It is now a standard phrase of the left, as continually touted by their paid flacks and repeated by their senators. When speaking of deporting illegal aliens, they constantly use the phrase "ripping families apart."
As if, you know, the left actually cares about families.
It has gotten laughable, and my feelings sort of crystallized during a hearing this week, when the pompous Kamala Harris of California (of course) kept pressing that phrase during a Senate hearing with the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen. "Why are you ripping families apart?", the leftist senator asked, or very similar words to that effect.
Secretary Nielsen, of whom I had not heard prior to her appointment to run DHS, is an impressive lady. She does not need my help to answer questions from politically-motivated, self-serving clowns like Kamala Harris. But I'll help, because clearly this is going to be one of those pet phrases that the left uses, and pet phrases have been a slight theme for the week.
"Senator, I'm going to answer your question first by acknowledging that there are actions that do separate families, that we take when illegal aliens are deported under the law. It is a shame, because it is not an outcome that the government prefers, but it is only your job in Congress to make law, and ours in the Executive Branch to enforce law that you make. You're free to change the law if you like.
"I will further point out that your sensibilities about ripping families apart may be well-meaning, but you seem not to have the same sensibilities when hundreds of thousands of black children are separated from their families each year by being killed against their will. Of course, they have not been born quite yet, so perhaps you are misinterpreting what their will actually is. But I digress.
[Given that Sen. Harris would surely have interrupted at this point, the Secretary would now say] "Please shut up and let me finish answering your question, Ma'am.
"While none of us is ever happy to see members of a family go their separate ways, deportation is hardly the most common instance of this. There are over two million people incarcerated as we speak, for having committed crimes, including 136,000 in California in just your own state prisons. Every single one of them was convicted of violating the laws that have been duly passed by state and Federal legislatures.
"Every single one of those people was, as you and the left and the press (but I repeat myself) keep referring to it, ripped from their families. I certainly have never once heard you, or any other Democrat, complain about enforcing laws against robbery, rape, murder, drug-pushing, any of those crimes that put people behind bars and rips them, in your words, from their families.
"The enforcement of immigration law is the same thing, Senator. Laws requiring people to be removed, whether to prison or their home countries, are the same thing. If you don't like the law, Senator, it's up to you to change it, that's your job. My job is to enforce the laws that the Senate has already passed. You passed this one, I will continue to enforce it to the best of my ability.
"If you continue to be hypocritical and political, to complain about immigration enforcement separating families but do not show the same moral indignities when other convicted felons are removed from theirs -- let alone unborn children being ripped from families they never even got to know -- then I'm glad I have used up all your time.
"Because, Senator, your time has expired."
Have a nice weekend. I plan to.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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