President Barack Obama and Democrats are holding the nation’s security hostage by refusing to heed the will of the electorate and defund executive amnesty, former Immigration and Naturalization Service officer Michael Cutler said Tuesday on "America’s Forum" on
Newsmax TV.
"The Republicans are afraid of being labeled as the people that defund their homeland security," Cutler said. "To me, as an outsider, it just seems this is extortion by the administration.
"I've come to call this administration a thugocracy. How in the world do you hold America's homeland security hostage to a political process?"
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It’s disingenuous for
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to talk about getting illegal immigrants out of the shadows, according to Cutler, when there are no resources dedicated to finding those that don’t come forward voluntarily.
"Fugitives don't willingly step out into the sunshine," he said. "We have hundreds of thousands, if not more, aliens who know they're wanted for crimes. They're not going to step out no matter what this amnesty program looks like. Yet, all we're going to do is provide false identities, potentially official false identities, to people who know they have clean fingerprints.
"On both sides of that equation, we're opening the door to terrorists for an embedding tactic that could really come back and hurt us badly. That's my concern."
While politicians are hyper-focused on people entering through the southern border, there are threats posed at international airports nationwide.
"I want everyone to understand that we do have 50 border states, we're inundated, we only have a couple of hundred immigration judges for the whole country, and they have front-loaded those unaccompanied minors, bumping the older cases to the back of the line, creating sheer chaos in the immigration court as well," said Cutler. "This system is overflowing right now."
Another unaddressed problem are Middle East refugees granted political asylum in the U.S., something the 9/11 Commission warned the government about.
"You had Ramsey Yousef, who participated in the first Trade Center bombing, granted political asylum," he said. "Kansi, who shot up the CIA a month earlier, applied for political asylum. We have the Tsarnaev brothers.
"Political asylum is a problem. It's hard to do investigations in those countries where these folks come from because of the chaos and the antipathy ... those governments feel for the United States, so we're letting in people without properly vetting them and that is a huge concern, especially in this dangerous era."
Interior enforcement is an oxymoron under the Obama administration, according to Cutler, and it’s an important piece of the equation.
"No matter how many times an alien attempts, if they're tenacious enough, they will succeed," Cutler said. "People will overstay visas and violate the terms of their entry. We have never put the emphasis where it needs to be, and that's on interior enforcement of the immigration laws.
"The 9/11 Commission made it clear that it was that failing, more than any other, that allowed" terrorists to "embed themselves in our country, this lack of interior enforcement. Of course with this administration, there is no interior enforcement now."
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