Update: Cathy Hoilman asks if the President caved on amnesty. 

Watch President Trump make the announcement live. According to reports, the choice will be former NLRB board member Alexander Acosta. This comes on the heels of the withdrawal of  Andy Puzder’s name from consideration, a decision that had been recommended by some patriotic immigration reformers, including Dan Cadman of the Center for Immigration Studies. Here are some factoids about the new nominee.

The big news to come out of the President’s first weeks in office is a federal judge enjoining his executive order blocking immigration from 7 nations of concern. The motion by the Trump administration for an emergency stay has been denied by the 9th Circuit, a decision which bodes ill for its ultimate fate, as Andrew McCarthy points out, although the court will hear the challenge later today. There are a number of troubling aspects to this ruling, foremost among them being the idea that a single judge can influence American foreign policy and national security based upon specious legal reasoning. This is a distressingly familiar sight for the patriotic immigration reform movement, which has seen a single judge thwart Proposition 187-consigning California to its current dismal fate-and another obstruct the implementation of SB 1070-the law which inspired this very website.

The biggest threat to President Trump’s immigration agenda, beyond the attempt by the Chamber of Commerce wing of the GOP to undermine it within Congress, is judicial obstruction. Immigration law is just one of many domains usurped by the federal judiciary over the past century, however it is one of the most vital to the survival of our republic. Notwithstanding the media-generated fog, this executive order is critically important, not least because it drastically reduces the number of refugees being resettled in the United States and, to the horror of the ACLU, targets criminal aliens.

The lack of reasoning that went into this decision is transparent. As Byron York points out, this injunction-relying upon a litany of unexamined open borders cliches-has been rebutted by the Justice Department, which described in painstaking detail the plenary power exercised by the Executive Branch with regard to the entry of foreign nationals into the United States. Contrary to the Obama administration, which attempted to confer a panoply of benefits upon illegal aliens without the consent of Congress, this is a measured attempt at maintaining the security of American citizens at minimal cost/inconvenience to foreigners. Even so, the same bureaucratic forces which enabled President Obama to flout the Constitution are intent upon thwarting that very reasonable aim of the current administration.

Josh Blackman has a thorough 2 part exploration of the injunction from a statutory perspective, which I highly recommend reading. These cases will set the precedent for how immigration is dealt with going forward. Therefore, we need to address and refute the myths and exaggerations which have already taken hold in large swathes of the media landscape. We cannot allow lies to dominate the narrative, because immigration is the defining issue of our era.

Despite the stream of propaganda spewed by the legacy media, the biggest fear the public had of a Trump administration had nothing to do with Vladimir Putin’s Russia or a white nationalist uprising. In fact, the main worry of Trump supporters was that his presidency would simply be business as usual. In other words, a White House dominated by globalist rope-sellers  and corporatist retreads who do not care about American identity. The idea of perpetual debt, unceasing third world immigration, and a continuation of pointless military interventions in Middle Eastern backwaters is something we all feared would come to pass.

Unfortunately, the most recent decisions and statements to come from the Trump transition have not done much to dispel these fears. The fact that Kris Kobach will not be nominated to oversee the Department of Homeland Security is disquieting, to say the least. The fact that he was paraded in front of the White House press corps, seemingly as nothing more than a sop to patriotic immigration reformers, reinforces the belief that President-elect Trump is not genuinely committed to this cause. Even though General Kelly is not the worst possible choice, he also isn’t a shaper of groundbreaking immigration enforcement policies, nor a brilliant immigration law scholar. What’s more, it’s doubtful that he will have the same commitment to prosecuting a national campaign against illegal immigration that Mr. Kobach would have. Coupled with the impending nomination of a Labor Secretary who is an open borders zealot, it makes one wonder what the point of this election was.

Another troubling indication of things to come is Donald Trump’s waffling on President Obama’s unconstitutional administrative amnesties. A central plank of his political platform was the elimination of DACA and DAPA, yet he seemingly left open the option of giving relief to millions of illegal aliens who fall under these 2 executive actions during an interview with Time Magazine. His use of the obnoxious euphemism DREAMer to describe these individuals, many of whom are fully grown adults with tenuous-if any-connections to the United States is particularly galling. Will a President Trump sign Leapin’ Lindsey’s amnesty bill if it passes Congress and reaches his desk? Only time will tell, but these are not good signs for those of us who believed Donald Trump would indeed drain the swamp.

It turns out that the violent Marxist riots targeting Donald Trump and his supporters weren’t the spontaneous upwelling of progressive rage we had been led by the media-those paragons of transparency and fairness-to believe. They were actually carefully orchestrated by people on Hillary Clinton’s payroll. Don’t worry. I’m sure she’s just as aghast as you are right now. After all, I’m sure a woman of her character wouldn’t countenance such dirty pool. Never.

P.S. For more illuminating videos produced by James O’Keefe, visit Project Veritas Action. At least, while it’s still legal to do so. I would also recommend reading this piece, which explores Hillary’s complex relationship to the professional agitator Saul Alinsky. 

We live in strange times.

WCCO’s Esme Murphy spoke with a top community leader who has been working with the family of Dahir Adan since Saturday night.

Haji Yussuf, the founder of the anti-Islamophobia group Unite Cloud, said that Adan left his family apartment to go pick up his new preordered iPhone at the T-Mobile store inside the mall.

“He went out to get an iPhone. He was very happy, he was joyful leaving home,” Yussuf said.

For what it’s worth, we all owe a debt of gratitude to police officer Jason Falconer, who stopped the latest outbreak of sudden jihad syndrome. Even as our government makes it easier for the world’s vibrant skittles to choke and/or poison Americans, we should applaud those willing to actually defend the homeland.

One of the more fascinating aspects of California’s transformation into the politically uniform, post-caucasian, multicultural utopia so many open borders Democrats-and their unwitting Republican allies-have worked so hard to achieve is the response of the ruling class. Most impartial observers might ask whether the hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities and public debt assumed by that state have some connection to the flight of the middle class and its wholesale replacement by the underclass exported by Mexico’s political and economic elite. However, elected officials have never been plagued by intellectual curiosity, particularly those whose careers are built upon ignoring or denying self-evident truths.

So instead of considering the possibility that the rampant corruption found throughout municipalities like Bell might be a foreign import, that some of the monumental problems facing California might have been exacerbated by its laissez faire immigration policies, the wise men of that state have decided to strike out in search of demons. Whether it’s crafting a law to protect the rights of less than 0.1 percent of the population-which are not imperiled-or contemplating bills which seek to suppress the speech of individuals who disagree with noted climatologist Al Gore, the sages in Sacramento have decided the best use of their resources is combating the vast, chimerical right wing conspiracy.

Based upon the substance of her widely mocked alt-right speech, Hillary Clinton has come to the conclusion that this strategy is the key to her political success. Like the genocidal despot whom she’s modeled her campaign aesthetics and fashion choices after, Hillary will spend the remainder of her campaign-and presidency, should she be elected-persecuting people who exercise no concrete political power in the country she seeks to lead. The fact that her party, her collectivist, politically correct President, has achieved every single professed domestic policy goal-including those which are proscribed by the Constitution-and yet three-quarters of Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of this country, must have some rational explanation. The unparalleled stagnancy of the nation’s economy, the erasure of the middle class due to the implementation of Barack Obama’s signature issue, and the explosion of domestic, Islamic terror attacks under his administration couldn’t possibly be the result of deliberate actions taken by the Democratic Party’s standard bearer and his underlings-including Mrs. Clinton. Therefore, another culprit must be found.

The best scapegoat, naturally, is one that’s unable to derail her political ambitions but which serves as the perfect foil in her quest for attaining power. In this case, a random assortment of Internet villains whose mere existence validates the paranoid fantasies of the social justice brigades and Hillary’s more deranged feminist supporters. So rather than focus upon the enormous money laundering operation known as the Clinton Foundation-which might very well continue into the Clinton presidency-or her mass deletion of potentially incriminating evidence, outlets like the ever-objective New York Times and Washington Post can spend the next few months dissecting tweets from obscure MRA bloggers and followers of Mencius Moldbug.

This, in addition to disclosures which have been strategically obstructed throughout the campaign, is what we have to look forward to over the next four years. An unrelenting, lavishly funded witch-hunt against witches that do not exist and who are not responsible for the monumental problems we are facing as a country. For an overview of how we arrived at this point, I would recommend this Mark Steyn piece from 2005 published right before the Trump ascendancy. It clearly delineates why the power brokers within the GOP were so unprepared to deal with Donald Trump and the challenge his supporters presented to the entrenched Republican apparatus. It also describes why the glorious future of multiculturalist uniformity will not be so glorious in reality. Elites look out for their interests, to the detriment of the public, and this election is a concrete illustration of that principle.

The peasants are angry, and for very good reason. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton’s stenographers in the press corps should start paying attention.

As most of you probably already know, the unsatisfying Speakership of Congressman John Boehner is drawing to a close. After helping to rubber-stamp some of President Obama’s worst legislative ambitions, while enabling his administration’s flagrant disregard for the Constitution, and punishing dissident House members who are actual conservatives, Mr. Boehner has decided to call it a career.

Kudos to the small yet brave group of Republicans who opposed him before this current session of Congress, as well as to Congressman Mark Meadows, who got this ball rolling. Although it’s too soon to speculate as to what Boehner’s future career plans hold, I wouldn’t be surprised if he follows the path of his protege, Eric Cantor, onto K Street. After all, if you’re going to do the bidding of corporate lobbyists, you might as well make it official.