PrairiePundit

 Breitbart: A new caravan has formed in Central America and is traveling north with the goal of reaching the U.S.-Mexico Border. The caravan formed earlier this week as several hundred migrants left San Pedro Sula in Honduras,  Telesur TV  reported. The group is preparing to cross into Guatemala despite claims by that country’s government that irregular migration will not be allowed. The Guatemalan government issued an order this week allowing the use of force to contain the caravan, the TV station reported. ... The new caravan comes as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is overwhelmed by the number of migrants arriving each day. The surge appears to be largely fueled by the arrival of President Joe Biden and commonly held hopes that asylum determinations will be more favorable. Last month, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador  publicly blamed Biden for the migration spike which is also impacting Mexican efforts to contain the situation . Lopez Obrador de...

Power Line: Let’s start by identifying what’s not driving it. The surge in immigration from Central America to the United States is not caused by violence in the countries the migrants are leaving. As Matt Sussis points out in the video below, since 2011 the murder rate has declined significantly in Guatemala and Honduras. It has declined significantly in El Salvador since 2015. Some on the left claim that climate change is responsible for the waves of immigration. Supposedly, it has led to lower crop production, thereby threatening the livelihoods of agricultural workers in Central America. File this claim under “climate change, is there nothing it can’t do?” Sussis observes that, since 2000 crop yields have risen significantly in all three of the countries mentioned above. Thus, as with violence, climate change does not explain the recent surge in migration. What does? The obvious motive for coming to the U.S. from Central America is the superior economic conditions in our ...

Monica Showalter: The Department of Homeland Security took a lot of flak for identifying 500 migrants traveling with the Central American caravan as known criminals. And President Trump was blasted in the press for saying the caravan had a lot of "rough people." But what's undercover intelligence compared to the media narrative that the caravan is just moms and kids, fleeing gangs? Actually, the migrants are the gang. Buried deep in this RT News story, with an official link, is news that the Tijuana cops have arrested 108 migrants on criminal charges. Not old charges, but charges for crimes committed upon arriving . The city authorities have released new data on Friday which states that 108 Central American migrants have been arrested so far, including 104 for administrative offenses, such as possession of drugs, public intoxication and disturbance. The remaining four are to be prosecuted for robbery, fights and insulting authorities. Sound like the kind of pe...

Washington Examiner: Nearly 3,000 migrants who had been a part of caravans moving from Central America to the United States' southern border have abandoned the group to either stay in Mexico or return to their home countries in Central America, according to Mexican government officials. Mexico's Interior and Foreign Ministries reported, as of Thursday, 2,934 people originally traveling to the U.S. have stopped and applied for asylum in Mexico. Of those, 927 have canceled their asylum claim with the Mexican government and returned to Guatemala and Honduras, where the caravans originated, according to a government news release. ... There are still roughly 4,000 continuing toward the US where they are not expected to be warmly greeted by the Trump administration.   They have over a 1,000 miles to go before reaching the Texas border and their requests for buses have not met with success.

NY Times: How the Migrant Caravan Became a Trump Election Strategy Activists in Honduras hoped the caravan would damage a president they opposed and help migrants. Instead it precipitated a crisis that hurt them and played into President Trump’s hands. I am curious why they were caught off guard by Trump's reaction.  Illegal immigration has been a winning issue for Trump since he came down the escalator in Trump Tower.  Democrats are on the defensive about it and have tried to avoid comment about the migrants horde approaching the US border.  Democrats see a tactical advantage in using illegals to boost the number of Democrat seats in teh House, but they know voters, in general, oppose their scheme.

Telegraph: Thousands of migrants making their way towards the United States remain stuck on a river crossing between Guatemala and Mexico without food or water. The migrants, part of a caravan of around 4,000 people, have vowed to remain there until Mexican authorities grant them entry into the country despite conditions on the bridge worsening with a growing pile up of rubbish and no bathrooms. Tensions flared on the Suchiate river crossing late on Friday when the migrants attempted to force their way across the border and Mexican riot police threw tear gas at the crowd. Meanwhile, many Hondurans, mostly men, swam across the river and remain on the river bank on Saturday, on the Mexican side of the border, waiting for the rest of the caravan to cross. Around 200 people who did manage cross, mainly women and children, were taken to an immigration center, where their details were recorded. They were later transported to a convention center located in the city of Tapachula, ...

LA Times: The gruesome murders were each more than 1,000 miles apart, an arc of bloodshed that spanned much of the North American continent. On a rutty street near a crowded slum in Honduras, gunmen sprayed automatic weapons fire at a bus filled with Christmastime shoppers. Twenty-eight people, including six children, were killed. In the woods near Dallas, an innocent 21-year-old man was shot in the head, his remains eaten by animals. His pants were pulled down, and police suspect that he may have been sodomized. And near the banks of a quiet river in Virginia, a 17-year-old informant was hacked to death. She was four months pregnant and stabbed 16 times in the chest and neck. The killings were similar not only in their brutality but also in their lineage: Authorities say all three incidents are tied to a single Los Angeles branch of Mara Salvatrucha, a street gang formed 20 years ago in the immigrant neighborhoods west of the downtown skyline. Today, the gang's extreme...

Daily Caller: Dozens of the U.S. citizens arrested in recent years on terror-related charges are immigrants admitted to the United States legally who later obtained citizenship. More than 70 U.S. residents have been publicly arrested and charged with conspiring to help, attempting to help, or actually helping terror networks such as Islamic State in recent years. At least 15 of them received U.S. citizenship after being admitted to the country legally, including one of the Boston bombers. (RELATED: U.S. Refugee Chief Didn’t Know Boston Bombers Were Refugees) Here are five examples. ... There is obviously more. You would have be delusional to trust the current screening process especially for Syrians with all of the fake documents being produced by ISIL that are confounding Germany already in trying to assess asylum cases. Here is another reason for the Border Patrol to be wary: Honduras detains 5 Syrians headed to U.S. with stolen Greek passports Whether or not they are ...

Washington Times: A House Republican task force Wednesday unveiled a $1.5 billion plan to ease the border crisis, including deploying the National Guard to help achieve “operational control” of the border and launching law enforcement operations in Central America and Mexico to stop illegal immigrants before they reach the U.S. Under the plan, the U.S. steps to accelerate immigration hearings for the unaccompanied alien children flooding across the Southern border, providing additional judges to hear requests for asylum. Tougher penalties on human traffickers, or coyotes, who smuggle the children to the United Sates would be imposed to discourage more mass illegal migration. Rep. Kay Granger , the Texas Republican who led the task force, called the proposed measures “common-sense, compassionate, but tough solutions.” “Our focus has been to ensure the safety of the children and it has remained a top priority throughout this process,” she said. “In our personal meetings with the Presi...

BBC: The Mexican army says it has rescued 165 migrants kidnapped by a criminal gang at least two weeks ago. The migrants were trying to cross to the US illegally but were taken hostage in northern Tamaulipas state by a gang who demanded cash from relatives. Most of the victims were from Central American countries. The migrants were probably betrayed by human trafficking gangs who were paid to get them into the US, a Mexican government spokesperson said. Instead of taking the group across the border, they handed them over to another criminal organisation that operates in northern Mexico. The kidnappers had been phoning relatives of the victims and demanding further money transfers, said government spokesman Eduardo Sanchez. The operation took place on Tuesday, in the municipality of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, but has only now been reported. The army was alerted to the presence of heavily armed men at a property in the area, said Mr Sanchez. When it stormed the property, it found 165 people, ...

NY Times: The United States military has brought lessons from the past decade of conflict to the drug war being fought in the wilderness of Miskito Indian country, constructing this remote base camp with little public notice but with the support of the Honduran government. It is one of three new forward bases here — one in the  rain forest , one on the savanna and one along the coast — each in a crucial location to interdict smugglers moving cocaine toward the United States from South America. Honduras is the latest focal point in America’s drug war. As Mexico puts the squeeze on narcotics barons using its territory as a transit hub, more than 90 percent of the cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela bound for the United States passes through Central America. More than a third of those narcotics make their way through Honduras, a country with vast ungoverned areas — and one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world. This new offensive, emerging just as the United S...

Guardian: Honduras  has voted to deploy the army to fight encroaching Mexican drug cartels in an effort to curb violence in the country. By an overwhelming majority, congress decided to follow a model used by the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón who launched an army-backed campaign against powerful drug gangs soon after taking office in late-2006. Since then, more than 45,000 people have died in drug violence in Mexico. But on a per capita basis, the small nation of Honduras far outpaced every other country in the world in homicides, with 82 murders per 100,000 people last year, according to the UN. About 20 people are killed in Honduras every day. Officials blame most of the murders on cartels smuggling South American cocaine through Central America to consumers in the US. Honduras also struggles with violent youth street gangs that extort local businesses with death threats. ...  My speculation is that like Mexico the police are not up to the task of dealing...

NY Times: Late on a moonless night last March, a plane smuggling nearly half a ton of cocaine touched down at a remote airstrip in  Honduras . A heavily armed ground crew was waiting for it — as were Honduran security forces. After a 20-minute firefight, a Honduran officer was wounded and two  drug traffickers  lay dead. Several news outlets  briefly   reported  the episode, mentioning that a Honduran official said the United States  Drug Enforcement Administration  had provided support. But none of the reports included a striking detail: that support consisted of an elite detachment of military-trained D.E.A. special agents who joined in the shootout, according to a person familiar with the episode. The D.E.A. now has five commando-style squads it has been quietly deploying for the past several years to Western Hemisphere nations — including  Haiti , Honduras, the Dominican Republic,  Guatemala  and Belize — that are battlin...

Alberto de le Cruz: On the last day of December last year, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, the deposed Honduran president and self-described victim of high-frequency radiation attacks by Israeli mercenaries, vowed to the press that he would return to Honduras . Few outside of Honduras have paid much attention to Zelaya’s MacArthur-esque prediction, but it has become apparent there is more behind his declaration than his usual hyperbole and bombastic absurdities. Behind the scenes in the Obama administration there appears to be a concerted effort to pressure the democratically elected government of President Porfirio Lobo to dismiss charges of misappropriation of government funds and falsifying documents that are pending against Zelaya. This would open the door for his return to the country, and would be certain to undermine the delicate process of reestablishing democracy and order that is currently taking place in this poor and beleaguered nation. When Zelaya was removed from office in ...

Jackson Diehl: I recently asked several senior administration officials, separately, to name a foreign leader with whom Barack Obama has forged a strong personal relationship during his first year in office. A lot of hemming and hawing ensued. One official mentioned French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is scheduled to bring his glamorous wife to the White House residence this month for a couples dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama. But in France, Sarkozy's bitterness toward Obama , the product of several perceived snubs, is an open secret, reported widely in the French press. In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in September Sarkozy appeared to mock Obama's signature disarmament initiative, saying "we are living in a real world, not a virtual world." Angela Merkel's name also came up: Obama and the German chancellor, I was told, share a down-to-business pragmatism. But Merkel, too, has been conspicuously cool toward Obama ever since he made Berlin a s...

NY Times: A plan for the ousted Honduran president, Manuel Zelaya , to leave the country for Mexico ran aground late Wednesday when negotiations over his safe passage fell apart, the leader and the Mexican authorities said. As the news about Mr. Zelaya’s possible departure spread, along with considerable confusion, his supporters gathered outside the police barricades erected in the streets surrounding the Brazilian Embassy, where he has been a virtual prisoner since September. In an interview with the Mexican TV network Televisa, Mr. Zelaya said that the de facto government had placed a “denigrating” condition on his departure from Honduras , offering him safe passage out of the embassy only if he would seek political asylum. He added that he has not asked for political asylum. ... It appears to me he needs to ask for political asylum or face prosecution for his crimes against the Honduran constitution. Given that choice, asylum sounds like a good deal. His own actions are responsib...

NY Times: The Honduran Congress voted Wednesday night against restoring the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya , to office to serve out the last two months of his term, throwing into further disarray an American-backed plan to end the country’s political crisis. Congress voted 111-14 to ratify its decision on June 28 to vote Mr. Zelaya out of office after he had been arrested by the military and flown out of the country. ... The vote was stipulated in an accord the United States helped broker a month ago that was signed by Mr. Zelaya and the de facto president, Roberto Micheletti . The agreement had appeared to be a road map for a compromise between the feuding politicians. Once its conditions were met, American officials said, the accord would lead the international community to restore relations and economic aid to Honduras . Congress’s vote came three days after a general election — set long before the political upheaval began — that was won by a veteran conservative politician, Porf...

NY Times: Porfirio Lobo, a longtime conservative politician, appeared to have won on Sunday in the Honduran presidential election, which many hoped could help the country emerge from the crisis caused by last summer’s coup and end its isolation. The electoral tribunal said Sunday night that Mr. Lobo had 52 percent of the vote, with almost two-thirds of the votes counted. That gave him a margin of more than 16 percentage points over his main opponent, Elvin Santos. Shortly before midnight, Mr. Santos conceded, Reuters reported. ... This election is a strong rejection of Zelaya and his leftist policies. The large turnout also rebuffed Zelaya's call for a boycott. The election was also a rejection of the interference in Honduran affairs by Chavez and others. The Times continues to wrongly describe Zelaya's removal as a coup. The facts are that his removal was because of his violations of the Honduras constitution. His replacement was also pursuant to the constitution.

NY Times: Porfirio Lobo, a longtime conservative politician, appeared headed toward victory on Sunday in the Honduran presidential election, which many hoped could help the country emerge from the crisis caused by last summer’s coup and end its isolation. Television news reports projected that Mr. Lobo, who owns one of the country’s largest farms, carried 55 percent of the vote in a commanding lead over his opponent, Elvin Santos, who had about 39 percent. ... This looks like a strong rejection of Zelaya and his leftist buddies in the region. Other reports show a large turnout. Since Zelaya called for a boycott every vote cast can be sonsidered a vote against him. The Times is still sticking to the description of Zelaya's legal removal as a coup. Such a description ignores the Honduran constitution and the facts. Mary O'Grady says this is a huge victory for tiny Honduras.

BBC: Polls are closing in the presidential election in Honduras after voting was extended for an hour to allow large numbers of people to cast ballots. The poll comes five months after a political crisis ousted President Manuel Zelaya. He was forced from Honduras at gunpoint in June, and replaced by Roberto Micheletti. Neither are candidates. The favourite to win is conservative Porfirio Lobo, with liberal Elvin Santos considered his nearest rival. Mr Zelaya had called for a boycott of the election, saying high abstention levels would discredit the government of the interim president. ... If they had to extend the voting period for an hour to take care of a large turnout, that suggest voters paid no attention to Zelaya. Some of the leftist government in the area will poo poo the results, but they are trying to overlook the reality of a free and open democratic vote.