Horowitz: 8 steps states should take to stop Biden’s border invasion

In the eyes of the Biden administration, there is still enough of a public health emergency to criminalize the breathing of 2-year-olds and disabled seniors on planes, but not enough of an emergent matter to prevent millions of illegal aliens from all corners of the globe from invading our border.

At present, the rate of illegal alien apprehensions at the border is averaging 7,000 a day, which is an annualized pace of 2.5 million. I’ve covered the border issue for 15 years and could never have fathomed these numbers. Some border sectors are now apprehending in one month what they did in the past during an entire year. Oh, and that doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands of gotaways, who are likely the most dangerous element of this invasion.

Yet as we are still trying to conceptualize the consequences of admitting a population roughly the size of the city of Chicago every year, the administration has announced that the flow is not big enough. On Friday, the DHS announced it is suspending the Title 42 public health provision that turns back certain single adults at the border. Given the bottleneck of single adults waiting in Mexico, a CBP source told Fox Business last week that the removal of Title 42 could lead to the invasion of 500,000 people a month.

In other words, we’d be letting in a population greater than the size of two Chicagos every year.

This would be the first time in history that the government of a country itself orchestrated an invasion against its own population. So, what do we do about it? Fortunately, our founders decentralized the governing powers by retaining the sovereignty of the states. We cannot allow the federal government to vitiate the social compact with the states and violate every aspect of immigration law, but then scrupulously apply the laws against the states by suggesting they have no authority to deal with the invasion. This is no longer immigration, but an orchestrated invasion.

Republicans in Washington already ceded their leverage by passing the budget bill for the remainder of the fiscal year. The leverage now resides in the states. Here is a blueprint of action items for red states to pursue in a united front to protect their sovereignty:

1) Texas and Arizona replace the feds on the border: Texas and Arizona must take the lead at the border itself, given their front-line status in this invasion. The governors and legislatures of those states should authorize state troopers to return any alien they catch to Mexico, regardless of federal policy. One can debate the threshold of an emergency and at what point they can no longer remain subservient to the capricious whims of federal enforcement, but clearly we have crossed that line.

2) Interior removals of criminal aliens: States should create new categories of crime through which to hold criminal aliens so that they are not released or given over to the feds. The degree of criminality from criminal aliens is unfathomable. Last month, a Daytona Beach couple was brutally murdered allegedly by a Haitian illegal alien who had already been released after committing previous crimes, in what the police chief described as the most brutal murders he’d seen in 20 years in law enforcement.

3) Publish illegal alien crimes: Every GOP-run state should publish weekly data on how many illegal aliens were arrested by criminal offense category. Unfortunately, cases like the Daytona Beach murder are not rare. This is an information war, and if the public knew the extent of the illegal alien criminality in this country and in their communities, they would raise hell with their elected officials. That is why the feds have made it so hard over the years to verify the legal status of those who commit heinous crimes. There is no reason why states can’t gather that information. They must require all local law enforcement to ascertain the nationality of anyone arrested for a crime.

4) Stop busloads of illegals at state borders: Let’s not forget that states engaged in travel bans on fellow Americans during the pandemic. If they suddenly had the power to keep out American citizens, then during a crisis of this magnitude they have the power to keep out illegal aliens. Gov. Greg Abbott stationed state troopers on highways leading into Texas from Louisiana in April 2020 to enforce quarantine rules. That should be the model to deter this invasion. States should activate their respective National Guards to interdict buses traveling to their states and reroute them to blue states.

5) Verify legal status for all state benefits: State agencies should be instructed to use the federal databases to check the legal status of anyone who applies for any state benefit, license, or official legal status.

6) Mandatory E-Verify: From the inception of this crisis, cutting off the magnet of jobs was always the most effective way to deter illegal immigration. All red states adopting this provision would, at a minimum, route the flow of illegal aliens to the blue states.

7) Prosecute identity theft: Most illegal aliens are only able to reside in this country because of identity theft, which in itself is devastating to many American citizens. States should immediately toughen penalties for identity theft and embark on a massive effort to prosecute those who engage in stolen identity.

8) Taxing remittances to Latin America: States that have income taxes should block remittances to Mexico or Central America by illegal aliens or place a prohibitive tax on them.

Taken together, these efforts will send the message to a population that works off incentives that these particular states are closed for business. At best, it will deter the invasion. At worst, it will reroute the invaders to the states that want them.

“But can a state do this?” you might ask. Well, Article I, § 10, cl. 3 allows states to even go a step further. The Compact Clause bars states from raising an army and engaging in war, but makes an exception when “actually invaded or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” In other words, when they are in imminent danger of an invasion, they can raise an army and actually engage in war. We are merely advocating a more passive and defensive measure of just keeping out the invaders.

At the Virginia Ratifying Convention, James Madison explained this clause plainly: States “are restrained from making war, unless invaded, or in imminent danger. When in such danger, they are not restrained.”

Given that during the time of our founding, the main concern was violence from neighboring Indian tribes, this authority was not just limited to deterring invasions of nation-states. In Federalist No. 43, Madison reasoned that the “latitude of the expression used” in the right to protect against invasion includes “not only against foreign hostility, but against ambitious or vindictive enterprises of its more powerful neighbors.” The cartels are most certainly ambitious and vindictive enterprises.

When it came to crushing the basic liberties of Americans, we were told by nearly every federal court that the “police powers” of the state were unlimited. After having gone through the horrors of the past two years, we are not going to accept a sudden limitation on state powers to deal with an invasion orchestrated by the federal government’s unconstitutional abrogation of immigration laws.