Ned Ryun argues Trump’s border policies are unfairly demonized by mainstream media, citing only 10% of separated minors were with parents and Obama’s 2015 anti-smuggling crackdown. He links Trenton’s gang-related shooting—22 injured, including a 13-year-old shot in the head—to racial bias in coverage, noting suspects used illegal guns despite NJ’s strict laws, with Tahaji Wells (33) released early under Phil Murphy’s policies. Ryun demands DOJ transparency, accusing Wray and Strzok of misconduct while questioning congressional follow-through on investigations. The episode reveals systemic media distortions and law enforcement accountability gaps. [Automatically generated summary]
Today and off the Cuff Declassified, the battle rages over separating illegal alien children from their parents at the border.
We'll discuss.
Political analyst Ned Ryan joins me to discuss the latest on the Mueller probe, immigration, and Congress's war with the DOJ, a mass shooting in New Jersey that you didn't hear about, and the New Jersey governor's ludicrous response.
And new privacy concerns over how police are using driver license photos.
we'll talk all about it.
Donald Trump is horrible, the most terrible human being ever to live, right?
I mean, his policy, his Nazi, jackbooted thug, white supremacist, hater of brown people from south of the border policy, is to rip babies from their mother's arms, screaming, outreaching for one another as they're crossing the border.
Except that's really not true.
That's what the mainstream media, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times is telling you.
They've gone as far, they've gone as far as to disgracefully and disgustingly use the term concentration camp.
What an insult to the memory of 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.
And to add insult to injury, it wasn't just far left commentators.
On MSNBC, former RNC Republican National Committee Chair, Michael Steele, one of the worst RNC chairs in history, he used the term concentration camp.
But wait, there's more.
General Michael Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director, he used the term concentration camp on Twitter.
Actually, put up a photo of train tracks leading to a concentration camp.
More than used the term.
I and many others resoundingly called out General Michael Hayden for daring to compare the honest, ethical, hardworking men and women of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and ICE, Nazi SS, Gestapo.
The Trump derangement syndrome is off the charts.
It's disgusting.
These people are unhinged.
So let's break this down and explain what's really going on here.
Misreporting At The Border00:15:26
All right.
First and foremost, first and foremost, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirsten Nielsen, called the media irresponsible.
Let me read you a tweet from Secretary Nielsen.
Quote: This misreporting by members, meaning members of Congress on the left, press and advocacy groups must stop.
It is irresponsible and unproductive.
As I have said many times before, if you are seeking asylum for your family, there is no reason to break the law and illegally cross between ports of entry.
And this is what's critically important here.
And I need to spend some time on this.
The left is trying to tell you that the people crossing illegally are asylum speakers.
The Secretary of Homeland Security is saying if you're an asylum seeker, you don't need to cross illegally.
Come to a legal port of entry, i.e., a border, a customs and border protection or immigration and customs enforcement station at a marina, an airport, and ask for asylum.
Request asylum.
The Refugee Protection Act of 1967 and its update of 1980 affords you protections if you do that.
There is no need to swim across the Rio Grande.
you swim across the Rio Grande with your baby in your arms, you risk having your child taken away.
If you walk up to a border checkpoint, speak to an ICE agent or a border patrol agent and say, I'm seeking asylum.
I'm persecuted in my country.
Your protections begin.
This is very, very simple.
Very, very simple.
Now, Trump administration, this is from a Fox News piece, but I'm just parodying what the president said last week.
He did an impromptu press conference on Friday morning, really on the lawn of the White House and in the driveway of the White House.
Fox writes, the Trump administration, which has called it, quote, horrible that illegal immigrant children are sometimes separated from their parents when their parents enter criminal proceedings, has been criticized in recent weeks for increasing the prosecutions of illegal aliens under a zero tolerance policy that critics say lead to those separations.
However, something else very important in there.
Another bit of minutiae that's being ignored.
In most cases, when someone does come illegally and then requests asylum, they're not supposed to do.
The kids that are being removed, when you dig into the data, are typically kids of parents who have another issue.
They've been deported multiple times.
They're suspected of a crime in the United States or in their home country.
There's an ICE detainer for them.
They're on some intelligence watch list for crime, for terror, for narcotics trafficking, for human trafficking.
And at that point, authorities have no choice.
I cannot tell you how many times as a cop, I had to remove kids from their parents.
If you go to jail, we don't send the children to jail with you.
We don't leave them sitting in the house by themselves.
We don't leave them on a sidewalk alone.
What do these people on the left in the mainstream media expect ICE to do?
Say to a toddler, well, your mom has an immigration detainer, an ICE detainer here, and she's suspected of working with the Sinaloa cartel.
Here you go, kid.
Here's a bottle of water and some crackers.
Mexico's that way.
Wear some shade in the desert.
Oh, here's some sunscreen.
No, no, we can't do that to a four-year-old.
Unfortunately, we have to take these children and put them into a shelter to safeguard them.
Well, then the critics say, these shelters are locked.
There are steel gates.
Well, yeah, we don't want these four-year-olds running out in the middle of the night into traffic.
Of course, we're going to lock the doors.
That's what safeguarding is.
These are not concentration camps.
People aren't being put to work, then systematically wholesale exterminated.
It is disgusting to use that term.
Reprehensible to use that term.
There's a child illegally entering the U.S. is generally separated from adults at the border if the child is in danger, has no clear relationship to the adult, or if the adult enters criminal proceedings.
The same exact criteria that domestic law enforcement here in the U.S. follow every single day, hundreds, if not thousands of times a day, when removing children from American citizens who endanger the child, are not related to the child.
There's no legal guardianship or enter criminal proceedings.
Again, I can't tell you how many kids I had to bring down to the Department of Children and Family Services in New York City because I arrested a parent and there was no other guardian there.
We can't take them on patrol with us.
Can't leave them in an NYPD police precinct.
Can't leave the kid in the house by themselves or on the sidewalk.
They have to go somewhere safe.
This is common sense.
This has been established law enforcement practice for decades upon decades.
It's been an established practice for centuries at this point.
This is just moronic.
Secretary Nielsen went on to say unequivocally in a tweet, quote, we do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period.
And she went on to say, you are not breaking the law by seeking asylum at a port of entry.
For those, these are tweets from Secretary Nielsen.
For those seeking asylum at ports of entry, we have continued the policy from previous administrations and will only separate if the child is in danger.
Again, there is no custodial relationship between family members or if the adult has broken a law.
But the mere presentation of yourself, of the illegal, to authorities at the border requesting asylum is not under the Refugee Protection Acts of 67 and 80, the addendum, the amendment.
That is not considered breaking the law.
You're being lied to by the mainstream media.
This is one of the worst cases of fake news I've ever come across.
You are being lied to.
You're being lied to.
Now, Democrats have been trying to go into detention facilities.
We're going to talk about that in a moment.
But let's talk about the deafening silence on the left back in 2015.
In front of me, I have a Washington Post story.
Mexican kids held for months.
This is the important part.
As punishment for border crossing.
And you know when this story was from?
Not last week.
Not this weekend.
March 11th, 2015, during the Obama administration.
During the Obama administration.
Wow.
Now, these are kids that were smuggled here.
These are kids that were smuggled.
All right.
Tragic.
They're little kids.
Now, let me read this to you.
Last spring, as Central American children flooded into Texas from, now remember, this is March of 2015.
They're talking about 2014.
This is March of 2015.
They're talking about last spring.
It's very important because that was spring of 2014.
And you remember all those photos we saw of children in cages from the Hill and other places trying to make it seem like it was under Donald Trump?
No, those photos were mostly from around April 2014.
So I'm reading this story and remember the context and the date of those photos.
Last spring, a Central American children flooded into Texas in a way he had never seen in his three decade career, border agent Robert Harris decided to experiment.
His intelligence analyst estimated, as analysts estimated that 78% of the guides smuggling other migrants were Mexicans younger than 18.
So the coyotes bringing others across the border illegally were themselves Mexican minors, Mexicans under 18.
Teenagers often hired or conscripted by the drug cartels who knew they would not be prosecuted if caught.
And he wanted to attack this loophole.
Why don't we remove these juveniles from the smuggling cycle?
Harris, the outgoing commander of the Laredo sector of customs and border protection, recalled thinking.
Now, as a result of that decision, young Mexicans are being held for months without charge in shelters across the U.S. back three years ago, more than three, three years, three months ago, sometimes without their parents' knowledge.
Since the program began in May, 536 juveniles have been held, 248 of whom have been deported to Mexico after an average stay of 75 days.
That's according to the Border Patrol.
Okay.
The Obama administration began this policy.
Because it's important to note that when you see the current photos of these, of these, what look like camps, tents, but the tents of air conditioning and high-speed wireless and video games and other buildings are one shelter, now one big shelter for these kids was in a former Walmart building with bedrooms.
And look, I'm not going to say these are wonderful places.
These are still shelters and these little kids are ripped from their parents, right?
They are.
I mean, we are taking them from their parents, but it's necessary.
My heart goes out to thee.
I don't want to two-year-old girl.
We've seen the image of her crying hysterically for her mom.
My heart bleeds for that kid.
The mom broke the law.
And we can't send that little girl across the desert by herself.
It's a terrible situation for law enforcement to be put in.
They're doing the right thing.
They're doing the right thing.
They're putting the kid in a safe facility in a bed with air conditioning, with food, with water, with doctors, with security.
It's far safer than the country that kid came from.
Sure.
One of the problems is they're not allowed to touch the children.
They're these crying kids.
Nobody can give them a hug.
It's heartbreaking.
It really, really is heartbreaking.
But the mom or the dad are the ones to blame.
They came illegally, possibly knowing they had committed other crimes or on an anti-terror or a cartel watch list.
This policy began under Barack Obama.
So the reason I bring up the shelters is that it's an important note.
Department of Homeland Security data tells us that in those shelters, 90% were unaccompanied minors.
90% were these scenarios that I just read you.
Kids coming to the border alone or were working for the cartels to smuggle.
Only 10% of the kids you're seeing in those shelters, these images the mainstream media is trying to use to paint Trump as a Nazi and a white supremacist and this oppressive dictator, only 10% were separated from their parents at the border.
Right?
And in those instances, as Secretary Nielsen notes, there was a reason.
Authorities felt the child was in danger.
The parent couldn't care for them.
Authorities felt that the parent wasn't really the parent.
There was no custodial relationship there.
So that individual adult had no right to have that child with them in the first place.
Or the parent broke the law, had a warrant, had a nice detainer, had some thing that required a criminal proceeding.
And look, we can't send the kids to jail, can't leave them on the street, can't give them a bottle of water and send them back across the desert, right?
Can't do it.
Now, everybody, everybody is concerned about this.
Everybody.
First Lady Melania Trump rarely, rarely makes policy statements.
Melania Trump made a policy statement.
She said that both sides of the aisle need to come together to achieve successful immigration reform.
That's a quote.
She said she hates to see children separated from their parents.
Her communications director Stephanie Grisham told CNN, quote, Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform.
He believes we need to be a country that follows all laws, but also a country that governs with heart.
She's right.
Everyone wants this problem solved.
Everyone.
Now, First Lady Laura Bush, former First Lady Laura Bush, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, excuse me, yesterday, and she said basically the same.
She said she lives in a border state.
She appreciates the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but the zero tolerance policy is cruel, it is immoral, and it breaks her heart.
Well, Obama had the same policy, Mrs. Bush.
And let me say, I always thought Laura Bush was a dignified, graceful first lady, always admired her, think she's very nice.
Women still do.
He's dead wrong on this.
Laura Bush and her husband, George W. Bush, somebody that I voted for twice, somebody I respected that I don't anymore.
I believe he loves America.
But what I don't respect is George and Laura Bush remained dead silent while Obama tried to impose socialism in this nation.
They remained dead silent.
While day in and day out, he sat in the Oval Office and via executive order and caveat tried to erode the Constitution.
They didn't say a word.
When Obama was punitively, and this is the big difference here, okay?
Obama's administration was punitively jailing these kids.
Trump administration is doing it in certain circumstances, and it's not jail, it's a shelter.
The Obama administration was actually putting them in what looked more like jails, in cages.
George and Laura Bush sat dead silent, didn't say a word.
Not a word.
But now, because they don't like Trump, because Trump called Jeb Bush low energy, they're out there criticizing, going back on, reversing, violating decade upon decade upon decade of Bush family policy to never comment on another administration when a Bush is out of office, whether it's Congress or the presidency.
But when it's Trump, all bets are off.
Administration Hypocrisy00:08:37
Got to take him down.
Got to take Trump down.
Now, Democratic lawmakers in New Jersey decided to launch a stunt the other day.
And they were New York and New Jersey lawmakers, all dams, all far left.
They went to an ICE detention center yesterday for a surprise Father's Day visit, and they included a who's who of far-left morons.
Representative Hakeem Jeffrey, Representative Zakeem Jeffries of New York, Gerald Nadler of New York, Adriano Espalot from New York, Carolyn Maloney from New York, Frank Pallone Jr. from New Jersey, Abio Sears from New Jersey, and Bill Caskrell from New Jersey.
They arrived around 9 a.m. for their publicity stunt with cameras in tow, and intelligently and appropriately, they were denied entry, screaming and yelling and stomping their feet.
Eventually, they were allowed in more than an hour later, after they were banging on the door, telling ICE and local police they would not move.
After, here's what Representative Carolyn Maloney, who wants to take everybody's gun, said.
Now, these people just quote: after being made to wait over an hour, after having to deal with local PD, after banging on the door and making it clear that we will not move in capitals until allowed in, ICE is finally granting us access to see individuals who have been separated from their families.
We are now speaking with detainees who were separated from their children when they sought asylum in the U.S. from terrible violence and danger at home.
But that's really not it.
They came illegally.
They didn't properly go through the asylum process.
Okay?
The new excuse on the left is: well, they don't have access to the internet.
They don't know how to seek asylum.
Well, I think in 2018, you could find out because they seem to make their way through a thousand, whatever miles of Mexico, maybe more.
And I'm guessing that along the way, you could probably stop and find out how to ask for asylum in the United States now.
These people are choosing to cross illegally.
The Trump administration is being eviscerated, is being vilified, is being called Nazi, white supremacist, cruel, dictatorial, just authoritarian, all of these horrible, horrible things for having the audacity to do something they should be doing, which is enforce federal immigration law.
That's what they're doing wrong.
They're enforcing federal immigration law.
And they're being roundly, roundly criticized by the left for doing so.
Unfortunately, from some neocons and rhinos on the right as well.
But I say this to the Trump administration.
Keep on keeping on.
This is a drastic problem and it's going to take drastic measures.
And law enforcement, I often say, does not look pleasant because you're enforcing a law that someone broke.
The optics of that, pretty much 10 times out of 10 are going to look bad, but it needs to be done.
Like I always tell you, society falls down.
That's why I want the Trump administration to keep doing what they're doing.
Society falls down.
put political correctness before public safety a lot to cover a lot going on over the weekend We've got this raging war between the DOJ and Congress with Devin Nunez and Trey Gowdy threatening to issue subpoenas, even going as far as to impeach Rod Rosenstein if he doesn't comply.
Got this massive battle happening over illegal immigration and a lot of fallout over what I thought was a very tepid speech by FBI Director Christopher Wray last week after the IG report dropped.
Here to break it down with me is political analyst, commentator, and founder of American Majority Ned Ryan.
Ned, thanks for being here.
Good to be with you, John.
And Ned, I just want to tell the audience, Ned's video's lagging a little.
His video's lagging a bit, but his audio is solid.
So we're good to go.
Ned, real quick, I want to cover, because I did it in my first segment today, this debate over illegal immigration and the lies being told by the left.
I thought that Homeland Security Secretary Kirsten Nielsen did an outstanding job of explaining that if you come to the border or any port of entry and you legally request asylum, your children will not be separated.
The people thatse children are being separated.
And by the way, kids in these shelters, only 10% of them are separatees.
We learned from DHS this weekend.
These are people who are either committing crimes and not the parent or a custodial guardian of the child, or authorities feel the kid is in danger in some other way, correct?
Yeah, correct.
And I think the thing that people have to be reminded of is get a little perspective.
I mean, some of this legislation that we're dealing with right now was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
The Obama administration, I think at a certain point, was doing twice as many of these separations.
So it's amazing to me, again, kind of highlights the hypocrisy of the mainstream media and some on the left with all of a sudden they're losing their minds over practices that were implemented and actually conducted by Democrat presidents in the very recent past.
And it's one of those things, John, I think we finally are hopefully getting to a point where we've got to fix this immigration problem.
I mean, that was one of the reasons Donald Trump was elected.
It's one of the reasons.
Build the wall, one of the top three reasons he was elected.
And so when you look at this whole issue, again, it highlights the hypocrisy.
I would actually argue, John, it's a little frustrating.
I think the White House got caught a little flat-footed on this.
Again, they should have been aware that the mainstream media was going to come after them in their hippocrat, usual hypocritical way.
Kind of what I would like to see in some ways is maybe go back to that Obama era detention center where families are kept together until they're deported.
But at the same time, we've got to start making deals here and say, if we're going to do that, we'll give you that.
You're going to give us a wall, full funding for a wall in border security.
You're going to stop chain migration.
And we're going to deal and really get this immigration issue dealt with.
Because I'm making the point, made the point on CNN on Friday.
You know, we're having all these conversations.
It's hyper-partisan.
Some people don't want to, you know, people want to give this.
They don't want to give this.
At some point, we have to understand 10 or 15 years from now, when mass automation hits and we have millions and millions more of low-skilled or unskilled laborers in this country that are thrown out of work.
There's either going to be bloodshed in the streets or they're going to be thrown onto our already massive welfare systems.
And then the only way that those welfare systems actually function is people like us are going to get hit with life-crushing draconian taxes.
Oh, it's going to be devastating.
We're going to, the entire country now is going to look like California with a 60 to 64 percent tax rate.
No, no water.
Our infrastructure is going to be taxed to the extreme.
It's going to be devastating.
Devastating.
Absolutely devastating.
And I hope that we can at least get to that point where we understand and common sense actually starts to kick in, where more and more of the American people realize, listen, we are a nation of immigrants.
We want them to come here legally as we have put out laws and set the laws.
You know, it's amazing to me too, John, the hypocrisy of the left when they lose their minds over a whole merit-based system when we see that Canada and Australia and other countries have that.
That's all we want.
We want to have the ability to say as a sovereign nation, we can choose who to accept or not to accept to come into this nation to be a citizen of the United States.
And all that we are asking is that you come legally and that when you come, you love this country and that you do your best to be an actual contributing citizen to the betterment of society.
I think that's a pretty, very easy task.
It is.
It is.
It's common sense, like you say, but the immigrant classes who came in the past, my great, great, great-grandparents on one side of the family and great great on the other, they looked at this thing a little differently.
My great-grandfather, one of my great-grandfathers, was born in Italy, but he came here young, and his dad, my great-great-grandfather, before they immigrated, bought a building in Queens.
Not an expensive building, but he wanted to at least own something in America, know he could establish a building.
He had an ice business back before we had home heating oil, right?
You would, on a horse-drawn cart, they would bring ice around.
But at least he knew his family had a place to live, his business had a facility, and he had a way to feed his family.
Entitlements were never in the mindset.
Right.
Hard Times and Lost Faith00:05:21
Right?
That's the difference.
No, no, no.
And the thing that concerns me is, especially with the whole issue of chain migration, there's an estimate that we'll have seven to eight million new immigrants coming through chain migration in the next 20 years that will actually vote.
And this is why Democrats are never going to give this up.
And this is why we have to get to a point where we've got to solve this.
Democrats don't want to give it up because they view that as their path to political dominance for decades to come.
But they're coming and they're voting Democrat because they have a view that government should take care of them.
And I think that's the troubling issue with what we're seeing.
Again, as you were pointing out, with these new immigrants that are coming in, they're coming in and they're voting Democrat because they believe that there should be massive social welfare systems.
And the conversation that has to be had, John, is social welfare systems are to be used as a backstop, not a permanent residence.
And I think that we've completely lost this perspective.
Listen, Republicans, conservatives, we understand that there are hard times in life, that there are people that hit hard times that have to have some help from society.
It's not meant to be for the next decade or two that you're residing in social welfare programs.
And so that's the other debate we have to have of how do we get to the point where we say this is a backdrop, not a permanent residence.
You can be on here for a certain amount of years.
And then after that, we're going to work on getting you towards actually being a self-sufficient, contributing citizen of this country.
That I couldn't agree more.
Let's switch gears in the last five or six minutes we have.
I want to talk about the DOJ war with Congress.
Real quick, I want to touch on Christopher Wray.
What I thought was only a tepid speech last week.
I thought it was embarrassing, embarrassment, foolish.
I'm really glad, though, very, very glad that the FBI only accepts 5% of their honors interns.
Maybe they can backflip and shoot somebody in a crowd with their gun.
He didn't address any, any of the problems in the FBI.
As a former law enforcement guy, that was one of the weakest policy statements I'd ever heard from a chief law enforcement officer.
If you had not read the Office of Inspector General's report and were listening to Christopher Wray, you would have thought, you know, some FBI agents, they misused the photocopy machine.
They made some people their faces and their butt beeks.
Oh, we can do better than this.
You know, somebody used somebody else's parking space in the garage.
This is unacceptable behavior.
No, what happened, and this is the part that was not only nauseating, but in some ways chilling about Christopher Wray's press conference.
He didn't address the fact that we had FBI agents, senior FBI agents, stating explicitly in so many words, we'll stop it, meaning we will use our law enforcement system to stop a potential presidential candidate from becoming president of the United States.
You know what we call that?
We call that weaponizing the police state, the law enforcement state against political opponents.
That is completely and wildly unacceptable.
And I think the thing that's insulting, John, about all of this, a gentleman by the name of Peter Strzok not only has his security clearance still, he is still employed by the FBI.
With a badge and a gun and powers of arrest.
By the way, by the way, NHRNED, which we all know, where he has access to the personnel files of others that he can use to strong arm men.
And this is one of the most egregious situations.
Now, I tweeted something.
I think you retweeted it.
And it really is true.
An FBI agent that were to use their official government vehicle to go to Walgreens to get their sick child cough syrup.
If there are other cars in the shop, the merit instantly, without any administrative proceeding, loses 30 to 60 days.
Peter Stroke still gets paid.
He's got a job.
He's never lost one day on the job for weaponizing the FBI.
We've got about two, three minutes left.
What do you think?
Are Nicas and Gowdy serious?
Do you think they would actually start issuing subpoenas and draft articles of impeachment for Rod Rosenstein if the DOJ and FBI do not comply with Congress' congressional demands?
I have a hard time believing Gowdy, seeing he's all over the place.
Of course, he said some really good things yesterday on Fox News Sunday that I think he was absolutely outraged by stuff that he saw in the Office of Inspector General.
He won't do anything.
He won't do anything.
He doesn't do anything.
At the end of the day, he says, oh, but Mueller's a great guy.
Let's let him do what he's got to do.
I think Devin Nunes, if he is empowered and given the ability to do that, I think he will follow through.
The question is, will Republican leadership allow him to do that?
I think I would certainly hope so.
And you saw this tweet yesterday, John.
I think after seeing that Office of Inspector General's report, which in its very nature basically demonstrated and showed massively preferential treatment, which by any other definition is biased for Hillary Clinton and her clonies to get away with not going to jail because you and I would be in jail right now if we had done that.
Without a doubt.
Without doubt.
And I think what we need to have now, and I've been fighting this, I think we either need to have a second special counsel or a select committee of the House and the Senate to have open proceedings in which we bring and we have full transparency and accountability.
And the other thing I would offer is this, John.
As the head of the executive branch, Donald Trump has the ability to have massive transparency by doing radical declassifying a lot of things that took place last eight years.
One of those three things or all of those three things need to happen because if we cannot have faith and trust in the DOJ and the FBI, the supposed guardians of the rule of law and even-handed justice, it calls into question a lot of things in society.
Phil Murphy's Dilemma00:09:26
Our whole system falls down.
And Americans, everyday Americans, start to say, well, if the protected class doesn't have to follow the law, why do I?
Why do we?
And that's what leads to chaos.
Ned is always an absolute pleasure.
Check him out on Twitter.
Always, always love his Twitter feed.
It's at Ned Ryan, correct?
I don't have it up in front of you.
That's right.
N-E-D-R-Y-U-N.
N-E-R-Y-U-N.
Ned, my friend, it's always a pleasure.
Hopefully next time we'll get the video issue sorted out.
I think it might have been on my end.
Sorry about that, but the audio was great.
So the audience got the full effect, my friend.
Thanks.
Sounds good.
Thanks, John.
Now, the FBI typically defines a mass shooting as three or more people shot.
Well, there was a pretty significant mass shooting that you probably haven't heard about or heard very little about in Trenton, New Jersey over the weekend.
No protests by the Parkland kids.
No protests by moms demand action or every town for gun safety.
22 people injured.
One of the suspects shot and killed by police.
Of the 22 injured, 17 of those shot, shot.
The others presumably trampled and people were running away and things of that nature.
But you didn't hear really about this.
The Mercer County, New Jersey prosecutor, their DA, Angelo Onofri, said it's a massive crime scene.
This is truly a tragedy for Trenton, Trenton Mayor Eric Jackson said.
13-year-old boy, 13-year-old boy, a little boy, in extremely critical condition.
Four others in critical condition.
Reports that that 13-year-old boy was shot in the head.
Why didn't you hear about this, this mass shooting?
Well, because it was two gangbangers shooting it out, hitting people in the crowd, complete disregard for life with illegal guns in essentially gun-free New Jersey, New Jersey, some of the most draconian gun control laws in the United States.
Two suspects, this is from a Fox News report, but the details came out of local New Jersey media.
Two suspects opened fire shortly between 2.45 a.m.
Now, this was happening at something called the All-Night Art Show in the Robling Market section of Trenton, New Jersey.
Trenton's a pretty rough city.
And what this is, it's a 24-hour cultural and art event.
Should be a really nice event.
They're doing it in this old converted building.
And, you know, we see this quite a bit in bad areas in New York like Red Hook, where they've converted these old buildings into these warehouses where you have all these hipster businesses.
Pretty cool, actually.
Blacksmiths and glassblowers and creative businesses.
And it is pretty cool stuff.
I'll admit it, you know.
And this should have been a nice festival, but gangsters are going to gangster.
You know, the gangbangers are going to act like savages.
So they come in when people are there just trying to look at art and overnight, probably having a few drinks, start shooting the place up because they can't function in society like normal human beings.
But this story isn't top of the headlines.
They're on a massive protest in the streets of Trenton.
Why?
Again, gangsters, gangbangers, they were non-white.
That does play in with illegal guns.
These were not white men in states where it was easy to obtain a firearm.
This completely debunks the narrative.
So you can't have a mass shooting on the books where 17 are shot.
You can't have that in gun-free New Jersey perpetrated by gangbangers with illegal guns.
It completely kills the narrative that only places where, and by the way, it wasn't an AR-15 or an AR-15 variant used in this shooting.
So it's a further nail in the coffin of it getting national media attention.
But one of the suspects is dead, and the main suspect is dead.
Another is in custody.
Everybody ran to the door.
And the people fighting and shooting got mixed with the crowd that was running and they went out the door shooting.
Unreal.
All of a sudden, my brother goes to me, you hear that gunfire?
I go, it sounds like fireworks.
He said, no, that's gunfire.
The next thing you know, we turn around and everybody's running down the street.
All hell broke loot.
That's from a couple of witnesses.
One guy, Franco Roberts, said he saw two punches and heard several gunshot.
The witnesses all told pretty much the same story.
Now, New Jersey's new governor, Phil Murphy, one of the most far-left morons to ever hold public office, a guy who should be solidly, solidly ashamed of himself, sees guns as the problem.
Guns, gun-free New Jersey, two gangbangers with illegal guns.
New Jersey having the most draconian gun laws in the U.S. right now.
Maybe Maryland's are a little bit worse.
Unreal.
But here's the bigger problem for New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy.
Let me read it to you from another Fox News story.
A suspect's gang membership and early release from prison after Murphy took office.
May have been bigger factors.
May have been bigger factors.
Yes, you heard it right.
Far, far-left governor, Phil Murphy, when he took office, began releasing hardcore bad guys from jail.
And the dead suspect, the one who was killed by police, a guy named Tahaji Wells, 33 years old.
Well, he was one of them.
He was one of the bad guys that Phil Murphy's policies released from prison early.
The second suspect, he's identified.
His name is Amir Armstrong.
He's hospital and in stable condition, facing weapons charge.
He should be facing charges of shooting these people.
A third suspect is in critical condition.
Murphy was a Goldman Sachs banker, really liberal guy.
He was also Barack Obama's ambassador to Germany.
He's a very wealthy, very, very wealthy, very liberal guy.
And, of course, just began calling for gun control.
Didn't address that there were illegal guns.
Didn't address the rampant gang and crime problems in Trenton, New Jersey, the nation's New Jersey's capital, by the way.
Most importantly, didn't address the early release program in New Jersey prisons for violent offenders.
No, he's blaming guns that are all but impossible, especially handguns, all but impossible to get in the state of New Jersey.
His quote, Murphy's quote, quote, it is yet another reminder of the senseless gun violence, even having signed six stringent gun laws last week.
He said that at a news conference following a service at a local church.
He went on to say, these are not, well, he wrote on Twitter, these are not inappropriate times to talk about gun policy.
These are the most important times to talk about gun policy.
Well, it wasn't gun policy, though.
Let's look at why the bad guy, Tahaji Wells, was on the street able to shoot 17 people.
Wells had been released from prison in February despite receiving an 18-year prison sentence in 2004 for aggravated manslaughter in the shooting death of a 22-year-old man.
So this guy had already killed somebody, already killed somebody, and the liberals in New Jersey let him out of prison and he went back out there and now there's a 13-year-old boy in the hospital in critical condition.
What is being reported to be a bullet in his head?
Huh.
But wait, there's more.
In 2010, while Wells was in prison, he was sentenced to six additional years for racketeering charges.
He was running a gang from inside the prison.
And he should have been in jail for another, it should have been through the 2020s.
But he was back on the street.
And that was all because of Phil Murphy, who has, he ran for office on shortening prison sentences, on releasing bad guys from prisons.
Unreal.
Unreal.
The liberal governor of New Jersey's policies enabled a murderer.
This guy was not a nonviolent drug offender.
He killed a 22-year-old.
Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, enacted policies that put this guy back on the street where he shot 17 people.
Luckily, Wells was killed by police, so he won't be doing anything again.
And the governor of New Jersey, the far-left governor of New Jersey, his response is to go after guns.
I say it all the time.
The liberal agenda is deadly.
They don't care about public safety.
They could not care less.
They coddle criminals at the expense of the safety of you and your family.
Government Databases and Privacy00:07:11
The privacy advocates are a little concerned over police in Hagerstown, Maryland, using the state's driver's license database combined with facial recognition technology to solve a crime.
This is a story from the Wall Street Journal.
And I actually think this is very smart policing.
Look, driving is a privilege, okay?
When you obtain your driver's license, you know that you're putting your name, your date of birth, many other things about you, your address, and your photo into a state database.
So in this case, what happened was police had an Instagram photo of a robbery suspect.
They fed that Instagram photo into the facial recognition software they had tied to the driver's license database.
The Instagram photo was reconciled against driver's license photos.
A facial recognition comparison was made and the suspect was found.
Now, 31 states are now allowing this from the Wall Street Journal, police to allow driver's license photos in facial recognition searches.
I have no problem with it.
Civil liberties advocates say that giving police unfettered access to photos of people who have committed no crimes infringes on those civilians' privacy.
Kind of an argument that falls on deaf ears, though, because police have all of our registration information and driver's license information already in their computers.
It's logical they have the photos.
Look, I'm a privacy advocate.
I've defended privacy many, many times.
But I also say you know what you opt in for.
If you choose to drive a vehicle, if you choose to get a state-issued non-driver ID, you know you're giving the state your information.
Look, I choose to be part of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA's global entry program.
So if I travel abroad and I come back into the U.S., I can scan my fingerprints.
I don't have to talk to a customs person, any of that, right?
I also choose to be part of TSA Pre-Check, where I gave the same biometric information and a lot of personal info.
The government has my retinas, my fingerprints.
I'm also part of the Clear Travel Program, which is a private vendor for the U.S. government.
They have it as well.
I know when I submit that information that one day, that imagery, those biometrics can be used if I commit a crime.
I know that going in, that's the case.
You can't really cry foul.
And law enforcement officials are saying, and I think rightfully so, it's a valuable tool.
Sheriff Bob Goltieri of Pinellas County, Florida, down here in Florida, says, quote, this is no different than if I laid out all those photos in front of me and said, no, that doesn't look like him.
That doesn't look like him.
Here we go.
That's him.
The only thing I am doing in a different way, a more automated way, a more efficient way.
He's doing it.
Now, Sheriff Goltieri, who, by the way, has an impeccable reputation.
He's actually the chair of the commission looking into Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel that we've been very vocal here at the Rebel about removing from office.
Goltieri has an impeccable reputation as a sheriff.
He's right.
Police do lineups.
Police do what's called photo arrays, where you put photos of different people.
And somebody looks at the photo array, typically six photos of people who look similar to the suspect with the suspect in there.
And they say, ooh, oh, it's nobody, or yep, that's him.
Not those five, that's him.
This is simply an automated, more digital way of doing that.
And I really don't have any problem with it.
I don't have any problem with it because they're only using photos that have been voluntarily submitted to government, i.e. your driver's license photo.
You waited online.
You paid a fee to give government that information.
Well, you can't cry foul when government shares it with other government agencies.
Now, in New York City, the police are saying they want to get access to driver's license photos, which are currently limited to mugshots, but have faced opposition from privacy advocates.
New York State is not playing ball with the city.
Maryland police are using what they call Maryland's image repository system to compare images with more than 7 million driver's license photos and more than 3 million mugshots.
Look, the privacy is your privacy is not going to be infringed upon anymore.
In other words, your driver license information is not going to be any less secure if shared with law enforcement.
There's a law here in the United States, been acted for many, many years called the DPPA, the Driver Privacy Protection Act.
And it puts very, very strict criteria on what even law enforcement can use your driver's license information for.
So this is one case where the safeguards actually predate the internet.
They predate the mass digitization of records.
And I really don't have any problem with this.
I said, you know, I think this is sound law enforcement.
Look, if this were law enforcement, good example is that we found out states like Delaware, Maryland, states with strong gun control laws, were using, were accessing databases of those who had concealed weapons license and reconciling those against license plate and then pulling over vehicles from those states, especially as they were driving through these states.
You know, a lot of people drive from the Northeast down to Florida on vacation and they were saying, okay, there's a plate from or back, you know, back and forth from Florida to see relatives.
Well, there's a Florida plate, a lot of concealed weapons licenses in Florida.
Oops, look at that.
That person does have a concealed weapons license.
We can access that.
Because in Florida, the list of those who have concealed weapons licenses, unless you were former law enforcement or had some other reason, public safety to not be on that list, that's public record.
It can be requested.
So these states requested it.
And then they would build their own internal databases that would say, okay, John Smith from Miami, Florida, 123 Main Street.
Well, look at that.
He's got a concealed weapons license.
Whoop, whoop.
Pull him over.
You have a gun on you while you're carrying it on your person or is it still in the trunk?
Oops, that's illegal in this state.
Clink, clank.
I've got a massive, massive problem with that.
That is a blatant Fourth Amendment violation because now you're using data to essentially entrap a person who's not doing anything illegal.
And Peaceable Journey, pretty much that standard pretty much allows that person to have the firearm anyway.
Sure, it should be in the trunk, but they're not a criminal.
This situation will be different.
Somebody who committed a crime is suspected in a crime.
Somebody has identified. an image of the person.
There's an Instagram photo of the person.
We're trying to find out where the person lives, where we have an ID on the person or some form, maybe a first name.
You reconcile that image of a suspect with a lot of supporting evidence against a driver's license photo that they voluntarily submitted.
You find out they live at 321 Elm Street.
That's just good law enforcement.
Now it's not a witch hunt.
Now it's not, you know, a fishing expedition.
You have a suspect in a specific crime.
You have complaining victims, witnesses, evidence, and you're simply using another tool, another investigative tool to find the person to go arrest them or interview them.
I have no problem at all.
So while I am a strong privacy advocate, especially in the age of big data, I think using driver's license photos against photos of suspected criminals to find those criminals, I don't have a privacy concern with it.