If we would shut down our borders the way anti-American agitators recently shut down a Portland, Oregon, ICE facility, we’d be in business. Now, however, after a week of disruption, the entrance to the building has finally been cleared and the lawbreakers arrested. As KGW8 reports:
Nine people were arrested Thursday morning after federal officers in riot gear moved in to clear the entrance to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding facility in Southwest Portland.
The ICE facility has been closed since Wednesday, June 20 after the protest group, calling themselves Occupy ICE PDX, set up camp with the goal of shutting down the immigration enforcement agency.
“At approximately 5:30 a.m. today, federal law enforcement officers initiated a law enforcement action to reopen the federal facility at 4310 SW Macadam Avenue in Portland,” Federal Protective Service spokesman Robert Sperling said in a prepared statement.
… Mayor Ted Wheeler, who also serves as police commissioner, has declined to provide assistance from the Portland Police Bureau to Department of Homeland Security during the siege. [Video on story below.]
While this appeared to be an organic protest, note that such leftist actions are often “astroturf”; this refers to movements made to appear like genuine grassroots efforts, but which actually are orchestrated and funded by powerful entities and figures behind the scenes (e.g., hard-left billionaire George Soros). More on that later.
American Thinker provides more detail:
The direct action to shut down operations of the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement and investigative agency began with a small group of demonstrators on June 17. Within two days, scores of radicals, including families with children, had set up a sprawling tent city on the sidewalks and streets surrounding the building, effectively shutting it down. By week’s end, hundreds of “comrades” had been lured by social media to join the campaign, as it served to inspire similar provocative illegal actions around the country. According to Willamette Week, “The Portland occupation, the first nationwide, is an attempt to disrupt President Donald Trump’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy that has treated refugees seeking asylum as criminals and separated small children from their parents.”
National mainstream television and cable news coverage of these developments in Portland has continued to be largely nonexistent. The fact that the movement has gone nationwide has also been ignored. Several Internet political publications, including American Thinker on June 25, have reported on the story, as have a few major newspapers. In contrast, the radical ragtag “Occupy Movement” demonstrations in the fall of 2011 grabbed major media coverage including on TV from the outset of the first one, Occupy Wall Street. It’s plausible that the widespread coverage of obnoxious and potentially criminal actions that have been taken [sic] place [the leftist violence in general], and their potential impact to harm Democrat candidates in the fall, have discouraged the MSM from reporting on the equally obnoxious radical encampments in Portland and other cities.
Below is a video offering a glimpse into the Occupy ICE camps.
Other than an “idle mind being the Devil’s playground,” what could occur to one upon viewing the above is that migrant children can be happy they’re not living like those protesting on their behalf. In fact, the longer-term child detention centers are actually a bit like boarding schools. As I wrote June 20, “Even left-wing CNN reported last week, after touring such a facility, that the kids were enjoying recreation such as watching soccer on TV and engaging in tai chi, pool, and foosball, and that their rooms were ‘antiseptically clean’ (a quality not common in their native countries).”
Note, too, that 10,000 of the 12,000 minors in federal custody arrived in the United States unattended (which speaks volumes about their guardians). As for the rest, parents charged with illegal entry can’t stay with their children any more than Americans charged with embezzlement can take their kids to prison with them. This is why both G.W. Bush and Barack Obama also separated parents and children at times.
In other words, barring the separation necessary for prosecution, the only option is “catch and release.” This is precisely what the Left wants.
Then there’s this notion of “zero tolerance.” Let’s draw an analogy: Obviously, you’d expect police to try to prevent all carjackings. But what if this intention were labeled “zero tolerance” and allowing some carjackings were considered compassionate moderation?
Tolerating something perpetuates it. Illegals keep streaming across our border because they’ve gotten the message that if they sneak into the United States, chances are decent they’ll be able stay and may receive amnesty down the road. The only way to prevent this is to cease rewarding the behavior by ensuring that illegal entry never pays off. Yet the media are portraying this practice, necessary to secure our borders, as some kind of uncompassionate intolerance.
So the message is clear: Anarchy must reign. We may not repel what is an invasion — we cannot be a successful nation.
Again, however, this disruption is no accident. Putting into action House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s 2014 advice to college graduates, be “disruptors,” leftist powers-that-be regularly stoke dissent’s fires and incite violence. Perhaps the best proof of this to date was a 2016 Project Veritas sting operation in which Democrat operatives were caught on video (below) talking about how they orchestrate astroturf and foment unrest. It’s an eye-opener. (Warning: foul language. Unfortunately, there’s no way for The New American to censor it from the video.)
One of the leftist operatives in the above actually states, “We’re starting anarchy here.” And now, as it continues and intensifies, the question is who will finish it.
