Dent, who represents a large Syrian community in the Allentown area, said he was contacted Saturday by a constituent who had family members turned away early in the morning at Philadelphia International Airport. Six family members who had secured visas and even bought a house in Pennsylvania arrived on a Qatar Airways flight but were returned back within hours, he said.
Dent called on the Trump administration to halt immediately action on the order.“This family was sent home despite having all their paperwork in order,” Dent continued, “so this 90-day ban could imperil the lives of this family and potentially others, and it’s unacceptable ,and I urge the administration to halt enforcement of this order until a more thoughtful and deliberate policy can be reinstated.”.. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) credited Trump with properly focusing on protecting the country’s borders and said it is necessary to connect “jihadi terrorism” with Islam and particular countries. However, he also noted that the order is “too broad.”
If we send a signal to the Middle East that the U.S. sees all Muslims as jihadis, the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that America is banning Muslims and that this is America versus one religion,” Sasse said. “Our generational fight against jihadism requires wisdom.”
.. Ryan told reporters following a closed-door morning meeting at the Republican National Committee in December of 2015. “This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for. And more importantly, it’s not what this country stands for.”
.. Several news outlets reported instances of travelers being detained in airports, including Hameed Khalid Darweesh, a 53 year old Iraqi man who spent several years acting as an interpreter for the U.S. Army in Iraw. Darweesh was released from detention in New York’s John F. Kennedy airport after two New York Democrats, Reps. Jerry Nadler and Nydia Valazquez, intervened on his behalf.
.. Aides also said it is not uncommon for an administration to prioritize refugee requests on the basis of religious persecution. However, since the beginning of the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State, many more Muslims than Christians have been killed or displaced because of the violence.
.. a 2015 Washington Post poll found that 78 percent of Americans favored equal consideration for refugees regardless of religion.
.. Evan McMullin, a former CIA officer and House GOP policy director who waged an independent presidential bid in 2016, was one of a small number of Republicans to publicly oppose the ban.
.. There is anti-Muslim bigotry at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and it fundamentally un-American and tangibly damaging to our national security and strength.”
.. Most Republicans, McMullin predicted, would decline to criticize the executive orders. “Those who are silent on this will be defined by that silence,” he said.
Who did those moronic thugs trashing downtown Washington on Inauguration Day hurt the most? Immigrants.
A limo driver was injured while the stretch limousine he drove was torched and destroyed by protesters near the intersection of 12th and K Streets NW in Washington, DC.
Muhammad Ashraf, the owner of the company, Nationwide Chauffeured Services, is now speaking out against the protesters for what they did.
.. It’s ironic to think that protesters are angry with President Trump for his proposed plan to harm and demonize immigrants and Muslims, yet they personally have a hand in destroying the livelihood of a Muslim immigrant.
Montrealer heading to Donald Trump inauguration turned away at border
‘I think it’s a shame,” says Sasha Dyck, who was carpooling to the U.S. when ordered to turn back
Dyck said that he and his fellow travellers told the border agents they were going to Washington, D.C., to take part in Saturday’s women’s rights march, an event where hundreds of thousands are expected to attend.
.. Dyck says they were then held for several hours, fingerprinted and had their cellphones examined.
.. Dyck said the agents did not say why they were denied entry, but told them that if they tried to cross the border again this weekend, they would be arrested.
.. “I think it’s a shame. I think the U.S. has historically been a very open country — open to other ideas or open to other people. Perhaps we’re seeing the start of them closing in on themselves.”
Dyck said he remembers a completely different mood when he went to Washington for Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
“At that point, the border guard said, ‘Come on in!’ It was open arms. They were so happy to celebrate with the world. It’s going to be a very different feeling this time.”
It’s Still a Mad, Mad California
The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is.
Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.
.. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.
.. Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.
.. Frustrated Californians of the interior of the state without money and who cannot afford to move to the coastal communities of Santa Monica or Santa Barbara (the entire middle class of the non-coast) are leaving for low-tax refuges out of state — in “if I cannot afford the coast, then on to Idaho” fashion.
.. Meanwhile, the coastal creed is that Facebook, Apple, Hollywood, and Stanford will virtually feed us, 3-D print our gas, or discover apps to provide wood and stone for our homes.
.. since 2014, violent crime has skyrocketed by 38 percent. This May, California’s association of police chiefs complained that since the passage of Proposition 47 — which reclassified supposedly “nonserious” crimes as misdemeanors and kept hundreds of thousands of convicted criminals out of jail — crime rates in population centers of more than 100,000 have increased more than 15 percent.
.. California governor Jerry Brown has let out more parolees — including over 2,000 serving life sentences — than any recent governor.
.. Most of us in rural California go into town to mail our letters, because our rural boxes have been vandalized by gangs so frequently that it is suicidal to mail anything from home. (Many of us now have armored, bullet-proof locked boxes for incoming mail).
.. I saw a commercial van stopped on the side of the road on the family property, with the logo of a furniture- and carpet-cleaner company emblazoned on the side. The driver was methodically pumping out the day’s effluvia into the orchard.
.. Down the road, I saw the morning’s new trash littered on the roadway — open bags of diapers and junk mail. Apparently California’s new postmodern law barring incorrect plastic grocery bags (and indeed barring free paper grocery bags) has not yet cleaned up our premodern roadsides.
.. The truck was found four days later, still operable but with the ignition console torn apart and the interior ruined, amid the stench of trash, marijuana butts, beer bottles, waste, and paper plates still full of stale rice.
.. Her relatively new hybrid bicycle was immediately stolen
.. Be careful in paying for anything with a credit card, because the number is often stolen and sold off.
.. The office is designated as a DMV center for licensing illegal aliens. The entire office, in the linguistic and operational sense, is recalibrated to assist those who are here illegally and to make it difficult if not impossible for citizens to use it as we did in the past.
.. What makes the law-abiding leave California is not just the sanctimoniousness, the high taxes, or the criminality. It is always the insult added to injury. We suffer not only from the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, but also from nearly the worst schools and infrastructure. We have the costliest entitlements and the most entitled. We have the largest number of billionaires and the largest number of impoverished, both in real numbers and as a percentage of the state population.
.. California is the most contentious, overregulated, and postmodern state in the Union, and also the most feral and 19th-century.
.. In one, shacks dot the lot. There are dozens of port-a-potties, wrecked cars, and unlicensed and unvaccinated dogs — all untouched by the huge tentacles of the state’s regulatory octopus. Nearby, another owner is being regulated to death, as he tries to rebuild a small burned house
.. The staggering costs for its illegality are made up by the shrinking few who nod as they always have and follow the law in all its now-scary manifestations.
.. From her nest in Rancho Mirage, a desert oasis created by costly water transfers, outgoing senator Barbara Boxer rails about water transfers.
.. When Jerry Brown leaves his governorship, he will not live in Bakersfield but probably in hip Grass Valley. High crime, the flight of small businesses, and water shortages cannot bound the fences of Nancy Pelosi’s Palladian villa or the security barriers and walls of Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley billionaires — who press for more regulation, and for more compassion for the oppressed, but always from a distance and always from the medieval assumption that their money and privilege exempt them from the consequences of their idealism. There is no such thing as an open border for a neighbor of Mr. Zuckerberg or of Ms. Pelosi.
A final window into the California pathology: Most of the most strident Californians who decry Trump’s various proposed walls insist on them for their own residences.