Even liberals should find these numbers chilling

While Democrats and the mainstream media make an effort to paint the massive influx of illegal aliens on the country’s southern border as peaceful “asylum seekers” who should be welcomed, new figures turned up by the Department of Homeland Security show hundreds already have criminal records from acts committed in the United States.

A Daily Caller News Foundation report Thursday showed their crimes include aggravated assault, sexual offenses and murder.

According to the report, the numbers were contained in a letter from members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to the Department of Homeland Security.

The DCNF reported that the letter described an investigation by Customs and Border Protection agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — both agencies within the DHS — into migrants who participated in two “caravans” that reached the California border – one in October 2018, the other in January of this year.

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Of the approximately 8,000 migrants in the 2018 caravan, 660 already had criminal records from the U.S., the DCNF reported.

“Of those, nearly 40 were convicted of assault or aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Three of them were convicted for murder,” the DCNF wrote.

For the January caravan – made up of about 3,300 migrants – it was even worse.

The DCNF reported that 860 had criminal histories in the United States, “including 30 convicted of sexual offenses, 20 convicted of assault and aggravated assault and one convicted of attempted murder.” That means 26 percent of the caravanners — about one out of every four members — had documented criminal histories.

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It’s important to stress that these are criminal histories within the U.S. That means at least a quarter of the people in the January caravan had already spent time inside American borders and were either deported or left of their own accord.

But either way, they left a criminal record behind.

Ever since he rode the escalator down to the lobby of Trump Tower in New York to announce his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, Donald Trump has been attacked by Democrats and the media for harping on the criminal element the nation’s porous borders are allowing into the country.

A casual consumer of news, judging by the mainstream media coverage, might think Trump’s insistence that the illegal influx poses a criminal problem is a figment of the president’s imagination.

(An Associated Press “fact check” from a Trump speech in 2018 is a particularly stomach-turning example, lauding the “overwhelmingly peaceful” nature of one caravan from Central America, even after describing how it had clashed with police at the Mexican border, “hurling stones and other objects as they tried to cross the international bridge.”)

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But the numbers in the DCNF report tell a different story: Trump is right.

There’s no doubt that the vast majority of illegal aliens causing chaos on the southern border are generally not criminals – in the same way that the vast majority of any human population anywhere is generally not prone to violence.

But the reality is that a large number of those entering the U.S. illegally – with the tacit or expressed blessing of the Democratic Party and its presidential contenders – present a clear and present danger to law-biding Americans living in the country.

And keeping a clear and present danger from harming Americans is the most important part of any president’s job. Trump’s predecessors couldn’t solve the problem. His immediate predecessor only made it worse.

Now, there’s a humanitarian crisis on the southern border that’s compounded by the undeniable presence of violent criminals trying to enter or re-enter the country in violation of the law.

Even liberals should find that chilling.

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