. . .And their leftist collaborators.

President Trump announced last week that he would “leave no stone unturned,” and tap vast federal databases to get an accurate count of citizens and non-citizens in the country. The president slammed “far-left Democrats” who seek to “conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst.” That happens because the far-left Democrats have a problem with the concept of American citizenship.

The early Americans did not want to be subjects of a distant British king and fought hard for an upgrade to the concept of citizen. So citizenship is something to be valued and the American republic has good reason to know the number of citizens, and the number of those illegally present in the country, such as Mexican national Gustavo Araujo Lerma.

He applied for a U.S. passport under the assumed identity of Hiram Enrique Velez, a deceased U.S. citizen. In the style of the assassin in The Day of the Jackal, the Mexican stole the identity of a dead person, a trick still possible decades after the book and film. Araujo Lerma, 62, used this fake ID for more than 25 years, which should indicate that U.S. officials are either a total failure or looking the other way.

That was good for Lerma who used his fraudulently obtained passport to obtain legal permanent resident status for Maria Eva Velez, 64. The couple had previously married in Mexico but did so again in Los Angeles in 1992 under the fake identity. This allowed Velez illegally to gain status as the purported wife of a U.S. citizen. As this proves, document fraud and identity theft are cumulative. Illegals increase exponentially, and there’s more to this couple’s caper.

Officials with the Diplomatic Security Service of the U.S. State Department found that Araujo Lerma “committed illegal alien voting” by using the identity of Hiram Velez in at least five federal, state, and local elections. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants could be forgiven for wondering how many other false-documented foreign nationals have cast ballots in American elections.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the popular vote by a count of 2.8 million and her popular-vote victory was due almost entirely to California, where she received more than 4.3 million votes than Trump. The president, who carried the day in the Electoral College, estimated that 3-5 million illegals had caused him to lose the popular vote. Trump duly launched a commission on voter fraud but California secretary of state Alex Padilla refused to participate.

Trump should get the State Department working three shifts to check all passport applications for the past 30 years to see how many belong to dead people. With computers, this is a simple matter. No need to search through boxes of papers, as in the Jackal movie. Then cross-check the voter rolls to see how many of the falsely documented voted in federal, state, and local elections, in the manner of Gustavo Araujo Lerma.

Since illegal alien voting is a criminal matter, the voter rolls should be subpoenaed. If voter information is not handed over, federal officials should seize it and charge the obstructionist officials accordingly. In line with the president’s campaign, federal officials should deploy super computers in a massive assault on document fraud, on every front where it occurs: Social Security, unemployment, welfare, housing, medical care. Gaining such benefits, funded by U.S. taxpayers, is what enabled Mexicans abroad, most in the United States, to send back more than $33 billion to Mexico in 2018.

The far-left Democrats are okay with that and take a know-nothing approach to the number of those illegally present in the United States. That happens because the left lives in the subjunctive mood, detached from the empirical realm. The Left is also decidedly Luddite, witnessed by the opposition to DNA testing after California used it to capture the Golden State Killer last year.

DNA testing can determine if minors brought to the border are actually the children of those who bring them to the border. The left resists such revelations and is currently mounting a jihad against facial recognition technology, even though, like DNA, it can help clear the innocent as well as find the guilty.

Meanwhile, last week pro-illegal forces tore down a U.S. flag outside a Colorado detention center and replaced it with a Mexican flag. They also tore down a “Blue Lives Matter” flag, honoring law spray-painted it with “Abolish ICE,” then raised the flag upside-down next to the Mexican flag. This should make it exactly clear, as the Buffalo Springfield put it, what is happening here.

The ongoing invasion of the United States through the southern border aims to replace legitimate U.S. citizens with false-documented “residents.” They serve as an imported electoral college for Democrats and a source of funds for the corrupt regimes of Central America. So legitimate citizens and legal immigrants should expect an escalation of violence from the open-border axis.

In those conditions President Trump has good cause to step up deportations beyond the modest level of his predecessor. An accurate count of those illegally present will show how much work remains.