Cass Sunstein
The Czar of Illegal Immigration
On Wednesday, January 31, 2024, Jhoan Boada, the new face of American immigration, walked out of the Manhattan Criminal Court, flipped off reporters, and declared in Spanish, “I didn’t do nothing.” Boada was one of eight illegal immigrants caught on camera attacking two New York City police officers after robbing a nearby store and beating the employee who tried to stop them. These Venezuelans are suspected to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang and were last seen boarding a bus under fake names that was headed west. Because New York City is a “sanctuary city,” it is illegal for city officials to notify US Immigration and Customs Enforcement about criminal defendants like Boada.
Since President Biden took office in 2021, U.S. immigration authorities have recorded 8.2 million “encounters” with illegal migrants attempting to cross our nation’s borders. From the Bracero Program to NAFTA, America’s southern border has always been opportunistically porous, but nothing like this. At the very least, 3.8 million illegal immigrants have entered the U.S. (2023 House Judiciary Committee) and each month the numbers continue to grow. While Americans citizens must present official forms of ID to fly on airplanes, illegal migrants simply log in to Custom and Border Patrol’s “One App,” provide a name and date of birth. Without verifying any of this information, DHS provides them with government-issued ID cards.
Why is the Biden administration so keen to flood the nation with criminally prone lumpenprol opportunists like Boada and his friends? There is only one person who can answer this question, and it is not Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, or Border Czar Kamala Harris. It is the architect of the open border policies, neoliberal emince greise, Cass Sunstein. In 2021, President Biden appointed him DHS senior counselor (and co-chair of the “climate change action group”) to roll back immigration law. “Cass is the nation’s foremost regulatory expert, and we are privileged to have him on our team to help us address a wide range of complex challenges,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at the time of Sunstein’s appointment. “Cass has already been an invaluable asset as we ensure that all of the rules that DHS issues are based on evidence, consistent with the law, and best serve our nation.”
Cass Sunstein and his wife, Samantha Power, former U.S. ambassador to the UN and now head of US AID, have never been elected to political office, yet they have haunted the corridors of power since the Obama administration. From the conspiracy/counterspeech doctrine, to the foreign policy debacles in Libya and Syria, to the unexplained “unmasking requests,” to the failed proxy war in Ukraine, to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, neoliberalism’s dynamic duo are the living embodiment of the “Peter Principle” of upward failure.
In 2008, Cass Sunstein laid out his “counterspeech” doctrine in his paper, “Conspiracy Theories.” He suggested that the U.S. government recruit “nongovernmental officials” to pose as “independent experts with information” so the U.S. government could “prod them into action from behind the scenes.” From 2009 to 2012, Cass Sunstein served in the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, then the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board.
Since its inception in 2008, Sunstein’s “counterspeech” strategy has evolved into a preemptive, offensive doctrine used to shore up the holes in whatever non-oppositional ideology rules the day. Criticize Hillary Clinton? Trump supporter! Object to open borders? White Nationalist! Don’t want digital currency? Conspiracy theorist! Questions the war in Ukraine? Putinista! If public ridicule and shame does not dissuade critics, the alphabet soup agencies in Washington can always “nudge” the real arbiters of free speech in America today, the Sultans of Silicon Valley.
At the time Sunstein was appointed to DHS in 2021, he said, “I sensed that there was a real appetite for, let’s say, good order.” Now that illegal immigration into the United States is at historic levels, America’s southern border is firmly in control of the Mexican drug cartels, human trafficking is at an all-time high, and the Fentanyl epidemic is killing more Americans each year than the Vietnam War and the War on Terror combined, does Sunstein consider this “good order?” We have heard enough dissembling from the Teflon strawman, Alejandro Mayorkas. Now Americans need to hear from the man behind the curtain, the Czar of Illegal Immigration himself, Cass Sunstein.
