Who is paying for all these illegal aliens?
By Julius Sanks www.americanthinker.com
Entering the USA improperly is a crime. The first illegal entry is a misdemeanor; any subsequent entry is a felony. Every illegal alien becomes a criminal simply by entering the country.
The ideological left is crowing that the administration scored a "victory" in United States v. Texas. On June 23, the Supreme Court stated that the administration can set priorities when deciding which illegal aliens to prosecute. But the Court also issued an opinion in United States v. Hansen. That is a more interesting opinion — not that this administration has any intention of abiding by it.
Side note: Before anyone objects to the term "alien," that is the word Congress uses in the Immigration and Nationality Act — officially Title 8, Aliens and Nationality, of the U.S. Code. The word "alien" appears in Title 8 more than a thousand times; the phrase "illegal alien" 32 times. When Congress changes its terminology, I will consider changing mine.
Anyway, Hansen addresses a case in which a fellow named Helaman Hansen fraudulently claimed he could give hundreds of aliens a path to citizenship through "adult adoption." There is no such process. He was running a scam as early as 2014 and was convicted of fraud. He was also convicted of violating 8 USC §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv), which prohibits "encourag[ing] or induc[ing] an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such [activity] is or will be in violation of law." SCOTUS added the brackets in its opinion. Hansen argued that the Title 8 prohibition was overbroad and moved to dismiss the Title 8 conviction. The District Court rejected that argument. The Ninth Circuit unsurprisingly agreed with Hansen. This was the second time the Ninth supported this argument; the Supreme Court had ruled against the Ninth in a similar case, United States v. Sineneng-Smith (2020).
Voting 7-2, with Justice Barrett writing for the majority and Justices Jackson and Sotomayor dissenting, the Supreme Court overruled the 9th Circuit, saying, "Because §1324(a)(1)(A)(iv) forbids only the purposeful solicitation and facilitation of specific acts known to violate federal law, the clause is not unconstitutionally overbroad." The Court was not impressed with Hansen's argument that the text's use of "encouraging" or "inducing" is in the ordinary definitions of the words, not the specialized legal definitions. The Court decided that those words in §1324 take the legal, not the ordinary definition.
This would ordinarily be a rather interesting, yet minor, grammatical battle, were it not for the fact that Hansen cannot be the only person violating §1324. We see thousands of illegal aliens looking happy and healthy as they enter. They surely did not walk all the way from Central America. They probably rode in buses most of the way, then walked the final few hundred yards to look more pathetic. Some come from overseas. Those illegal aliens did not swim across the ocean. They had airplane tickets or, less likely, voyages aboard ships. Some have appeared in professionally-printed T-shirts asking Biden to let them in and carrying professionally printed signs saying the same thing.
Someone paid for those bus rides. Someone paid for those airplane tickets. Someone arranged the boat rides. Someone purchased those T-shirts and signs and handed them out at or near the border. Whoever did it is encouraging and inducing. Who are these people? It is a pretty obvious conspiracy, arguably violating RICO. The Court has given the administration a strong reminder that it is not just the illegals who are the problem. But there is no way Biden and his so-called Justice Department will go after those conspirators and the people who are funding them. They should, but I am not going to hold my breath.
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