What if Attorney General Sessions had prosecuted the Menendez Brothers?

Dov Fischer
American Spectator

It never ends, does it? The hypocrisy, the outright lies, and the way that every single news item is spun one way during the Obama and Clinton presidencies and the opposite way during the Trump presidency.

Obama had promised, from the majesty of two cardboard or papier-mâché Greek or Roman columns borrowed from a Harvey Weinstein-like prop studio, that his election would see the oceans stop rising and the planet heal. Without having accomplished much more than voting “present” at some Illinois state legislature events, forging powerful alliances with Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayres, and convicted felon Anthony Rezko, Obama ended up getting a Nobel Peace Prize. And the Seedier Media could not be more thrilled up the leg. By contrast, President Trump forges an unprecedented and improbable first step towards breaking a half-century logjam with North Korea, and the left media responds with derision and pronouncements of failure.

But those media did not pronounce failure when Obama gave away the family store, the family farm, and half the bank with Iran. Secret cash flights of billions in greenbacks as ransom, secret promises of access to American financial institutions — all wonderful. Peace in our time. To be sure, the American people not only were dubious of it all but were so skeptical that Obama did not dare press their Congressional representatives, not even Democrats, to ratify his Iran Deal as a treaty. It was a farce from the outset, even worse when the subsequent disclosures emerged of how much we gave away for how little we received. But the Seedier Media loved it. A real peacemaker.

And compare the reaction to President Trump opening new vistas to the Sunni Arab world.

The Seedier Media are aflutter: But Trump is meeting with a tyrant, a dictator. How can we countenance that?

Yes. And did it bother the same mainstream media when Obama cozied up to Hugo Chavez and danced the salsa with the Castro party?

The CNN obsession with Stormy Daniels who, at best, is a pornography professional and public liar who has changed her stories several times to describe, at its very worst, a seedy consensual affair… contrasted with the same Seedier Media total blackout for years on everything from Bill Clinton’s lip-biting rape of Juanita Broaddrick (no, the rape was not consensual), the forced open-zipper obscenity imposed on Paula Corbin Jones, the forced grabbing and sexual advance on Kathleen Willey when this very decent and then-vulnerable woman, then-just-recently recently widowed after her husband’s traumatically sudden death, approached the President for assistance. Two different worlds of ethics, of morals, of values. To this day, if it were not for the cynical self-aggrandizing political machinations of people like Presidential-aspirant New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, combined with the Democrat Party’s wholesale abandonment of Clinton stock and souvenirs, Bill still would be free to wander over women. But, as he himself ruefully now concedes: norms have changed “for what you can do to somebody against their will.” (Sigh!)

It just never ends, the double standard. In the world of “Black Lives Matter,” where a thug who stole brazenly from convenience stores and tried to wrestle a gun from a cop in his police car got shot to death, the media went wild: but he was peaceful and said “Hands up don’t shoot!” Right. Ferguson, Missouri burned down over that lie, a mendacity that a grand jury shot through with more holes than the criminal whose demise launched the sordid affair. The liberals never have been at the forefront of defending the decency of the law-enforcement officers who risk their lives, night and day, to protect them. And yet, suddenly, Democrats have found their true love: the FBI. Suddenly, from Schumer to Pelosi to Schiff to the whole bunch of them, nothing in America is more sacred to Democrats than the FBI. We must respect our law enforcement agency, they lecture us. Yes, you may — you should — kneel at the playing of the national anthem if you like. You may use the “F” word to speak of the President of the United States, and you will reap thunderous applause from the clapping seals in the echo… echo… chamber… chamber of Broadway. Use the “C” word to describe the elegant and dignified daughter of the President. Kathy Griffin, once an employed unfunny “comic” who lost her job after losing her head, now is so desperate for a laugh, a “hi” sign from anyone anywhere — even the ephemeral Zen Koan of the sound of even only one hand clapping — that she now tweets her own “F” word to describe the President’s wife, figuring that if it worked to get headlines for De Niro, it might work for her. But of course it will not because, as every funny comedian knows: (i) a joke is never as funny a week after everyone has heard it repeated fifty times; and (ii) jokes are best when they are original or, at least, sound like they might be. So Kathy is back to banging her head.

All of which brings us to the Menendez Brothers. Huh?

Remember them — Lyle and Erik? They were gifted by life with wealth, fabulous looks, stardom, connections, success — and then they got tired of collecting one gold coin at a time from the golden geese that laid those golden eggs, so they just went ahead and murdered their parents. Well, they got caught. (It happens sometimes.) They were tried and convicted and sentenced to life in prison without a possibility of parole. And that does seem the least the justice system could justly do for patricide in a state like California, where the death penalty is reserved primarily for elderly people who get pressured by their caretakers to sign a form permitting premature administering of morphine and assisted suicide.

But here’s the thing: If the Menendez Boys had been prosecuted by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the leftist media would have reacted differently. CNN instead would be airing hour-long television specials, augmented by a coordinated New York Times front-page series, titled: “Why is the Trump Justice Department Seeking Life Sentences Against Orphans?” There would be film of homeless orphans in Croatia. Starving orphans depicted as prisoners in a Homeland Security lock-up, but only later revealed to be film outtakes from the 1968 release of Lionel Bart’s and Carol Reed’s Academy Award winning musical, Oliver! And yet the campaign would be unleashed to free the two fellows who murdered their mom and dad in bed: “Free the Orphans!”

Religious leaders would be rounded up by the activists: Sign now, or we will boycott your church. Sign now, or we will disrupt your lives. Indeed, in the Jewish community — my home base — it gets insane enough that the Leftists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome even go on social media to threaten rabbis engaged in certifying foods as kosher: “Either you condemn Attorney General Sessions now, or we will refuse to eat foods that you certify as kosher!”

So what are they gonna eat, cheeseburgers at McDonalds? Pork loins? Squid Caesar salad?

Let us therefore set forth certain points clearly, then:

1. This country has borders. It must enforce its borders. Lax border control exposes this country to three overriding perils that should concern coherent liberals every bit as much as it does conservatives, and it further should concern Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi:

(i) Porous borders are the source of unmitigated illegal smuggling of toxic opioids into this country, leading to a national death epidemic;

(ii) Porous borders are the source for massive human trafficking, particularly in women and children for prostitution, not women willingly opting to ply that trade but victimized and unsuspecting women and children who are kidnapped by “coyotes” who make them false promises that they will be successfully secreted into America but who instead get hustled off the radar of their frantic families and loved ones, moved endlessly from town to town in this country, their humanity destroyed; and

(iii) Porous borders expose our country to the surreptitious entry of terrorists masquerading as persecuted immigrants fleeing oppression.

2. We already separate children from their parents when we incarcerate their fathers (or mothers) for crimes. The prisons are jammed with broken families whose parents have taken calculated risks resulting in being separated predictably from their children. A married dad who holds up a bank. A married dad who rapes and, unlike President Clinton, is caught and punished for his crime. A married dad who cheats on his taxes and is punished in prison. It happens all the time, too often. But what is the alternative?

3. People take calculated risks, and they knowingly separate themselves from their children. Men who wish to serve this great nation in the most noble way join our armed forces, and they sometimes fight in Afghanistan and Iraq or are stationed in Germany, Japan, and on the Korea divide. We could tell them, as we did with the family of Private Ryan when our country had a limit on how many sons we dared allow a family potentially to lose in one war, that our country has adopted a policy that we will not allow fathers and their children to be separated. But that is not our policy, and we do not look upon that sacrifice as evil when a man voluntarily enlists, leaving behind children to wait and hope for his safe and speedy return.

4. Jewish parents in 1930s and 1940s Europe took terrible risks for their children and sent them off to hide, separated from their families, all alone, with Righteous Gentile neighbors, or they sent them on boats and ships to flee Germany for their lives while the parents stayed behind. This is the result of a world with terrible cruelty, where people have to make decisions as to what is best for themselves and their children. It is a terrible part of our reality. Likewise, the families knowingly trying to break our immigration laws now, at a time when we also allow millions to enter legally, are gambling and making calculated risks that their kids will be better off if they grab them and try to sneak through illegally. It is a calculated risk. We are reminded even of the Clinton Administration and Attorney General Janet Reno’s brutalization of Elian Gonzalez, the boy from Cuba who almost got to stay in America, but whom the Clinton Government tore away from his family in Florida to “reunite” with his father in Cuba after Elian’s mother died, drowning on her ill-fated journey seeking escape to America from Castro’s Hell.

5. The Left are the ones who always said during the Bush years — and the non-neoconservatives among us always have agreed — that America is not the world’s policeman. It does not fall on the United States to solve the world’s every problem. Yes, there is a heightened social obligation to allow entry of refugees facing certain death at the hands of persecutors committed to murdering people based on their membership in certain demographic groups. United States immigration law grants asylum to such people. 8 C.F.R. § 208.13. But the recent liberal-newsmedia tear-jerkers are different. This country has no obligation to and must not admit every person who claims that a spouse or parent is beating them up in Guatemala or even that they need to come in because they got on the wrong side of the drug cartels in Mexico or Ecuador. We cannot do this. No country can. There is too much evil in the world — look at the United Nations General Assembly vote the other day in which three-quarters of the world voted to condemn Israel in her struggle to ward off Hamas terrorists, while all the gutless cowards of Europe abstained (except for France, who voted with the terrorists). If we take everyone in, then we get swallowed up. When a country moves towards immigration anarchy, it ends up with the most horrific of terror attacks as in France and with 14-year-old girls getting raped and murdered in Germany — something that this country blessedly has managed to avoid so far, for the most part.

It is moral and ethical to preserve the nuclear family. The Democrats under Lyndon Johnson created a welfare system half a century ago, and which they mostly revived under Obama, that utterly destroyed the American nuclear family in many parts of our great society, condemning generations of young men to grow up without fathers. We know that result: crime, incarceration, lost generations, poverty, single-parent homes headed by wonderful women with a lifetime to contemplate their own lost dreams. We conservatives are pro-life. We oppose partial-birth abortion. We oppose inducing suicide among the elderly. We insist on school choice so that all children can have the same educational opportunities that the children of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Barack and Michelle Obama had when their presidential parents leveraged their wealth and influence to keep their kids out of the public schools. We want kids to be with their parents. We run and support homes that seek to place orphans with parents who will love and care for them. Who would ever — if honest — stoop to suggest that conservatives, of all people, are soft on the powerful role of the bonded preserved nuclear family?

We must not be deceived by cynically false mercy and crocodile tears into becoming a society that is overrun by murderous opioids, by “coyotes” perpetrating unbridled human trafficking in unsuspecting kidnapped women and children, and by terrorists entering undetected. If the law ever becomes so diverted that no one can be imprisoned if they enter our southern border illegally with a child in tow, then each and every aspiring illegal immigrant henceforth will rent or buy a child en route to the border if they have none of their own. And such misplaced “mercy” will prove to have been as cynical as it would be to demand that the Menendez Brothers be released on the humanitarian grounds that, having murdered their parents, they are orphans.

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I am thinking this is just another big loser issue for the Liberal-Left. Anyone with just an ounce of common sense can see that "refugees" from Honduras are no longer being threatened in Mexico, and Mexico let them in, so they should just stay in Mexico. It is pure lunacy to assume that everyone on the planet who cries for amnesty has some sort of "right" to come to the USA.

In fact, the sheer lunacy of the Left on this issue may be increasing support for Trump.

Ah yes...the hypocrisy of the left.

Those same commies screaming about the morality of separating children from their parents are the same people who unabashedly support late term abortion for gender selection.

"Think of the children!"

Indeed.

Manufactured crisis.

10,000 of the 12,000 minors in residence at federal day care facilities showed up with out adult escorts, parents or otherwise. If the adults traveling with those minors had crossed the border legally to claim refugee status they would not have been separated from the children. It is not at all clear those minors were even related to the adults they were traveling with. At least some were part of human trafficking enterprise's for sex trade or labor. Any parent (?) that wants to be reunited with their children can withdraw there application for asylum , and be immeadiately reunited with there children and sent back to where they came from.

A couple videos from CNN. Hillary's position on deporting children in 2014 was that she totally supported the concept:

So crossing the border as these folks do is a federal crime. So what happens to a kid who is with someone who commits a federal crime? Anyone? Yeah, the kid doesn’t accompany the person committing that crime to adult jail. No, it’s not a get out of jail free card t have a minor with you when you’re caught. Drugs? You go to jail. The kids go to child protective services. Rob a bank? Same thing. Is this child abuse? Not in my book. If you’re the parent and you break the law while towing your child along, who’s the bad guy? Law enforcement? If you’re sending your child on a 2-3K mile trip north from somewhere in Central America with you cousin/aunt/next-door neighbor/local ms-13 representative and they get caught! Who’s the bad guy? It isn’t Donald J Trump.

Some economic migrants are using children as chits, but the problem is fixable — if Congress acts.

National Review
Rich Lowry


The latest furor over Trump immigration policy involves the separation of children from parents at the border.

As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.

For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.

The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.

It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)

When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.

The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.

If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.

Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.

That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.

The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.

This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the ajudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).

Even if Flores didn’t exist, the government would be very constrained in how many family units it can accommodate. ICE has only about 3,000 family spaces in shelters. It is also limited in its overall space at the border, which is overwhelmed by the ongoing influx. This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.

Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.

A few points about all this:

1) Family units can go home quickly. The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).

2) There’s a better way to claim asylum. Every indication is that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary. It nearly dried up at the beginning of the Trump administration when migrants believed that they had no chance of getting into the United States. Now, it is going in earnest again because the message got out that, despite the rhetoric, the policy at the border hasn’t changed. This strongly suggests that the flow overwhelmingly consists of economic migrants who would prefer to live in the United States, rather than victims of persecution in their home country who have no option but to get out.

Even if a migrant does have a credible fear of persecution, there is a legitimate way to pursue that claim, and it does not involve entering the United States illegally. First, such people should make their asylum claim in the first country where they feel safe, i.e., Mexico or some other country they are traversing to get here. Second, if for some reason they are threatened everywhere but the United States, they should show up at a port of entry and make their claim there rather than crossing the border illegally.

3) There is a significant moral cost to not enforcing the border. There is obviously a moral cost to separating a parent from a child and almost everyone would prefer not to do it. But, under current policy and with the current resources, the only practical alternative is letting family units who show up at the border live in the country for the duration. Not only does this make a mockery of our laws, it creates an incentive for people to keep bringing children with them.

Needless to say, children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases. They are considered chits.

In April, the New York Times reported:

Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.

Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.

According to azcentral.com, it is “common to have parents entrust their children to a smuggler as a favor or for profit.”

If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.

4) Congress can fix this. Congress can change the rules so the Flores consent decree will no longer apply, and it can appropriate more money for family shelters at the border. This is an obvious thing to do that would eliminate the tension between enforcing our laws and keeping family units together. The Trump administration is throwing as many resources as it can at the border to expedite the process, and it desperately wants the Flores consent decree reversed. Despite some mixed messages, if the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.

The missing piece here is Congress, but little outrage will be directed at it, and probably nothing will be done. And so our perverse system will remain in place and the crisis at the border will rumble on.

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