Welcome to the PDB Situation Report.I'm Mike Baker.Your eyes and ears on the world stage.All right, let's get briefed.
Coming up on today's show, Israel's retaliatory strike on Iran and the impact it's had on the Islamic regime's war-making capabilities and support for its proxies and allies.
We'll break down the details with intelligence analyst and weapons expert Ryan Macbeth.
Later in the program, a new report from the House Judiciary Committee uncovers what some are calling a, quote, quiet amnesty, allowing nearly 1 million illegal migrants to remain indefinitely in the US.
Now, look, I know it's sometimes easy for eyes to glaze over once we start rattling off numbers related to illegal immigration.But this quiet amnesty issue is a fascinating aspect of the immigration problem
and provides clear insight into how the Biden-Harris administration pursues, essentially, an open border policy.Resident Fellow for Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, Art Arthur, joins us to dig into that.
But first, today's Situation Report Spotlight. With the dust now settling from Israel's retaliatory strike on Iran, we can somewhat better assess the impact that it's had on Iran's military capabilities.
Israel targeted, almost exclusively, military sites focusing on Iran's missile production facilities and air defense systems.
Now, when it comes to missile production, the Israeli Air Force reportedly crippled Iran's ballistic missile capability by taking out key equipment, specifically a dozen of what are referred to as planetary mixers.
Yes, I know, just saying planetary mixers makes you sound smart.But they're used to produce solid fuel for long range missiles, which form a major part of Iran's arsenal.
As we've covered on the PDB, this targeting could also affect possibly Russia's supply chain.Iran has been providing Russia with short-range ballistic missiles that use similar solid fuel technology.
So this strike might indirectly impact Russia's missile supply.
Additionally, Israel struck Iran's air defense systems, taking out several Russian-made S-300s, which, according to some reports, has left Iran essentially naked to further air attacks should they occur.
If I were Iran, I would ask for my money back for those S-300s.Joining me now to dive deeper into this is Ryan Macbeth, a 20-year Army veteran, intelligence analyst, software architect, good God, what else does he do, and cybersecurity specialist.
You can find more of Ryan's insights at ryanmcbeth.substack.com or on his very excellent YouTube channel, you should check that out, at Ryan McBeth Programming.Ryan, thanks very much for joining us here on the PDB.
Again, you're a return visitor, which is very impressive.Most people just run in the other direction. Thank you.It's always a pleasure.How can I help you today?Excellent.Hey, let's go right into this retaliatory strike that Israel conducted.
And there had been a lot of speculation leading up to this because there was a great deal of time between the October 1 barrage of ballistic missiles by Iran into Israel and the time when they finally decided to do their strike.
And there was a lot of speculation about what was their target package going to be.Would it be nuke facilities, which sort of be top end?Would it be energy infrastructure?Would it just be military sites?
Were you surprised at the end of the day when they finally conducted the strikes at their target package?
I actually was.And what's fascinating is that what Israel did really set them up for future success.
They mainly attacked Iranian surface-to-air missile sites and Iranian manufacturing sites that manufactured fuel and components for their weapon systems.
And the brilliant thing about that is a lot of these sites are out in the middle of the desert, right?They're nowhere, especially a surface-to-air missile site. So Israel can strike those targets.
They can attrit Iran's surface-to-air missile capability while simultaneously not really having any footage to show online.
If there's no footage to show online, Iran gets to save face, and they might not necessarily feel the need to counterattack Israel.
So in a lot of ways, everybody wins, of course, except the four Iranian members of Artesh, their army that died in that attack.
Yeah, this is sort of a sidebar question, I suppose.It's not really directly with what we're going to be talking about.But do you think that that final selection of sites was influenced to any degree by pressure from the White House?
I don't.I think it was influenced by the capability of their weapon systems.One of the things you saw a lot was Israel's use of ballistic missiles, air-launched ballistic missiles, like the
Maybe the Air Laura, maybe the Golden Horizon, although that came out of that leaked document thing, which I'm not allowed to read.I promised my security manager I did not read that document.
But most of the attacks came from these air-launched ballistic missiles, which have a limited size warhead.So you're not moving a lot of mud with these air-launched ballistic missiles.
because you can't really go after those nuclear sites that require heavy bombs like multiple 2,000 pounders to penetrate all that earth and concrete.
So this actually made a lot of sense from a tactical standpoint because it allowed Israel to fire at Iran from a standoff range or perhaps use some F-35s, at least for battlefield coordination or very precise targeting of some of these sites.
Okay.As far as the air defenses go, reporting had it that the Iranian military had a total of, I believe, four S-300 Russian air defense systems.And one had been taken out in April during the course of an Israeli strike.
And then reportedly they took out the other three during this latest strike.If you were the supreme leader of Iran, would you ask for your money back from Putin?
So, not necessarily.I think they spent about $800 billion on that particular system.But one of the things I like to compare it to is something like spearmen.
If you were in a phalanx of spearmen during the Greek era, the range of your spear is about 15 meters. But if somebody has an arrow, well, that's a range of not 15 meters, 15 feet.Someone has an arrow, that's a range of about 200 yards or so, right?
So if these systems were not designed to intercept theater ballistic missiles, it's not really the fault of the person on the receiving end.And the S-300 can intercept these theater ballistic missiles.
However, if Russia didn't sell them the software upgrades, especially the software upgrades that they were using in Ukraine, because they recently updated the S-300 with that capability in, I want to say, December of 2022,
and finally got it to everybody in June of 2023.If they didn't sell that software update, it's going to be a lot harder to track and target those theater ballistic missiles.So Iran had the right surface-to-air missile system for the wrong war.
Okay.No, that makes sense.Do you put any credibility in the recent comments that the Iranians are essentially naked?I think that was the quote.
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Well, if we're playing strip poker here, they're down to their underwear. They have medium and short-range systems like Core-Ed 15, Pansir, or the SA-22, other short-range, short-edge systems that are homegrown.
So some of their sites, yes, they might be well-protected with these short-range air defense systems, but the moneymaker, the long-range systems aren't there anymore, and it's really going to have to make Iran evaluate its priorities about where it needs to put their spending.
Yeah, it does seem like you could argue that basically what they've been doing, both with this strike and the previous strike, is setting the table.
I mean, I know they're sending a message as well, but it does seem as if they're setting the table for what they anticipate, you would have to imagine, is an eventual strike on their nuclear facilities.
I think that is very likely.In order to do something like that, Israel is going to need a heck of a lot more fuel tankers.Just because they've attrited the S-300s, meaning Iran's long-range air defense system, is essentially no longer viable.
That doesn't mean that they can operate their fuel tankers over Iran with any kind of impunity.Israel has seven modified Boeing 707s as mid-air refueling tankers.
They also have seven KC-130 aircraft, KC-130Ks, I believe, that can do mid-air refueling, but I don't know whether some of their equipment has the probe and drogue capabilities to refuel from those KC-130s.
So they might just be stuck with these seven 707s.And that really limits the amount of power that you can actually project.Your limitations are based on refueling tankers.
So it's certainly possible that Israel might try to strike these sites, but it might have to be something that's done over the course of days as you're moving all of this mud out of the way to get to the bottom where the actual centrifuges or nuclear materials actually are.
The question would be, on their own, would they be capable of that type of attack?
Or would that, by definition, look, if there was consensus, or at least if there was a credible intel that said that the regime, the Iranian regime, was just on the cusp with their nuclear weapons program, and that window had almost shut for taking action.
At that point, you would have to imagine that the U.S.would have to be involved in that attack.I know this is complete speculation, but hey, it's my show.Why not?
Well, you're absolutely correct.A couple of B-2 bombers and the U.S.'s refueling capability and Iran no longer has a nuclear program.Israel, it would be a lot tougher.
I actually did the math on this in a spreadsheet where I figured that Israel could support 20 F-35s in a long-range mission against Iranian targets, but 20 F-35s equals approximately four 2,000-pound bombs.
And that's not a lot of ordnance when you're trying to move a lot of mud out of the way.
So if Israel did want to do this, they would need refueling help from the United States or perhaps Jordan or perhaps Saudi Arabia, and all of those refueling booms are compatible.
And they could also do something like make a deal with Saudi Arabia, like, hey, can we use your runways to strike Iran?Because it doesn't help you if they have a bomb either. The third thing would be Israeli audacity.
Israel is not beyond the capability of doing something like sending paratroopers into Iran, taking over an airfield for a couple of days, and using that as a staging base.It would be incredibly dangerous, but Israel never seems to lack for audacity.
Yeah.Well, yeah.And I mean, go back to Antebbe and other operations.And they don't lack creativity.That's for sure.And it's interesting.You raised the issue of Saudi or Jordan and others.It would be fascinating
This is completely off topic, but it'd be fascinating to know what the regional players thought of this retaliatory strike.Because part of you could argue that they were really hoping for them just to deliver a more serious blow.
There's a number of regional actors out there who would not be sad to see the Iranian regime go. I mean, until that happens, I would argue, I don't want to get up on my soapbox.Oh, I'm already on my soapbox.
Until there's a change in that regime, hopefully from internal uprising, hopefully from the population finally saying we've had enough.But until that happens, nothing really is going to change.
You could put a ceasefire together for a short period of time, but you're just kicking the can down the road to more violence.
Look, Ryan, if you'd stay right there, now that I've climbed off my soapbox, we're going to take a quick break, hear from some of our outstanding sponsors, and then when we're back, we're going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which would be planetary mixers.
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Welcome back to the Situation Report.We're joined again by Ryan McBeth.You can check him out at ryanmcbeth.substack.com or at his most excellent YouTube channel, which is at Ryan McBeth Programming.Do that.All right.
Listen, we were talking about the retaliatory strikes by Israel against Iran.We focused to some degree on their air defense systems.
But I'd like to dive a little bit more into some of the infrastructure that they hit, because now there's word that they've essentially crippled their missile production capability.
And in doing that, they took out, and as you know, I'm a bit of an expert, world renowned, I suppose, on the production of solid fuel.And one of my favorite topics is planetary mixers. I have no idea what any of that means.
Could you please explain all of that to me in a short period of time?
Absolutely.So Israel attacked these planetary mixers.Now, I want you to imagine that these mixers are not like your KitchenAid mixer that you have sitting on top of the shelf above the oven.
These mixers are about 600 gallons in total size, and you can even go up to like 1,200 gallons in size.And the whole idea behind these mixers is that they're actually vacuum sealed.
As well, because you don't want any bubbles forming in your fuel, because if you have a bubble of oxygen inside your fuel, the fuel isn't going to burn correctly or it's going to hit that bubble.It's going to misfire.That's how you might see.
I'm sure you've seen footage of rockets suddenly turn around and go back the other way. If fuel is stored improperly or fuel wasn't mixed properly, that can contribute to that.
But essentially, you take the dry stuff like aluminum powder, aluminum perchlorate, and you mix it with the wet stuff like the HTPB polymer, plasticizer, cure catalyst. And you mix that up for a while.
And when you're done, you have about 7,500 pounds of castable propellant.So think of it like a very kind of liquid Play-Doh that you can put inside of a mold.So let's say a typical ballistic missile weighs about 52,000 pounds.
If you have a 1,000 pound warhead, about 80 to 90% of that missile is fuel. The rest is warhead and the avionics and the actual missile frame.So now you need 47,000 pounds of fuel.
So if that 600-gallon mixer can make 7,500 pounds of fuel, you need about six production runs to just fill up that missile.
What Israel essentially did is they took a very complex process and they completely destroyed it, obliterated it, and now Iran's going to have to purchase these mixers, most likely from China,
set these things up again and start this process going again.And that's going to take at least a year.
All right.So you're saying these planetary mixtures are probably on back order, given the state of the world.So they're going to purchase.Do you know if, in fact, that they had purchased the ones that were destroyed?Had they come from China as well?
I don't know that, but I would certainly assume that China would be a major manufacturer.I'm sure Germany manufactures these things as well, but Germany might not necessarily sell to Iran.
This sounds like a strange question, but do these mixers have any other purpose other than just producing this fuel?
I guess you could bake bread with it.You could probably make bread.They are mixers.But from what I understand, look, when you have these mixers set up, all they're doing is pumping out fuel.
And there's actually waste, about 150 to 300 gallons of propellant is actually waste that you can't actually use.So you have these things set up and running as you're producing these weapons systems. Okay.
And you would have to assume, right, given what we're seeing now as the dust is settling and we're being able to assess the damage that was done to the Iranian infrastructure, you have to assume that this is going to put a real problem for them or pose a real problem for them in terms of providing their proxies, you know, in particular Hezbollah, I would assume, with additional weaponry.
But to what degree does this impact potentially Russia?
So believe it or not, not that much. So, the only missile, other than the Shahed, the only missile I understand that they've sent is the Faf 360, which is a short-range missile.It's about 120 kilometers in range.
I don't know how many of those Iran has, and Iran isn't going to tell us, but those things aren't very useful for attacking Israel because it has 120 kilometer range.
But they could be very useful for Russia to attack Ukraine with because you're near the FEBA, the forward edge of battle area.
So I don't really see this being a problem for Russia because Iran probably has quite a few of these short range missiles available that they can sell.And honestly, they probably will because they need the money at this point.
Okay.Any sense of timing?How much time would it take the regime, the Iranian regime, to get back up to full production to recover from this attack?
It would honestly take probably about a year for them to get that solid fuel production back on track. unless they could purchase that solid fuel from another state like, let's say North Korea, but God knows what their quality control is like.
Okay.Do they have to put these planetary mixers together?I mean, do they come with an instruction manual or will the Chinese just deliver them and set them up for like furniture in your house?
I would imagine like any contract, they probably come with contractors who set these things up and start the manufacturing process and do a train the trainer. where they train people on how to use these things.
So that would be my best assessment, although I'm not an expert on planetary mixer setup and purchasing.
Wait a minute, I see that's not what it says right here.It said, Ryan McBeth, planetary mixer expert.Yeah, okay, well, I'm gonna cross that off.That's not correct.It really is fascinating.
When you think about the Chinese, what I love about Xi Jinping and the Chinese regime, and this is apropos of nothing, Ryan, but what I love is the fact that with a straight face, they stand there and they say things like, well, we don't take sides, we just want peace.
They are constantly, supposedly walking this very fine line and saying, well, we don't want to get involved in any international issues or conflict.We just want a peaceful world and peaceful community.
Meanwhile, they're about to contract with the Iranian regime to get them more planetary mixtures.And now our viewers are very well written on this subject.
And not only that, but there's been reports, and maybe you could talk about this briefly, there've been reports that there's actually a facility now in mainland China, a cooperation between the Russians and the Chinese to produce drones, long range drones, for the Russian military to use in their conflict, of course, with Ukraine.
China's always gonna do what's best for China.And right now what that means is we give Russia stuff it can't manufacture and they give us oil. And what are they going to do?Are we going to create more sanctions?
We need those $10 alarm clocks from China.So there are limitations in what we can do to dissuade China from assisting Russia.But essentially, Russia is a mafia-run gas station.They have oil.China needs to import oil.
and they're going to do what they need to do to make the situation best for themselves.
You know, we had, not that long ago, a good friend, Gordon Chang, a China expert analyst.He's a very, very good guy and a friend of the show.
And he was on, and he's just written a new book in which he, in part, argues that China is already on war footing with the West.It's just that we don't either understand it, we don't appreciate that fact, or we're just ignoring it.
We're just naive about it.Any thoughts on that?
We're in a state of war right now.Absolutely.If you look at Infodom War, TikTok is a weapon system.TikTok is a weapon that can be deployed by China against the United States, and it can have kinetic effects.
A couple of months back, it was actually last year,
of this pro-Palestinian organization told college students, go to the port of Long Beach, break into the port, and glue yourself to the MV Cape Orlando to prevent the MV Cape Orlando, which was a ship, from leaving because this ship has weapons on it that are bound for Israel.
Now, I guess some of these blue-haired idiots didn't actually look at a map and realize that, oh, you know, if you were going to sail to Israel, you'd probably do it out of the East Coast.
But they went and they glued themselves to the side of this Navy Reserve Fleet merchant ship that prevented that merchant ship from leaving.Now, if you look at a weapon system, why do you use a weapon?You use a weapon for its effect.
A weapon is an effector, right?If you want to take out a bridge, you figure out what kind of effect you want on that bridge and you use a weapon.So if you want to disable a ship, you can use a missile.
You might be able to use a saboteur or a limpet mine, or you use TikTok to tell blue-haired idiots to glue themselves to the side of a ship.And so now you have an electronic system creating kinetic effects.We are at war.
We've been at war ever since the first TikTok app was downloaded and China started entering our lives through our phones.
Dude, it's always true.I think my wife always says, look, every time I go out and talk to people or give a presentation or whatever, I'm always bumming people out.So it's good to hear.
I enjoy talking to you because I think we're on the same sheet of music.There's a lot of conflict.There's a lot of crises.There's a lot of flashpoints, a lot of hot spots out there around the world.Let's wrap it up with this.
Let me ask you a question. What keeps you up at night?
Of all the conflicts, of all the problems out there, of all the potential escalations, what's the one thing that you would put at the top of your list that you think has the potential for a world-shaking event?
Honestly, our southern border.One of the things that defines our country is a border.A border says, hey, this is where your laws stop and our laws start.
And we haven't really enforced immigration laws at our southern border, mainly because if we did that, it would look bad, right?
Now you have people in camps, and now the news is saying, look at these poor people that are locked behind cages just because they want freedom.And I totally understand immigration.I totally understand why people might want to come to America.
It's a fantastic place.This is the country that gave my family refuge when we fled Northern Ireland.I get it, 100%.But how about we know who's coming in? Because right now, we don't.
And what I can see is I can see agents of foreign governments infiltrating America.And when they are activated, they begin to cause chaos.And we need to know who's coming in.So the southern border is kind of what keeps me up at night.
Yeah, I'm on that same sheet of paper right there.
Look, next time, if you agree to come back next time, I think what we'll do is we'll bring the show to your office, and then we'll spend 20 minutes or so, and you can walk us around, and you can show us and tell us all about that stuff in the background, because I have a hard time.
I'm like a raccoon chasing the next shiny object.So in talking to you, what I love is I end up getting fixated on something behind you thinking, what is that?So we'll do the show from your office next time if you're okay with that.
That would be fantastic.Thank you so much for inviting me on, Mike.
Oh man, you betcha.Ryan McBeth, thank you for your insight and for joining us again here on the PDB Situation Report.Take care, man.
Well, all right, coming up next, we're going to examine a new House Judiciary Committee report revealing what some lawmakers are calling a, quote, quiet amnesty.
Now, this report highlights how nearly a million illegal migrants may now be staying in the U.S.indefinitely.Joining us to unpack the details for that is Art Arthur, resident fellow for law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
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Welcome back to the PDB Situation Report.Now, a new report from the House Judiciary Committee reveals what some are calling a, quote, quiet amnesty for nearly a million illegal migrants currently residing in the United States.
According to this report, many of these individuals are staying here indefinitely, often due to gaps or delays in immigration case processing.
Now, the report details that over 700,000 illegal immigrants have had their cases either dismissed, terminated, or administratively closed in immigration court during this administration, the Biden-Harris administration, effectively allowing them to remain in the U.S.
without facing consequences. The report also points to a second group impacted by similar delays.DHS has reportedly failed to file the required documentation for around 200,000 additional cases.
I know it's shocking that the government might not be as efficient as we thought, meaning most of those individuals also remain in the U.S.indefinitely with little or no legal follow-up.
So you ask yourself, what's behind these numbers and what might it mean for the future of U.S.immigration policy?Joining us to break down the details is Art Arthur.He's resident fellow for law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Art, thanks very much for joining us here on the Situation Report.Thank you so much for having me, Mike.No, of course.Listen, let's start sort of at the 30,000 foot level.
If you could explain in layman's terms, because I think sometimes most of America, me included, I put myself in the same category, we're kind of like raccoons now.We just start chasing the next shiny object.
So when we start talking about immigration, particularly when we start throwing numbers out, I get the sense that a lot of people just tune out.It's just one of those things that they have a hard time.
They hear about it all the time, but they have a hard time really absorbing the information and understanding what it means on various levels.If you could explain what this quiet amnesty is and why people should understand that it's important.
So most people who are in the United States who are removable can't be deported until after DHS gets an order of removal issued by an immigration judge.I know all about the process.I was a prosecutor and I was a judge for about eight years.
The first decision that the judge has to make is whether that person is in fact removable.
And generally in about 95 plus percent of cases, people just admit that they're removable because the only real question is whether they're eligible for what we call relief, something like asylum or a waiver or, you know, some other immigration benefit that would allow them to remain in the United States.
One of the things that the Biden-Harris administration has been doing from the beginning, literally the first minute of the administration, has been to restrict the ability of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take enforcement action, to investigate, arrest, detain, prosecute, and deport removable aliens in the United States to actually get those orders of removal that they need so that they can deport somebody.
The Biden-Harris administration issued a memorandum in April of 2022 that directed the ICE attorneys, the people who represent the interests of Americans in immigration court, to take a kinder, softer, gentler tone toward the millions of removable aliens who are in immigration court.
to not prosecute their cases, to dismiss them or terminate them, or to reopen them so that they could be terminated.People who are under final orders of removal would receive their day in court.
One of the things that we know from the Judiciary Committee report that they issued is that 700,000 plus cases have been either terminated or dismissed or closed. immigration court.
These are individuals who are removable from the United States, who likely should be removed from the United States, but who are being allowed to remain in the United States indefinitely, many of them without any status here, simply because the Biden-Harris administration deems it important in the interest of equity to grant those individuals discretion.
Now, I think I'm probably going to oversimplify this, but part of my understanding was that the reasoning behind this was, in part, to save resources.Saying, OK, look, we've got finite resources.We have to focus on the high-priority cases.
So let's take all the low-priority cases, and essentially, we're going to take them and put them in a back drawer somewhere and forget about them. So we can focus on the high priority cases.
I think one of my problems with that from a national security or law enforcement perspective is that we know from talking with CBP consistently, they don't have the ability to vet individuals.
So the idea that somehow they're making an efficient, effective, educated decision on who's high priority and who is not, it falls apart at the very beginning because there's no real vetting process that's taking place.
Am I wrong on that or somewhere near correct?
You're a hundred percent correct.Take a look at the major populations of people that we've had coming to the United States.Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians.
Three of those countries are socialist dictatorships that have no interest whatsoever in sharing any information about the criminal or terrorist intent of their nationals. The fourth one, Haiti, doesn't even have a government at all.
There's no way for us to find out anything at all, whether that individual was involved in a gang, whether they have criminal charges pending, whether they've committed murder or some other heinous crime in their home country.
So when you talk about these large populations of people that the Biden-Harris administration is funneling into the United States by the tens of thousands monthly, there's really nothing that we know about them.
And we only find out about them after the fact when they commit some horrible crime in the United States.And then we're always told, oh, well, this is an isolated incident.This is a one-off situation. That's really the critical thing.
The whole scarce resources, limited resources argument is a canard because the Biden-Harris administration, at the beginning, certainly for the first three years, wanted fewer immigration resources from Congress.They wanted less money for ICE.
They wanted fewer detention beds.They wanted to basically strangle immigration enforcement.They wanted to defund ICE without defunding ICE.
So what you're seeing in this report, 700,000 people, many of those people, they don't even have status in the United States.You're turning them out in the street, and they're still as removable as the day that they walked into court to begin with.
And this is going to make it much more difficult for any future administration to actually get what the vice president refers to as our broken immigration system back on track.
Before the next question, I will encourage people who are watching, you've written a very, very good informative piece and it can be found on the Center for Immigration Studies website, where you kind of lay all of this out related to this quiet amnesty.
You make a very interesting point, which is, hey, You've got a tremendous amount of experience, including serving as a judge.But you're saying, don't take my word for it.
This is all backed up with DHS and their own statistics and what they've already put out in the public forum.So I mean, I guess because a lot of times I think this is one of those subjects that
One side or the other just dismisses outright when they hear information that doesn't fit with where they want to be in their narrative.
And they're just willing to say, that's partisan politics, and of course that's a Republican speaking, or of course that's a Democrat speaking.
But as you note in this piece, again, on the Center for Immigration Studies, everybody should go and check this out. As you note in there, it's data that's available.People can find this.They can take the time to read it.
It's just, again, we're all busy putting food on the table and most people don't take the time.
Yeah.And transparency has been a big issue with this administration.Whenever they talk about their policies, they talk about how they're reasonable, how this is pure discretion.This is what every other administration has ever done.
But if you read through my piece and you read through the Judiciary Committee report, you'll see that this is nothing like any administration has ever done.
Generally, any given year, a handful of asylum cases are dismissed because there's some glitch in the system.And a lot of people don't show up for court.
But just looking at the asylum completions that were done by immigration judges this year, more than half of them were never adjudicated.There's no question that each one of those individuals is removable.
There's no question that none of them have status in the United States.And rather than adjudicating their decisions, giving asylums to the ones who deserve it, and ordering remove the ones who aren't,
you know, this administration has simply decided to turn them all loose, allow them to remain indefinitely in the United States, probably pending some, you know, ultimate amnesty that they've been pushing for, again, since the first day of this administration.
Yeah.I mean, aside from the 700,000, where you're talking about dismissed, terminated, whatever, you also make the point that
Another aspect of this is that now they're going back to cases that had already been, and I may not be using the right word, but adjudicated.The individual was already deemed, OK, you're deportable.Again, if that's the right phrase.
And yet, now they're reopening those cases with an eye towards saying, eh, you know what?Let's reopen cases where we've already said that individual should be deported.
And I thought that was a very interesting point because you said in doing that, I'm going to quote your words here because I think it's very important.And having said that, here we go.
In other words, tens of thousands of old cases involving aliens who received their day in court and were ordered deported are being reopened even though many, if not most of those respondents are removable and still don't have any relief.
That's not, you say, breaking the immigration system.It's smashing it into bits, pouring gasoline on the fragments, setting them on fire, and then tossing the ashes to the four winds.
Well, okay, well, you've really gone the whole, you know, path down there.But talk to me about that and why this is also important.
Yeah, no, you know, the basic idea of all of our justice system, whether it be criminal or immigration or civil, is that there be due process, that everybody get their day in court.
In the first three quarters of 2024, FY 2024, the Biden-Harris administration directives have required ICE attorneys to reopen more than 31,000 cases involving people who had had their day in court, people who have already had their cases adjudicated.
The only thing that's left is to physically remove them from the United States.And, you know, most of those people are still removable.
When you talk about a broken immigration system, you talk about, well, you know, this doesn't work or that doesn't work.This is the action of physically demolishing the immigration system.
And you know, I sometimes write in colorful terms, but I can't underscore enough how much harm this does to our system of justice and to our immigration system generally.I mean, this would be like
uh, you know, going back after a person is, uh, you know, been incarcerated for murder and saying, well, you know, you're not that bad a guy, come on, you can, you know, we'll, we'll just let you go.That's appropriate in isolated situations.
I believe that's going on with the Menendez brothers right now in California, but this isn't something that you do tens of thousands of times in nine months.This is, you know, and again, it's going to make it very difficult for,
a future administration to put this process back on track.And for what it's worth, it's going to make it very difficult if Congress decides to intervene and do something differently to even fix it.
And a lot of those people, an unknown number, are going to be criminals.They're going to go out and prey again on people.
They're going to get rearrested, and they're going to come back into immigration court, and we're going to go through this entire cycle again until somebody says enough.
What I'd like to do is talk a little bit about, and I know this is more of a soft science, if you will, but I want to get your impressions on the differences, the impact of each potential administration, the Trump administration, the Harris administration.
on the immigration issue and border security, et cetera.But first, Art, if you wouldn't mind, we're going to take a quick break.We have some terrific sponsors.We're about to hear from some of them.And then we'll be back with more from Art Arthur.
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Welcome back to the PDB Situation Report.Let me bring back our guest, Art Arthur.He's the resident fellow for law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.Now, I mentioned it earlier in our conversation.
For all you viewers, if you get a chance, just go to the Center for Immigration Studies website.There's a piece there written by Art talking about this very thing that we've been discussing, this quiet amnesty concept.I suggest you go there.
Take the time.It'll take you a few minutes, but you'll come away from it being much better informed. All right, let's talk about the upcoming election.I suspect you've heard we've got one coming up.And I know, right?Who knew?
Has there been anybody talking about this?The differences, from your perspective, for a Harris administration and a Trump administration, I don't mean sort of the... Because we don't talk a lot of politics here at the PDB. Thank God.
But what I mean by that is from your perspective on the impact of a Harris administration or a Trump administration on immigration policy, to what degree are we going to see significant changes?To what degree would we see pretty much the status quo?
Well, with respect to the Harris administration, you know, one of the things that they're lauding is that border patrol apprehensions, you know, have been down for the last, you know, three to four months.
And a lot of that has to do with actions they're not talking about.The administration has gone to the Mexican government and the Mexican government has sent 35,000 troops to block off the migrant routes to the southwest border.
It's, you know, catching people, third country nationals, sending them back down south to Tapachula and Villahermosa in southern Mexico and basically keeping them in camps down there to prevent them from moving north.
Now, that's an untenable situation.The Mexican government's not going to be able to continue to hold those folks back. But at the same time that it's doing that, the Biden-Harris administration is allowing people in through the ports of entry.
Again, people who have no right, no visas, no right to be in the United States at a rate of just over 1,700 per day.So when you talk about the apprehension statistics, you have to add that on.
And the press has been largely ignorant about what's going on.They call these lawful pathways, but they're not.They're simply slugging people into the United States.
flooding the labor market because all of these people are eligible for work authorization and, you know, cutting them loose, even though they have no plan to ever get rid of them.So I think that that's going to continue and it's going to continue.
And the pressure on cities like, you know, New York or, you know, Springfield, Ohio, Charlevoix, Pennsylvania, Aurora, Colorado, those pressures are going to continue.But people are going to be like, oh, we're still working our way out of the system.
We're still filling up the balloon. full of migrants who don't have jobs and don't have families in the United States and really know where to turn except for state and local governments.
If Trump gets elected, I think what you're going to see is all of those so-called lawful pathways get cut off on day one.
You're going to see a huge surge of people between the election and inauguration day coming over to the border because they want to get in. My colleague Todd Bensman was actually down in Southern Mexico talking to those people.
They were very anxious to get into this country before Trump takes office.Trump has also promised that he's going to have a mass deportation program, but I don't think it's going to be what most people envision.
It's not going to be agents with guns drawn and sirens blaring, wearing battle rattle around the streets and big white vans. I think that it's going to be a much more measured response.I think that first they're going to go after the terrorists.
We know that 99 terrorists have been apprehended at the border and accidentally released into the United States.I think that's going to be a huge priority for the Trump administration to pick up all of those people.
It's going to go after the criminals next.We know that there are hundreds of thousands of alien criminals who were in the United States, many of whom, again, are under final orders of removal.They can go.
So, and then they're going to move to the 1.3 million people who aren't criminals, but are still under final orders for removal.I mean, just think about that, Mike.1.3 million people are ready to go.They're just not going anywhere.
And so those will be the next individuals for a priority for removal. And then you're going to be faced with what do you do with the rest?
I think that the Trump administration is going to force them to register with the federal government, whether they have already been apprehended or not.And if they violate that registration program, it's a federal crime.
It's a misdemeanor subject up to six months in prison.So when you talk about all those sanctuary cities and towns across the United States that don't want to cooperate with us, fine, don't cooperate with us.You're going to have
cooperate with the U.S.Marshals Service because they're taking a federal criminal into custody.
And I think that once you start doing all of these things, some people are going to leave the United States voluntarily, but you're still going to have a very sympathetic population left.
And I think that Donald Trump offered an amnesty the last time for 1.8 million people here on lawfully.I think he's likely to do that again once he puts down a marker that shows that he's serious.
I don't think it's going to be a massive amnesty, but I think it is going to be a limited one toward those sympathetic individuals.
You made an interesting comment there.You talked about leaving voluntarily.
And that's an interesting concept, because if someone's adjudicated and they're found to be deportable or to be removed, one of the options, apparently, correct me if I'm wrong, is to voluntarily leave.
I guess this question is sort of a sidebar issue, but then how does the U.S.government confirm that they've actually done that?I mean, they walk out of court and say, okay, I'll voluntarily take off.How do we know that?
I mean, it just seems like this whole system, whether it's, we're talking about the lack of vetting, or the fact that they just haven't filed cases, or the fact that they're just shutting down cases, or the fact that they're saying, you voluntarily leave, fine, whenever you get a chance.
Yeah, and it's actually a great question because it seems like a rather ridiculous thing.You come in, you enter illegally, and then you promise you're going to go.
But there actually is a mechanism in place that enables us to confirm that they've left.If they leave, they're given a document that they then have to take to the U.S.consulate or to a U.S.
consulate outside the United States to confirm the fact that they've actually left.And if they ever want to come back into the United States legally and they haven't done that,
they're going to be barred for a period of years from ever coming back legally.So we've had voluntary departure in the law for seven decades.When the law is actually enforced, it really does work.
The problem is we just haven't seen a lot of enforcement in the last four years.
Do you think, and I know this is everything from speculation to just sort of, I don't know, I almost hate asking you this question, but do you think that the current administration, are there people within the Biden-Harris administration that actually believe in
open borders?Or is that sort of a talking point on the Republican side that says, well, they just believe in open borders because they're at a loss to explain why they don't have better border security policies in place?
You know, this is probably the most important question that I occasionally get asked, but not as often as I should.
We know why the Biden-Harris administration has adopted these policies, why they don't go after criminals in the United States, why they don't deport people who are here legally.In fact, they put it in a document back in September 2021.
One of the President Biden's first big pushes was for equity in the enforcement of all laws.
And that document equates immigration enforcement to outright discrimination, to, you know, Jim Crow, to the color bar, you know, to the worst laws that have ever existed in our society.
And their opinion is that they have to put their thumb on the scale in order to make that more equitable.So that really only the worst of the worst are forced to leave and that the rest are allowed to stay.
It's actually a rather remarkable document that they issued.It's, you know, one paragraph and an eight page document, you know, in which they actually admit why they're doing this.And again, you know, the immigration laws aren't discriminatory.
you know, the way that they're written, they could be discriminatory, I guess, in their application.
But right now, the immigration laws are largely a dead letter, except for, you know, the very, very worst individuals who Congress has said are supposed to be removed.
It's also important to notice the fact that under our Constitution, the Supreme Court has recognized this.Congress makes all of the rules as it relates to
immigration, makes all of the policies that govern whether people are allowed to come in, whether they're allowed to stay, and whether they have to be removed.
But the Biden-Harris administration has torn up that very concept and decided that they get to make the rules about who has to leave.
Yeah, there's an implication, I guess, that somehow the immigration laws, and again, you've made that point very well in the piece that you have, again, that we're directing people to go to on this quiet amnesty, but you've made the point very well that, okay,
We have laws on the books, right?And we just need to enforce those laws, right?Yes, we can look at them and say, are they effective, efficient, whatever?Can we have better protocols, whatever?But you have to affect those laws.
But when people talk about it, the immigration system is discriminatory. Again, I think it's like a speeding ticket, right?You either are going over 55 or you're not.You're either coming into the country illegally or you're not.
It doesn't matter where you're from, right?You have a surge of Anglo-Saxons suddenly rushing the border from Mexico.They're still coming in illegally. You have Haitians come in, they're still coming in illegally.It doesn't matter.
I just don't understand the logic train when people talk about how it's unfair in some fashion.I also don't understand because I've spent most of my life overseas.
Every country I've been to, no matter what their status is and where their standing is in the world, they've got border security.And they want to know who's coming into their country.And they take it seriously.
But again, I think we always want to be careful about ascribing politics or a certain narrative.I'm just always curious.And I know you get that question.I know I've heard that question asked a lot.Why are they doing this?
And then there's always the narrative that, well, maybe they're doing it just so they can get 12 million more voters. But who knows?It's just unusual because if you don't have border security, you don't have national security.
And again, I'll climb down off my soapbox, but if you're the president of the United States, your primary responsibility is the protection of your citizens.And you can't say that you're doing that if you don't know who's coming across your border.
And as you rightly pointed out, we've got a large list of terrorists known on the terrorist watch list that have come across.
We've got a variety of others who have come across, and it would be naive, moronic, dangerous to assume that some of those individuals, not all, most are looking for a better life, but you would imagine that some have nefarious intent.
Let me ask you this if I could, Art. How many people, because you hear different numbers all the time, 8 million, 10 million, 7 million, 12 million.If we just looked at the Biden-Harris administration, let's just take it in that chunk.
How many people are we talking about who have come into the country during that period of time?Do we have a solid number that people who study this problem all the time, like yourself, agree on?
So there's a huge lack of transparency from the current administration about how many people they've released.
In fact, if you think back a couple of weeks when Bret Baier was interviewing Kamala Harris, he actually asked her that question, prosecutor and all those things, but didn't actually answer the question.And I could give you
the best estimate that I have, which is probably pretty exact.It's about 5.7 million people showed up illegally, either at the border or the ports and were released into the United States.
In addition to those people, about 1.9 million others evaded apprehension, made it past the overwhelmed border patrol agents to make it into the country.When you add those two together, you come up with 7.5 million people.
And that's a figure that's being increased by, you know, roughly 70,000 more per month under the Biden-Harris's lawful pathways, uh, you know, that they, that they laud.So, yeah, I mean, you know, you're talking about a huge population.
We know that, uh, somewhere we can tell from the American Community Survey, which is a Census Bureau product, that anywhere between 13 million and 15 million, we can't get a whole lot more exact than that.
Individuals who are present in the United States are aliens who are here unlawfully.So, you know, you're, you're talking about a big number, but you're not talking about 30 million or 50 million or, you know, 25 million.
You're talking about a manageable figure.It's interesting because both sides, you know, sort of blow up that figure for their own purposes.
On the one hand, you know, people that want amnesty say this problem is so big, we just can't tackle it through the law.Let's legalize everybody and then we'll start over.
And we, you know, promise, pinky swear that we're going to have enforcement the next time.On the other side, it's, we're going to make this, you know, big enough so that it sounds bad.5.7 million is a bad problem.
7.5 million, 7.6 million is a big problem.So, you know, when you're talking about this many people, it's a problem.It's a problem that could be managed.We just need to get back to enforcing the law.
Yeah.Well, I'm not holding my breath on that one.But yeah, Art, listen, thank you very much for taking the time with us.Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies.Again, go to their website, check out this article.
I really encourage you to do that.It's worth your time to better understand these problems that we've been talking about.Thanks again, Art, for giving us your time.
And I hope when we call you the next time that you'll pick up the phone and you'll come back again.
I'll always be here.I love this program and all the best to all of your viewers.It's a great format and great program.
That's great.Thank you very much, man.Appreciate you.All right.Well, that's all the time we have for the PDB Situation Report.Don't look so sad.Come on.
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