polecat news and views

Friday, April 17, 2026

Trump's Immigration Crackdown Delivers a Historic Drop in Both Legal and Illegal Immigration

Trump's Immigration Crackdown Delivers a Historic Drop in Both Legal and Illegal Immigration

According to an analysis by the Cato Institute, President Trump’s immigration crackdown has not only significantly reduced illegal immigration to the United States but also led to a substantial decline in legal immigration. In raw numbers, the analysis finds that the Trump administration reduced legal immigration by more than it reduced illegal immigration.

Illegal immigration was swiftly addressed by the federal government once President Trump took office, as it was one of the central priorities and a key pillar of the president’s campaign. According to the Cato Institute, illegal immigration fell by over 80 percent, as the Department of Homeland Security reported a steady decline in border encounters and quickly shifted its attention to a nationwide deportation campaign.

However, the Trump administration has been just as effective, if not more so, when it comes to reducing legal immigration.

Legal entries by asylum seekers fell 99.9 percent, from nearly 40,000 per month in December 2024 to just 26 in February 2025. Refugee admissions are down 90 percent overall, from 12,518 in December 2024 to 1,341 in March 2026. Immigrant visa issuances fell by 50 percent, driven mainly by bans on immigrant visas for nationals from an additional 92 countries as determined by the Trump administration, along with the suspension of the Diversity Visa Lottery. H-1B visas are also down by around 25 percent from 2024 to 2025.

In total, the Trump administration has seen a larger reduction in legal immigration than in illegal immigration. The analysis pointed to monthly legal immigration decreases of about 132,000, compared with roughly 50,000 monthly reductions in illegal immigration.

This comes as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller continues to emphasize the Trump administration’s commitment to protecting Americans from illegal immigration, revealing just days ago that DHS is continuing construction of the border wall. He also blasted House Republicans for advancing a bill that would provide amnesty to thousands of undocumented immigrants.

New Cave Bone Finds Reveal Deserts Were Lush Paradises Just 5,000 Years Ago

New Cave Bone Finds Reveal Deserts Were Lush Paradises Just 5,000 Years Ago

By Ward Clark

One thing many folks (including me at times) have a bit of trouble wrapping their heads around is the concept of what geologists call "deep time." The planet we all live on has a history measured in billions of years - a tad over four and a half billion, in fact. And, through most of that history, the best data we have from multiple sources informs us that the planet was warmer than it is now. We are, after all, still technically in an ice age. We're in a warming interglacial, but the poles are still covered with ice, which is a pretty recent thing as geological time goes, and it's entirely possible, indeed likely, that sooner or later those mile-thick ice sheets will come marching south again.

Even so, more recently, there have been some warmer and colder spells. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago, there were tropical forests as far north as Germany. During the Roman Warm Period, from 250 BC to 400 AD, agriculture took off, and one could grow wine grapes in Britain, which one certainly can't do today outside of a greenhouse.

Another such period, at least in what we call the Canary Islands now, saw at least one of those islands enjoying a climate only 5,000 years ago that was warmer and wetter than today. That island is Fuerteventura.

Scientists (Sánchez-Marco et al., 2026) have recovered the remains of several bird species known to reside at the edges of bodies of water (e.g., lagoons, lakes, rivers) with riparian vegetation and dense forests from a cave in Fuerteventura, the most arid of the Canary Islands. The bones date to ~9000 to 5000 years ago.
This discovery “unexpectedly” reveals the Holocene climate was much warmer (as much as “3 to 7°C”) than present. It was also “much wetter than it is today” a few thousand years ago, and thus regions that are today arid and largely uninhabitable were recently able to host to far more plant and animal species diversity.
The cooler Fuerteventura environment is today covered in sand dunes and classified as an arid desert, as it receives only 100-150 mm of rain annually. The island no longer supports water fowl (sic) habitat or any other species dependent on large annual rainfall totals.

That's an interesting, if local, discovery. And we might note that island habitats aren't generally isolated. They are affected much more than continental habitats by things like ocean currents, prevailing winds, and global warm and cool spells. 5,000 years ago, off the coast of northwest Africa, where the Canary Islands are located, it was evidently not only warmer but wetter than it is now.

Nothing's surprising about this to anyone who has studied global climate trends, of course. And, remember, even 5,000 years ago - an eyeblink in geological time - there were no coal-fired power plants, no gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, and no "End Fossil Fuel Now" protestors. There were people around, but they weren't hanging out in modern housing made comfortable by air-conditioning.

Green Energy Systems Are Wreaking Havoc on Wildlife, and Climate Scolds Are Lying About It

Here's the key finding:

It seems likely that there was a lagoon or pond near the cave, around which large areas of riparian vegetation developed. Likewise, wooded areas with undergrowth, where there were even wrynecks, were probably also in the vicinity of the cave. The ornithological record from Cueva del Llano suggests that in the early stages of the Holocene, the dominant climate in the Canary Islands was much wetter than it is today. In Fuerteventura, there were bodies of water with riparian vegetation and more or less dense forest areas with shrubby undergrowth.

This is pretty solid evidence. Riparian and lakeside species like cranes, herons, rails, and other birds are never found in desert habitats. There's nothing for them there. The kinds of plants associated with those environments, again, disappear when the local climate grows cooler and drier. The only possible explanation for the finding of a range of species associated with warm, wet climates is that, in the time those species were alive and moving about, the local climate was warmer and wetter.

Why does this seemingly localized bit of data matter to the climate scolds? Well, it doesn't; if the scolds have shown us anything, it's that they care little about data or facts. But science is about gathering data from multiple sources. This is just one more data point of many, and what it reveals is that we still don't understand the global climate all that well. The earth's climate, global, regional, and local, is all subject to billions of inputs, to cycles ranging from decades to millions of years. The earth's climate is, as I am fond of pointing out, vast and chaotic beyond our ability to easily comprehend. And this work in the Canary Islands reveals once more that, through most of Earth's history, it was warmer than it is now, and that there is no sane reason to sacrifice our modern, technological lifestyles to try to affect something as huge as our planet's natural cycles.

https://redstate.com/wardclark/2026/04/14/new-cave-bone-finds-reveal-deserts-were-lush-paradises-just-5000-years-ago-n2201269?utm_source=rsafternoonbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Stephen Miller Goes Off on the Amnesty-Granting 'Dignity Act'

Stephen Miller Goes Off on the Amnesty-Granting 'Dignity Act'

Amy Curtis

Stephen Miller Goes Off on the Amnesty-Granting 'Dignity Act' — *AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell*

A bipartisan group of 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats is pushing the "Dignity Act," which is actually titled the "Dignidad Act," a bill that would grant blanket amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, including criminals like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the MS-13 gang member and reported human trafficker Democrats love.

Trump administration official Stephen Miller blasted the legislation, calling it a move that makes America weaker.

"You know that this administration opposes amnesty," Miller said. "President Trump has always been clear his opposition to amnesty, and, of course, you know my own views."

"I want to reframe this whole conversation ... to something that President Trump has been very focused on for a long time. And that's about having the kind of immigration to this country that makes it stronger, not weaker. I think this conversation gets siloed too often, when we have to look at the whole picture," Miller continued.

"You saw the recent tragic case where an illegal alien from Haiti bludgeoned a woman to death in broad daylight with a hammer, smashing her skull in, one hammer blow after another. That's what happens when you have open borders to this country from some of the most dangerous parts of the world," Miller said. "That's one person that Biden let in, the Democrats let in, to maim and murder our citizens. But there are thousands more."

"Largely, for five decades, before President Trump, we had open migration from the most dangerous places in the world. How do your schools work? How do your hospitals work? How does your economy work? How do you have a society that can win all these great civilizational struggles against your adversaries around the world if you have to feed, house, clothe, educate, support, and give affirmative action to millions and millions of people from failed states around the world?" Miller asked.

"So President Trump has said we want to have high-value migration into this country, not low-value migration," Miller said. "And we have to deal with the fact that we have millions of people here who are on welfare, who are not contributing, who commit a lot of crime, who consume a lot of public resources, and it's in the best interest of this country for those people to be humanely returned home."

"That's the big conversation, and so this old Washington conversation about amnesty is missing the whole point," Miller continued, "the real conversation is: how do we have an immigration policy that makes America stronger and more unified, not weaker and more divided."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/04/13/stephen-miller-dignity-n2674363?utm_source=thdailypmvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-UkhUgyfY9F&utm_term=&_nlid=UkhUgyfY9F&_nhids=ncqWjHm0cxj1ls

Thursday, April 16, 2026

Whoa: DNI Gabbard Reveals Intelligence Community Conspiracy That Led to Trump's 2019 Impeachment

Whoa: DNI Gabbard Reveals Intelligence Community Conspiracy That Led to Trump's 2019 Impeachment

By Bob Hoge

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents Monday that she says show the intelligence community, along with certain Democrat congresscritters — think California Sen. Adam Schiff (a representative at the time) and House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (CA ‑11) — used to justify the ludicrous 2019 impeachment effort of Donald Trump.

Democrats incredibly tried to take down a sitting president over a phone call because they alleged that Trump had requested Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky look into Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who had been conducting suspicious business activity in the Eastern European country. They further charged that Trump used presidential power to unlawfully pressure the Ukrainians.

Gabbard says the new documents show that the case was manufactured:

In her tweet, she points readers to a lengthy press release on the official ODNI webpage that goes into more detail on the efforts to convict a duly-elected president, and she pointed the finger directly at former Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (ICIG) Michael Atkinson, who Trump fired in 2020:

During his preliminary investigation into President Trump’s July 2019 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, former IC IG Michael Atkinson did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives – only conducting interviews with four individuals: the Whistleblower, the Whistleblower’s friend who was a co-author of the January 2017 Russia Hoax Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and close colleague of disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok, and two character references who had zero firsthand knowledge of the July 2019 phone call.

Ah, yes, Peter Strzok, the slippery former FBI agent who was a foaming-at-the-mouth Trump Hater. Gabbard had more:

Despite a lack of any firsthand evidence, IC IG Atkinson proceeded to take actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction by ignoring Department of Justice guidance and relying on only second-hand testimony to ensure the whistleblower complaint was released to Congress, referred to the FBI, and leaked to the propaganda media.
Then-House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Chairman Adam Schiff and then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi used this false, second-hand narrative to create media intrigue and ultimately spark the basis to impeach President Trump in December of 2019.

Whistleblower met with Democrats on House Intelligence Committee (then led by Adam Schiff) BEFORE reporting his allegations to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.

Remember Peter Strzok, the Smirking Anti-Trump FBI Agent? He Just Lost 1st Amendment Case Against the DOJ

Gabbard provides numerous details regarding Atkinson’s shenanigans, but her summary tells you the takeaway: these folks didn’t care about the rule of law, or the Constitution, or integrity; all they wanted to do was get Orange Man Bad at any cost. Emphasis hers:

“Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States,” said DNI Gabbard. “Inspector General Atkinson failed to uphold his responsibility to the American people, putting political motivations over the truth. And this, along with the politicization of the whistleblower process by a former CIA employee who was working hand in glove with Democrats in Congress, are egregious examples of the deep state playbook on how to weaponize the Intelligence Community. Exposing these tactics and showing how they undermine the fabric of our democratic republic furthers the critical cause of transparency and accountability and will help prevent future abuse of power.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe has already weighed in, saying Monday that the whole thing was a hoax:

"As Director Ratcliffe made clear as a member of President Trump's impeachment advisory team in 2019, this impeachment was entirely baseless, unfounded, and brought in politically-motivated bad faith," CIA Director of Public of Affairs Liz Lyons said in a statement to Just the News.

It may seem like old news at this point, but the 2019 impeachment remains a stain on our nation. If voters inexplicably give Congress back to the Democrats in the midterms, and/or the presidency in 2028, we’re likely to just see a whole lot more of this criminality.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/04/13/whoa-dni-gabbard-reveals-intelligence-community-conspiracy-that-led-to-trumps-2019-impeachment-n2201246?utm_source=rsafternoonbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Boom: CNN Host Obliterates Dem Narrative About Removing Trump From Office

Boom: CNN Host Obliterates Dem Narrative About Removing Trump From Office

By Nick Arama

Iran doesn't have a lot of cards to play in the fight with the United States.

One of the few is that they seem to have folks on the left attacking everything President Donald Trump says or does in regard to Operation Epic Fury. That may give them thoughts. If they just hang in there, the Democrats' attacks on Trump may force him to pull back.

However, in another way, the Democratic reactions may have helped Trump and convinced the Iranians that Trump was going to drop "hell" on them as he promised. He had already been pounding them as it was. But you had people like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (CA-11) calling on the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment because of Trump's "civilization will die" comment about Iran.

The Democrats' freak-out over some of Trump's language may have accidentally served his purpose of forcing Iran to the negotiating table. The regime put people out on their bridges - clearly, they thought Trump was going to follow through and were concerned. They know for sure he isn't the weak Joe Biden or Barack Obama, neither of whom seemed to know how to enforce red lines. Now, we'll see what comes out of the talks. That's still a question, since Iran isn't an honest actor.

But Trump is already showing a clever response to something the regime claimed. They reportedly said there were issues with opening the Strait of Hormuz - the point agreed to as part of the ceasefire - because they weren't sure where all the mines they put out might be. Trump's response was immediate - we're sending in ships to help detect where the mines are and work to ensure the safe passage in the Strait. Since Iran agreed to open the Strait, they can't object if he helps them out with their problem. He turned their excuse around on them, and used it to help clear the Strait.

New: US Navy Destroyers Lead Mine-Clearing Charge in Strait of Hormuz

In what might be the surprise of the weekend, it was CNN host Michael Smerconish who obliterated the Democratic narrative that Trump was demented/crazy and should face the 25th Amendment/impeachment.

Warning for graphic language:

“This window into prewar decision making was for the Americans,” Smerconish said about the NYT report. “It shows airing of competing views, some open to dissent, reliance on legal counsel, and a deliberative process. Not the impulsivity with which Trump is so often associated. There’s nothing in the times behind closed doors account of an unstable Trump.”
He continued, “At the same time that he was playing the madman card in public, you’d expect the guy that posts about a whole civilization dying would be simultaneously busting up the White House furniture. But there’s never been any reporting of Trump like that behind closed doors. In other words, it’s not that there’s a method to his madness, it’s that the madness is his method.”

Now while I won't necessarily believe everything in The New York Times report - it is after all the Times - I think the general overall tenor of it, as Smerconish describes it: open to dissent, consulting his Cabinet, and deliberative, is consistent with reports of how Trump operates.

Smerconish continued:

The Haberman-Swan reporting ultimately reveals, much like what Bill Maher saw at dinner, is that Donald Trump is capable of exactly what his critics say he isn’t: patience, process and genuine deliberation.
He went around the table, he heard the dissent. He consulted the lawyers. He made a hard call under enormous pressure. And 90 minutes before his own deadline, a cease fire materialized. That’s not nothing.
And it’s certainly not the behavior of someone who needs the 25th amendment invoked or warrants impeaching.

Smerconish then said Trump didn't need the "madman" mask - because the real man was more formidable. That's a big observation, and one that most on the left wouldn't get. But he's also sort of wrong for the reasons I said above - it's that madman move which likely moved Iran. They're used to playing all the prior presidents, but they appear off-balanced because Trump doesn't deal with them as the prior ones did.

Smerconish also spoke to Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who has known Trump for years. And while Sonnenfeld is obviously critical of Trump and slipped in some shots at Trump in the process of his remarks, he also acknowledged that Trump is "absolutely strategic."

"Backstage, he is not temperamental," he said. "He is rational."

His best line? "Boy, he is not dumb!" Sonnenfeld pronounced. "He is dumb like a fox! He's very strategic."

Exactly. There's a reason Trump is where he is now, and has risen through any attempt to bring him down. Democrats fail against him because they fail to understand him, and keep using the same failed tactics for the last 10 years.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2026/04/11/cnn-host-obliterates-dem-narrative-about-removing-trump-from-office-n2201200?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl