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Trump's Plan Worked: Self-Deporting Caravaners Double. Say They're Too Scared to Cross Border Patrol

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There are two things that we’ve discovered this past week about the caravan of migrants currently at the United States border.

The first is that a significant percentage of them have, in the words of one MSNBC reporter, “not articulated (the) need for asylum.” The second is that when those individuals try and cross the U.S. border illegally by breaching the wall, the Border Patrol is willing to meet them with the force necessary to repel them.

And, according to some of the individuals involved in the caravan, that’s enough to send them back to their home countries.

According to tweets from Adolfo Flores, BuzzFeed’s national security correspondent for immigration, the number of self-deporting immigrants in Mexico doubled the day after Sunday’s incident at the border.

Do you think the Border Patrol's response was appropriate?

“An agent with Grupos Beta, the humanitarian arm of Mexico’s immigration authority, told me 30 people from the caravan have elected to self deport this morning,” Flores reported Monday.

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“It’s double than the 15 they get daily and believe it’s because people are scared after yesterday.”

There was photo evidence of that trend, too.

“People outside the outdoor shelter are signing up to leave Mexico and return home,” Flores tweeted.

“Many cite fear of staying after yesterday’s clash at the border and discrimination in Tijuana from residents.”

“The border is not like people and the news back home says it is … they said it was safe and easy,” Javier Gonzalez, one of those voluntarily going home, told Flores. “We came to find the American dream and all we found was a nightmare.”

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Using force against people isn’t pleasant, even if it’s necessary. Let’s start there. However, it’s part of a civilized society. Almost any social contract requires individuals to enforce a set of laws; definitionally, for that legal authority to enforce laws also requires them to use force if lawbreakers don’t comply. That force must be used at a minimum level, but be used it must.

Several years ago, most people would likely agree with this assessment. And many still do — but there’s a loud group of leftists who believe any attempt to enforce our immigration laws on the southern border is racist and/or cynical. And their reasons for believing this are usually — but certainly not always, it must be noted — racist and/or cynical. The fact remains that the idea we ought to enforce our own laws is seen as “tough.”

Fine. It pays to be tough.

The American dream is for immigrants. But the American dream doesn’t entail breaking immigration law. What an individual who’s self-deporting is saying is that they a) have no realistic asylum claim and b) are fearful of Border Patrol reprisal because they were going to illegally breach the border as opposed to asking for asylum at a port of entry.

Indeed, Mr. Gonzalez seems to confirm this when he says “they said it was safe and easy” to cross the border. It’s impossible to know for sure, but that doesn’t sound like someone who was planning to follow the appropriate law to enter this country legally.

In other words, the Trump administration’s decision to enforce the law — which, incidentally, was the same way that the Obama administration enforced the law — worked, at least in microcosm. This is anecdotal, of course, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see this happen on a macro scale in the weeks to come.

That the enforcement of the law via the minimum force necessary produces the appropriate result shouldn’t make any of us gleeful, but it should reinforce our belief that the Trump administration’s plan works — no matter how much the left may crow about it.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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