President Barack Obama’s White House Press Secretary Jay Carney joined House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Speaker John Boehner in making an inaccurate attack on Rep. Steve King (R-IA) over comments he made about efforts to grant amnesty to illegal aliens who entered America illegally while they were still minors.
In an interview with NewsMax published last week, King had pointed out that some minor illegal aliens are good people, but many are criminals too.
“Some of them are valedictorians — and their parents brought them in,” King said in that Newsmax interview. “It wasn’t their fault. It’s true in some cases, but they aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents.”
The political establishment has seized King’s comments as an opportunity to try to paint him as unfair to immigrants.
King told Breitbart News on Wednesday afternoon in response to the attacks from the establishment that he thinks this is a sign conservatives fighting against amnesty for illegal aliens are winning politically. “You know when people attack you–in this business, when you’re in this business, you know that when people attack you, and they call you names, they’re diverting from the topic matter,” King said in a phone interview. “You know they’ve lost the debate when they do that. We’ve talked about it for years. Tom Tancredo and I joked about it that that’s the pattern. When people start calling you names, that’s what confirms you’ve won the debate.”
Cantor, who is pushing amnesty for illegal aliens who fit the DREAMer description, rushed to attack King.
“I strongly disagree with his characterization of the children of immigrants and find the comments inexcusable,” Cantor said.
Boehner seconded Cantor’s attack.
“There can be honest disagreements about policy without using hateful language,” Boehner said in a statement. “Everyone needs to remember that.”
According to the Associated Press, Carney joined in on the attacks on Wednesday, calling King’s comments “unfortunate.”
The major problem with the arguments made by those in the political establishment pushing amnesty, and their specific attacks on King, is that the facts back King up.
Just last week, the Christian Science Monitor ran a feature story by Lourdes Medrano headlined: “Along key stretch of US-Mexico border, more kids running drugs.”
“On a balmy Monday afternoon, authorities at a highway checkpoint a few miles north of the US-Mexico border pull over a commercial shuttle for inspection,” Medrano wrote in the lead of the story. “A teenage girl sitting inside appears rattled and, as it turns out, with good reason. Several bundles of heroin are weighing down her bag.”
That teenage girl and three of her friends ended up in the custody of Border Patrol, as they all “had heroin packets tucked in their waistbands.”
“This incident from April was the latest in a string of recent cases in Arizona where juveniles have been arrested trying to smuggle drugs into the United States,” Medrano wrote. “While luring teens to act as drug mules for a few hundred bucks is not a new practice, the Tucson sector of the US-Mexico border – the nation’s busiest – has seen an alarming jump in the past two years.”
Medrano is right. In fact, if Boehner, Cantor and Carney, among the others who have attacked King, did a quick Google search, they could find a flurry of news reports over recent months and years about how those young illegal aliens under the age of 18 are being used as drug mules.
San Diego’s 10News.com ran a story in March 2012 under the headline: “ICE: Number of Young Drug Mule Arrests Rising.”
“The number of children being arrested trying to smuggle illegal drugs across the border continues to rise, according to new numbers released by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement,” 10News.com wrote. In fact, that local San Diego news outlet shows that President Barack Obama’s own Department of Homeland Security’s agencies are confirming what King wrote.
Fox News Latino reported similar information from Obama’s administration’s own agencies back in January 2012. “Children between the ages of 11 and 17 are being recruited by Mexico’s drug cartels to smuggle narcotics and work as spies, the Mexican press reported Sunday, citing information from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE,” Fox News Latino wrote.
Obviously, if those children were not caught by law enforcement–drug mules often do not get caught–they would qualify for amnesty under the DREAM Act being pushed by Cantor and being implemented by Obama via executive order.
The Associated Press, in March 2012, reported those same Obama administration ICE statistics and included anecdotal stories of young Mexicans under the age of 18 who are addicted to drugs and now selling them on behalf of the cartels.
Drug dealing is not the only criminal activity some DREAM Act-qualified illegal aliens engage in inside America’s borders once they are here. Jamiel Shaw, Jr., a young 17-year-old black male destined for Stanford University, was murdered by an illegal alien who would have qualified for amnesty under the DREAM Act. Shaw’s father testified, in the House Judiciary Committee, just last month, about how the DREAM Act-qualified illegal alien killed his son in 2008 and that illegal alien now awaits execution on death row.
Given the fact the Speaker, Majority Leader and White House Press Secretary all got their facts wrong in these attacks on King, King told Breitbart News “it looks like” it all part an effort by those in the political establishment to push amnesty.
“I’ve never seen such lack of restraint on the part of the team of people that have been elected to lead us,” King said in his interview with Breitbart, referencing Boehner’s and Cantor’s remarks. “The only thing that is logical is that they are seeing their dream of a component of amnesty slip away.”
King added that the leadership in Washington in both parties has “now been confronted with the reality and instead of accepting it, and addressing it, what they have done is just wiped out.”
“When I read their quotes, I have to believe they didn’t read mine,” King said. “They completely missed the mark. I don’t yet know of anyone who has raised a logical argument against my statement.”
King added at the end of the interview with Breitbart News that “any of my critics out there should review the video, watch the video, and they should review the entire quote. And they will understand that what I said is objective, it’s true and it cannot be logically challenged. If we can’t deal with reality when we’re writing legislation that sets the destiny of the United States forever, then this nation will eventually fail.”
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