Kudos to Humberto Fontova over at TownHall.com for reminding us of another time when liberals weren’t so kind to refugees seeking asylum while fleeing genuine repression and poverty. Then even the New York Times and parallel universe occupant Thomas Friedman supported secure borders to the point even a bitter clinger might blush:
”America is a country where the rule of law rules. This picture (a U.S. Marshall pointing a genuine assault rifle at a terrified 6 year old Hispanic immigrant, whose mother had just drowned or been eaten alive by sharks) illustrates what happens to those who defy the rule of law and how far our government and people will go to preserve it. Come all ye who understand that.” (The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman.)
TAKE THAT! — you uppity Cuban-American ingrates! But The New York Times’ Tom Friedman (who had an obscenity-laced meltdown on CNN last week sputtering against President Trump’s “racism” and “xenophobia”…blah…blah) had barely started venting his spleen against those insufferable Cuban-Americans….
“One only hopes that this affair will remind the extremists among the Miami Cubans that they are not living in their own private country, that they cannot do whatever they please and that they may hate Fidel Castro more than they love the U.S. Constitution — but that doesn’t apply to the rest of us.”
When the President is Clinton, not Trump, when the refugees are Republican-leaning Cubans and not undocumented Democrats, those who shout “xenophobia” and “racism” today were quite silent then. Imagine if today an ICE or Border Patrol agent shoved an AR-15 under the chin of a 6 year old from Honduras. They do not do anything of the sort yet are falsely slandered as guards in modern-day concentration camps who make women drink out of toilets – the only such camps in human history that people climb walls and cross rivers to get into.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes wad 10 years old when on Thanksgiving Day 1999 a five-year-old Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, was found clinging to an inner tube three miles off the coast of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Fishermen rescued him and took him to a hospital for treatment. But his mother and 11 others on the raft had drowned in their attempt to come to the U.S. from Cuba. The rest as they say is history and Democrat hypocrisy
Time was when liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton shared Donald Trump’s dream of family reunification for illegal alien families on the other side of the border. Hillary should know about deportations, since she was First Lady when presidential hubby William Jefferson Clinton returned a young Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba, literally at gunpoint.
As recently as June, 2014, when unaccompanied minor children were being ferried by “coyotes” under contract north on the tops of boxcars in what GOP presidential contender Jeb Bush said was an “act of love”, Hillary Clinton told CNN such children should be quickly returned to their foreign parents, to send a message:
“They should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who the responsible adults in their family are because there are concerns about whether all of them can be sent back, but I think all of them that can be should be reunited with their families,” she said, adding that the United States must do more to confront the violence in the region and strengthen border security. “But we have to send a clear message that ‘Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean your child gets to stay. We don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”
Elian’s mother was hoping to bring Elian and join the extended family in the U.S. as they fled the poverty and oppression (sound familiar?) of Cuba. Elian’s father, who was separated from his wife at the time, chose to stay behind. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized:
As Fox News Latino reported, Gonzalez’s Miami relatives had refused to surrender him to authorities, leading to the infamous raid on April 22, 2000, on President Bill Clinton’s watch, by armed federal agents who seized Elian at gunpoint from a closet where he was hiding at his uncle’s home in Little Havana.
He was forcibly returned to Cuba two months later….
It was then-Deputy Attorney General Holder who invented the “legal” cover for federal agents to forcibly enter the home of Elian Gonzalez’s legal custodians, American citizens all, so he could be returned to the warm embrace of Castro in communist Cuba.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that once the INS chose a guardian, the guardianship could not be changed. On Dec, 1, 1999, the INS asserted that Miami-based uncle Lazaro Gonzalez was now Elian’s legal custodian. Holder then decided on his own that the court ruling and the INS determination were both invalid and that Elian would be returned to his father in Cuba…
Today, if Elian Gonzalez were Honduran and his reunited family likely to vote Democratic down the road, he might get to stay with Holder’s blessings under the same rule of lawlessness that once forcibly returned a young Cuban boy to Castro’s tyranny.
Family separation anyone? Trump is doing what the law, court rulings, and available resources allow to protect our borders and our citizens. He is brutalizing no one and no child. The Democrats forget when they were shouting, to media applause, “Send them back!
