became chairman of OneWest, which was sold to CIT Group in 2015. Before the sale, OneWest faced a string of lawsuits over its home foreclosure practices.

This month, housing advocates filed a complaint asking the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate OneWest for possible violations of the Fair Housing Act. The lender failed to place branches in minority communities, provided few mortgages to black homebuyers and preserved foreclosed properties in white neighborhoods while allowing similar homes in minority communities to fall into disrepair, according to the California Reinvestment Coalition and Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California.

CIT declined to respond directly to the complaint but stressed in a statement that it is "committed to fair lending and works hard to meet the credit needs of all communities and neighborhoods we serve."

Mnuchin also became a major investor in Hollywood, helping finance a number of movies, including the 2009 blockbuster "Avatar."

As treasury secretary, Mnuchin would be the administration's chief economic spokesman, serving as a liaison not only to Wall Street but also to global investors, a critical role given the trillions of dollars in treasury bonds owned by foreigners. In addition, it would be his job to sell the new administration's economic program to Congress.

Mnuchin will also oversee a sprawling bureaucracy that includes the Internal Revenue Service and the agency that issues millions of Social Security and other benefit checks each month. Treasury also runs the agency that wages the financial war on terrorism.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump officially nominated Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., as Health and Human Services Secretary and tapped Elaine Chao, former President George W. Bush's Labor Secretary, to be secretary of transportation.
Price, a former surgeon, supports the repeal of ObamaCare and has offered a replacement that would provide tax credits to subsidize the purchase of individual and family health insurance policies. His proposal would also allow insurers to sell policies across state line, boost incentives for health savings accounts, and create high-risk pools to help individuals afford coverage, while barring assistance for nearly all abortions.
Price has emerged as a top advocate of House Speaker Paul Ryan's plan to transform Medicare from a program that supplies a defined set of benefits into a "premium support" model that would, similar to Obamacare, offer subsidies for participants to purchase health care directly from insurance companies. He also wants the Medicare eligibility age to rise to 67.
Price also backs, as does Trump, a plan by House Republicans to sharply cut the Medicaid health program for the poor and disabled and turn it over to the states to run. Like Trump and most other Republicans, Price wants federal funding withdrawn from Planned Parenthood, which has come under attack for its practice of supplying tissue from aborted fetuses to medical researchers.
If confirmed as Transportation Secretary, Chao would face many pressing issues, such as how to boost the nation's aging infrastructure so that it can accommodate population growth and not become a drag on the economy, modernizing the nation's air traffic control system, ensuring that new transportation technologies are adopted in a safe manner and responding to a surge in traffic fatalities.
After serving in the Bush administration, Chao served on the board of directors for Bloomberg Philanthropies, run by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. She resigned last year after learning the organization planned to expand an environmental initiative to shutter coal-fired power plants.
Almost 90 percent of Kentucky's electricity comes from coal, and Chao's ties to the organization were used against her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, during his 2014 re-election campaign.

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