The photo went viral: a little girl crying after she’d been separated from her mother at the U.S.-Mexican border.  Time photoshopped it so that the little girl was crying while the Evil Donald Trump looked down at her, looming over her like some giant troll as she sobbed for her mother.  It was tweeted and retweeted, Facebooked and emailed, while the political class went ballistic with outrage.  How could this be happening in our country?  Trump is a Nazi!  Abolish ICE!

Oh, the air was thick with righteousness!  That little girl became the focus of the left’s latest “save the children campaign,” as thousands of illegal aliens swarmed at the border, defying the Trump administration’s new policy of “arrest and detain.”

There was just one problem: It turned out that the little girl had never been separated from her mother, as was alleged.  Her mother had left her home country without the consent of her father, who objected to his wife making their young daughter—two years of age—endure a journey via smuggler to the United States.  The smuggler was paid $6,000.  It also turns out that the mother wasn’t fleeing oppression or violence—she just wanted “a better life,” as she explained to reporters.  She had been previously deported back to Honduras in 2013 but was determined to try again.  In short, she was an economic refugee, not someone who is qualified for asylum.

Most of the “refugees” massed at the border are motivated by the same economic ambitions: They want a better life.  The whole phony narrative of suffering and martyrdom projected onto the migrants is a lie.

Despite this debunking of what our President rightfully calls “fake news,” the emotional manipulation ultimately worked.  After Congress refused to act, Trump signed an executive order mandating that parents must not be separated from their children at the border.  What this meant, in effect, was that “catch and release” was back in force.  This is because a court decision by the Ninth Circuit, the so-called Flores settlement, had determined that children cannot be held in detention for more than 20 days.  Brandon Judd, head of the National Border Patrol Council, which serves as the agency’s union representation, said that the new executive order spelled the end of Trump’s “no tolerance” policy.  “We’re going to have to release [families] under what’s called the catch-and-release program,” Judd said.

It’s impossible to not separate the family unless the catch-and-release policy takes hold again.  If we can’t hold the children more than 20 days, therefore we can’t hold the parents more than 20 days.  It takes about six to nine months to see a deportation proceeding from the beginning to the end.

ICE is looking for written instructions from the White House on how to carry out this contradictory policy.  I imagine they’ll be waiting for quite awhile.

What country allows illegal aliens to cross its border, catches them, charges them, and then releases them into the general population?  Not even the Germans do that.  The political class has clearly decided on a radical open-borders policy, which we haven’t seen in any country in modern times.  You have to go all the way back to the Roman Empire to find a comparable arrangement.

For me the immigration issue always conjures the eloquent Garet Garrett in his 1938 essay “The Revolution Was”:

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road.  But they are gazing in the wrong direction.  The revolution is behind them.  It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 effectively opened the floodgates, and yet I don’t recall conservatives—or anybody, really—raising objections at the time.  Barry Goldwater said nothing that I can recall about the issue, and National Review—the leading journal of rightist opinion back then—was similarly laconic.  Pat Buchanan raised the topic in the early 1990’s, but few listened.  Not until Trump did any mainstream figure besides Ann Coulter take immigration seriously, but by then it was too late.  The machinery of a government-mandated surge in immigration had been grinding away for years: By the 1970’s, 39 percent of population growth was because of immigration, most of it from Latin America and Asia.

Estimates of the illegal-alien population vary, from 10 million to as many as 30 million.  Whatever the exact number, what’s clear is that the inundation of America is already a fait accompli.  Are we going to deport millions of people in a vast sweep of illegals from the Rio Grande to the border with Canada?  Of course not.  They’re here, and they aren’t going anywhere.

Coming next: voting rights for “undocumented immigrants.”  It’ll be billed as the great civil-rights crusade of the new millennium.  Because replacing the electorate that put Trump in office is what this open-borders campaign is all about.

It gets worse.  The Mexican political system has just given birth to a presidential demagogue whose hostility to the United States and ability to subvert our sovereignty has had no equal since the days of Pancho Villa.  Andrés Manuel López Obrador is a Mexican leftist who has written a book, Oye, Trump, (Hey, Trump), and declares that he will take on the American Chief Executive.  Among his various strategies is a plan to help illegal aliens exercise what he describes as their “right” to cross the border and avoid the authorities in the U.S.

In short, Obrador will go to war with the United States, without, of course, launching a full-scale military operation.  Instead, the idea is to wage a guerrilla war, one in which the American media can be recruited to act as a fifth column.  Which is precisely what we are seeing today.

The war on the American nation that has been going on for decades is now reaching its climax.  Unfortunately, the defenders of the nation have only just awakened to the fact that they are besieged.  Is it too late to save the country from eventually going the way of Venezuela?  Indeed, if the open-borders lobby has its way, the entire nation of Venezuela will land on our shores quite shortly.