“In the 35 years Gilda and Juan Francisco Loureiro have been running a shelter in northern Mexico for undocumented immigrants, they’ve never seen a week like this one. … Since they opened it, upward of 1 million people have slept there on their way to the U.S. But on the day I visited, it was almost empty.” —Betsy Woodruff, Daily Beast, Apr. 14

“Four young men were brutally beaten and killed with a sharp object in a Long Island Park — and cops are looking into whether the violent MS-13 gang is behind the slayings. … ‘There’s no question MS-13 still exists in Suffolk County,’ [Suffolk Police Commissioner Timothy] Sini said Thursday at a press conference. ‘This is a long-term war and make no mistake about it — it’s a war.’” —New York Post, Apr. 13

There is a long-term war going on in America, but it’s not the one described by Commissioner Sini. It’s a war between bankrupt, open-border-supporting “progressives” and law-abiding Americans who don’t want their towns and cities turned into sanctuaries at best, or de facto Third World hellholes afflicted by illegal alien, gang-banging violence at worst.

Woodruff epitomizes the utter contempt leftists have for Americans disgusted by an Obama administration that facilitated a three-year onslaught of hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children (UACs) into America. Children initially placed with of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), then dispersed throughout the entire nation, even to “guardians” who were also here illegally. She bemoans the fact that border-busting facilitators like the Loureiros have seen a downturn in their “caseload,” because “the symbolism of Trump in the Oval Office and the threat of extended detention has already deterred many migrants.”

Not migrants. Illegal aliens.

The extended detention to which Woodruff refers comes courtesy of U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Last week Sessions made it clear the Obama administration’s efforts to undermine national sovereignty are no longer operative. “Where an alien has entered the country — which is a misdemeanor — that alien will now be charged with a felony if they unlawfully enter, or attempt to enter a second time, and certain aggravating circumstances are present,” Sessions said, who added “the lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch and release practices of old are over.”

In a separate article for the Beast, Woodruff declares Sessions officially “weaponized the Justice Department to crack down on undocumented immigration.” She considers it appalling that he expects federal prosecutors to target people suspected of the “transportation or harboring of aliens” as well as illegals who engage in document fraud and identity theft.

Woodruff has her equally twisted allies. “Every dollar spent on prosecuting an illegal immigrant for illegal reentry is a dollar that could have been spent on prosecuting or investigating a real crime,” states Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert for the libertarian Cato Institute. “It’s a shame the government is prioritizing the enforcement of, essentially, labor market regulations over violent and property crimes.”

Try telling that to Kate Steinle’s family. The 32-year-old was murdered by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a seven-time convicted felon who had been deported five times. Or perhaps Nowrasteh could speak to the parents of the two-year-old child who was the victim on an alleged sexual attack by Tommy Alvarado-Ventura — a man who had been deported four times.

He is also a member of MS-13. “For more than six years, Long Island has experienced a new and disturbing criminal gang trend that many are attributing to throngs of unaccompanied children from Central America being placed in communities such as Brentwood,” reported the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) last November.

Since 2010, at least 30 killings have been attributed to MS-13 on Long Island alone.

Suffolk Country in Long Island is not an outlier. Along with three other counties — Harris County, Texas; Los Angeles County, California; and Miami-Dade County, Florida — they have absorbed approximately 30,000 UACs into their communities. All four are combatting increased levels of MS-13 violence.

It is violence marked by a high level of savagery. “They all suffered from significant trauma throughout their body. It appears they were killed with a sharp or edged instrument,” Sini said of the latest Long Island victims. “We will confirm the manner in which they were killed is consistent with the modus operandi of MS-13.”

CIS reveals that Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials arrested 4,000 members of MS-13 between 2005 and 2014. Ninety-two percent of them were illegal aliens.

Even more infuriating? “By policy, ORR does not give communities the opportunity to be proactive in preventing gang violence, keeping them in the dark as to the numbers of UACs in their community and where they are staying,” CIS reports.

“Mynor and a handful of other migrants sat in a small chapel in the shelter waiting for dinner to be ready. A large picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe hung on the wall, and a nearly life-size crucifix draped with plastic rosary beads stood beside it,” Woodruff writes. “On a table in front, there was a pile of Know Your Rights pamphlets from the Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, a Mexican group, and the ACLU. ‘Tus derechos humanos viajan contigo,’ one pamphlet read. ‘Porque ningún ser humano es ilegal…’ In English: Your human rights travel with you, because no human being is illegal.”

Like the attempt to obscure the true nature of illegal immigration by referring to its perpetrators as undocumented immigrants, Woodruff and her equally duplicitous fellow-travelers attempt to use the term “human rights” as the basis for inferring borders and the Rule of Law are irrelevant. Hence we must accept people fleeing “dysfunctional” cultures where crime and mayhem are commonplace, “because Trump hasn’t changed the structural realities that drive migration: He hasn’t made southern Mexico any less poor and violent, and he hasn’t made the cartels any weaker,” Woodruff writes, quoting Joanna Williams, U.S. director of education and advocacy for the Kino Border Initiative, a Roman Catholic humanitarian aid group.

In other words, it is either incumbent upon the United States to solve the problems of the entire world, or accept anyone and everyone interested in fleeing from them.

As maddening as the utter impracticality of such a scheme is, it pales in comparison to American leftists’ determination to import that very same cultural dysfunction into America — under the multiculturalist rubric of “celebrating our differences,” no less.

Such differences were recently “celebrated” in Livonia, Michigan, where Dr. Murtaza Hussain was charged with performing female genital mutilation (FGM) surgery on two girls between the ages of six and eight. “The Department of Justice is committed to stopping female genital mutilation in this country,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Blanco, “and will use the full power of the law to ensure that no girls suffer such physical and emotional abuse.”

To a morally bankrupt American leftist, one man’s physical and emotional abuse is another man’s cultural expression, and enforcing law and order is “weaponizing” the DOJ.

That’s the real war going on in America. Nothing more, nothing less.