One way that you can tell that Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States is to read The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Altagracia Maria Herrera is an undocumented house cleaner who was excluded from most government aid, making the pandemic the first time she felt she didn’t belong in the United States.
By Robin Shulman | Monday, March 22, 2021
Altagracia María Herrera poses for a portrait outside of her home in Northeast Philadelphia on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. Herrera is an undocumented house cleaner who lost all her work during the pandemic. Photo by Heather Khalifa, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Photographer
One night, as the pandemic shut Philadelphia down last March, Altagracia María Herrera, who cleans houses for a living, answered her phone.It was one of her employers, who, in broken Spanish, told her to stay home for the next few weeks, Herrera recalled.
“I understand,” responded Herrera, who was born in the Dominican Republic, lives in Northeast Philadelphia, and is a single parent to two U.S.-born daughters.
Then, over a few days, all her other cleaning jobs evaporated. Herrera had just enough saved to make her $750 rent. “After that, there was no money,” she said. As an undocumented immigrant, she didn’t qualify for relief from Washington — no stimulus checks, unemployment benefits, or ongoing salary funded by Paycheck Protection Program loans.
There’s much more at the original, but one thing is clear: she feels that she doesn’t belong in the United States because she really doesn’t belong in the United States. She is, the story tells us, “an undocumented immigrant,” the mealy-mouthed, Associated Press Stylebook term for an illegal immigrant, someone who is not an American citizen, someone who sneaked across the border illegally, someone who broke the law!
When Mr Trump was President, the Inquirer would never have printed her name, or noted that she lived somewhere in Northeast Philadelphia, or pointed out, in the photograph caption, that she was in the city on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. Why? Because under the Trump Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents might have used the information, tracked her down, arrested and deported her back to the Dominican Repub
Further down, the article tells us that Miss Herrera “followed her dream of a better life and joined a friend in Philadelphia” in 2000. the article does not tell us how she got to the United States from the Dominican Republic, an nation sharing the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti.
How did she enter? Did she overstay a legitimate visa, and simply not return home? Was she somehow smuggled into the United States via a private boat that landed at night on the Jersey shore or the Outer Banks of North Carolina? Either way, she broke the law!
The story tells us that Miss Herrera had two illegitimate children in the United States, which, sadly, makes them American citizens. The two daughters are now 17 and 15, and almost certainly have sucked up taxpayer dollars by attending Philadelphia’s public schools.
When the pandemic began, Herrera lost all five of her regular cleaning clients and pay of at least $650 a week. One employer said she had lost her job, and in a kind of trickle-down unemployment, could no longer pay Herrera.
Really? Five regular cleaning jobs? That means that either five separate clients were paying Miss Herrera cash ‘under the table,’ meaning that they were not withholding federal income taxes, state income taxes, the city wage tax, Social Security taxes and Medicare taxes, which is illegal, or Miss Herrera had presented falsified documents so that they could pay her legally, but also means she either forged documents herself, or paid someone else for forged documents.
Did Miss Herrera somehow pay her federal, state and local taxes? Did she pay her share of Social Security and Medicare taxes? Did she file her federal and state income tax forms? If she failed to do any of those things, she committed felonies!
The Inquirer article noted that Miss Herrera had an account with Wells Fargo bank. What documents did she present to open an account in her name. Was the account opened after the PATRIOT Act was passed, in which the documentation requirements became more stringent? Regardless, Miss Herrera must have presented some form of identification, and that means she presented forged documents to the bank. That is a felony.
So many people seem to think that crossing into the United States illegally is really no big deal. But living in the US illegally requires the commission of other crimes virtually every day. If someone is in the US, and has to work, he is doing so illegally. If he is working here illegally, and being paid in cash under the table, he is evading income taxes. If someone is paying him in cash that way, and fails to file a Form 1099 for the employed person — which would bring that person to the attention of the Infernal Revenue Service — the employer is committing a felony. There are so many things required to live and work in the United States which require the payment of taxes and having documentation that it really cannot be done legally if a person is an illegal immigrant.
And The Philadelphia Inquirer is covering that up!
“It has become increasingly clear that the restrictions placed on many resources prevent those who have greatest need from accessing them,” said Mayor Jim Kenney. The city is building another fund to lift 100,000 Philadelphians out of poverty over the next five years — and that fund will include undocumented immigrants, said Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sánchez.
So, the great Mayor of Philadelphia, who has presided over 109 murders so far this year, an increase of 29% over the same date last year, a year which fell just one killing short of the city’s all-time record, is going to give money, including taxpayers’ dollars, to non-citizens, to people in the city and country illegally. He can’t do his job in making the city safer, but he can enable more crime.
That’s just great, isn’t it?
In a wryly humorous link at the bottom of the Inquirer article was an OpEd about ‘vaccine envy.’
There is massive inequity in vaccine distribution. Black, Latinx, and low-income communities are being underserved while continuing to bear the brunt of the virus. For those fortunate enough and healthy enough to just be waiting your turn, it’s easy to get impatient.
According to the Inquirer, Miss Herrera, an illegal immigrant, not only got her first shot of the COVID-19 vaccine earlier this month, but got a new cleaning job as well. She stepped in front of an American citizen, one who hasn’t been able to get the vaccine yet, and she got another job it is illegal for her to have.
This is what is wrong with liberalism, with the left and the #woke. This is why Donald Trump won in 2016, and may well contribute to another populist candidate winning in 2024. When we are allowing blatant violations of the law to not only go unpunished, but seeing our credentialed media publicizing them without any fear of law enforcement stepping in, things have gone very wrong in our country.
The Democrats’ and “progressives” — William Teach defines ‘progressives’ as “Nice Fascists” — current cause du jour is housing and the shortage of ‘affordable’ housing. Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist independent who caucuses with the Democrats, railed that “Almost 600,000 Americans are sleeping out on our streets.” So, I have to ask the Distinguished Gentleman from Vermont, just who caused that problem?
