In the beautiful Christian hymn “The Prayer of St. Francis,” we hear lyrics that say, “Make me a channel of your peace./ Where there is hatred, let me bring love.” If a president, or anyone else who took an oath to enforce the law, said such a prayer, what would it mean?
We might revise the second line to read: “Where there is chaos, let me bring calm.” It’s the calling of every political leader to push back against entropy, the tendency in a fallen world for things to crumble. For the forceful, the clever, the ruthless, to ravish the weak — to rape them, rob them, even make them slaves. That’s why St. Paul told believers to obey Caesar whenever he sought justice, and that’s why President Trump is standing strong on U.S. borders while protecting immigrant children.
Trump has seen the chaos engulfing our allies in Western Europe, with wave after wave of economic migrants sailing for their countries — where few will find work. Instead, they will languish on welfare. Some will join radical mosques. Others will feed into the Jew-bashing, rape gangs and no-go zones that now blight once-peaceful cities from Marseilles to Stockholm.
The craven failure of European leaders to stop this influx of migrants has shattered the social peace, destroyed political parties and stoked unemployment. Perhaps worst of all: Every boat that lands in Europe, instead of being turned back, invites thousands more people to risk life and limb in leaky boats at the mercy of human smugglers.
As the president pointed out, the same thing is happening at the U.S. southern border. While our Congress dithers on whether to fund a Wall, thousands of people pull up stakes in Latin America, headed for U.S. soil.
As the Huffington Post reported, eighty percent of women and young girls who make that journey are raped along the way. That is why “rape trees” with their torn and bloodied clothes profane our southern border.
Human smugglers linked with gangs like MS-13 corral these immigrants like animals, exploit the women and often steal their children. Then those children enter the nightmare world of slave labor, sex trafficking and child pornography. How do such smugglers get these children into America? By posing as their parents. And until the U.S. government started splitting adults from children at the border, these criminals were getting away with it, on a massive scale.
As The Washington Post reported, “The Obama administration failed to protect thousands of Central American children who have flooded across the U.S. border since 2011, leaving them vulnerable to traffickers and to abuses at the hands of government-approved caretakers, a Senate investigation has found.
“The Office of Refugee Resettlement, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, failed to do proper background checks of adults who claimed the children, allowed sponsors to take custody of multiple unrelated children and regularly placed children in homes without visiting the locations.”
How many of those children ended up in the hands of sex traffickers? We may never know.
That’s the price we paid for leaving the U.S. border uncontrolled. Even the Obama administration saw that this wasn’t working. That’s why it started separating children from adults among illegal immigrants — to protect them.
President Trump is committed to do just that, even as he strives to keep real families united, as they apply for U.S. asylum. That’s what he did with his new executive order, which holds children and parents together for the three weeks permitted, now under law, for such claims to be heard.
He has asked Congress to untangle the legal mess that prevents America from holding families together any longer than that. Senator Ted Cruz listened and proposed a clean “fix” for this problem.
Will the Democrats in Congress listen?
If President Trump simply returned to the “catch and release” policy abandoned by the Obama administration, he’d be turning children loose without protection. He’d also be flouting his campaign promise to protect Americans and impose a sane, just order on the border. He’d be sending a message to poor people all across the Western hemisphere: free passage to the United States so long as you’re willing to put your children at risk.
The human traffickers would rake in more millions in smuggling fees, more migrants would die in the desert, and hundreds or thousands more “rape trees” would sprout from California to Texas.
It’s the president’s sworn duty to take back our southern border from the narco-terrorist gangs that have long controlled it. He also promised to stop feeding vulnerable workers into our underground economy—where migrants toil at illegal wages in unsafe conditions without any legal protections.
They live as workers did back when Charles Dickens was writing, in a world that has made zero progress since then. And American workers suffer, especially those with the fewest skills and least education.
That’s a part of the price of refusing to build a wall and enforce our democratic laws.
To cover up that horror, those who favor the chaotic status quo on the border are wielding outrageous rhetoric. A former head of the CIA actually compared the safe, clean centers where the United States holds immigrant children for their protection to Nazi death camps. Catholic bishops who are silent on abortion threaten to excommunicate ICE workers and Border Patrol agents who risk their lives pushing back against the chaos. Hollywood and the media are feeding a moral panic, which targets not the exploiters of immigrant children, but those who strive to protect them.
We must stand firm and move forward. Where there is chaos let us bring calm. It’s our solemn moral duty to the least among us.
Pastor Aubrey Shines is the founder of G2G Ministries, Inc. in Florida.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
