Laken Riley and the Failure of America’s Border-Control System
UPCOMING EVENT: Next week, Wednesday, February 5, at noon. FFF is hosting a get-together in downtown Boston after the oral arguments in Ian Freeman’s appeal, where we will discuss the oral arguments. I will be there. Trillium Brewing Fort Point, 50 Thomson Pl, Boston, MA 02210; (857) 449-0083; https://trilliumbrewing.com. Reminder: The Court of Appeals is located in the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse, One Courthouse Way in Boston. The oral arguments are scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on the 7th floor of the courthouse. Trillium Brewing is about one block away. See here for more details.
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The just-enacted Laken Riley Act goes a long way toward demonstrating the failure of America’s decades-old border-control system and the manifest refusal of border-control advocates to accept personal responsibility for the failure of their own system.
The law was enacted in response to the 2024 murder of 22-year-old Laken Riley at the hands of an illegal immigrant named Jose Ibarra. Amidst publicity and fanfare, President Trump just signed the bill into law as one of his first steps to crack down on illegal immigration, in an effort to finally — finally! — make America’s decades-old immigration-control system work. The new law enables officials to take illegal immigrants who have been accused of committing crimes into custody before they have been convicted of a crime. Never mind that under the law, federal officials are already supposed to — and do — take illegal immigrants into custody, whether they are accused of committing a crime or not.
Proponents of the law, including President Trump, say that the reason that Ibarra illegally entered the United States is because there were “open borders” under President Biden’s administration. If Biden had not had a policy of “open borders,” they say, Ibarra would not have been able to enter the United States and Riley would be alive today.
There is one big thing wrong, however, with that justification: It’s false. In fact, it’s just a way for proponents of immigration controls to avoid accepting personal responsibility for the failure of their own immigration-control system, something they have been doing since the inception of immigration controls many decades ago.
The difference between open borders and the failure of America’s immigration-control system to work is the difference between day and night.
Open borders — genuine open borders — is the abolition of all restrictions on the freedom of people to cross borders. That necessarily means no Border Patrol, no ICE, and no border stations or border guards. Simply free movements of goods, services, and people across borders.
To get a good understanding of the concept of open borders, think about the dom
Article from The Future of Freedom Foundation
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