More euphemistic, politically correct terminology about illegal immigrants from the New York Times, as Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Ron Nixon reported in Friday’s paper. The soft-pedaling even made the headline: “Proposed Budget Takes Broad Aim at Undocumented Immigrants -- Money for Jails, Not for Benefits.”
The phrase “undocumented immigrants” (which the Times itself has admitted is a euphemism) was used six times in the story, while the accurate phrase “illegal immigrants” was avoided completely. The closest Davis and Nixon came was “illegal border crossers,” adhering to the paper’s righteous insistence that there are no illegal people, only illegal acts.
Illegal immigration is an issue where the paper’s bias comes through quite clearly, combined with a deep aversion to any slowdown in federal spending of what it calls the “social safety net.”
President Trump’s first budget offers up dramatic policy shifts and hundreds of millions of dollars to clamp down on undocumented immigrants living in the United States, denying them tax credits, jobs and haven while funding a deportation force and flights home for those being removed.
The proposals, part of the $4.1 trillion blueprint the White House released Tuesday, offer the clearest indication yet of how Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a promise to build a southern border wall to keep immigrants from illegally entering the United States and hunt down and banish those who are already here, intends to carry out his crackdown. In a budget marked by steep cuts to social safety net programs, it is one of the few areas besides the military where the president proposes to increase funding.
....
To carry out the changes, Mr. Trump has requested a $2.7 billion increase for border security and immigration enforcement, part of a nearly 7 percent increase for the Department of Homeland Security. But his targeting of immigrants reaches beyond spending freely to track and deport them.
The proposal also calls for new steps to bar undocumented immigrants from receiving tax credits, including adding a new requirement that those claiming the child tax credit provide a verifiable Social Security Number valid for employment, and tightening current rules that mandate that a Social Security number be furnished to claim the earned-income tax credit. Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, said the change -- which has long been sought by Republican immigration hard-liners in Congress -- was in keeping with the administration’s determination to spare taxpayers from supporting people undeserving of federal help.
“Amnesty” would be a better word than “advocacy” in this overheated sentence:
Immigrant advocacy groups argue that the proposal, like the rest of Mr. Trump’s budget, is less a considered attempt to promote security and safety than an effort to use every means at the president’s disposal to sow fear and create chaos for undocumented immigrants and their communities.
The paper loves to dwell on the outrage of Republicans trying to spoil the picnic of people who don’t have the legal right to live in the United States.
“If your single goal is to make life as miserable as possible for those who are here without status, then it’s about as effective as you can get,” said Angela Maria Kelley, a former Obama White House immigration official who is the senior strategic adviser for immigration at the Open Society Foundations.
Open Society Foundations (formerly Open Society Institute) is funded by left-wing billionaire financier George Soros.
Apparently federalism, while wonderful when jailing Kentucky bureaucrats like Kim Davis for refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, is awful when it comes to enforcing the country’s border laws.
But in his budget -- in a provision tucked away on Page 544 that went unmentioned at the White House this week -- Mr. Trump proposed expanding that statute, adding language that would force local governments to comply with federal detention requests. The Justice Department and Homeland Security Department would issue grants only to cities that complied.
No current federal law requires local officials to honor federal immigration detainers; those who do, Justice Department lawyers have previously acknowledged, do so voluntarily.
San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herrera, who sued the administration over the issue, accused the administration of trickery.
....
The budget for the Department of Homeland Security also signaled that Mr. Trump’s immigration agency intended to continue aggressively pursuing the deportation of immigrants present in the United States without authorization, in keeping with data that the administration released last week that showed arrests had shot up nearly 40 percent over last year.
