We are witnessing an extraordinary collapse of the rule of law in our immigration system as hundreds of thousands of migrants exploit our generous asylum system by making bogus claims of asylum after entering the United States illegally.

Caravan after caravan of illegal aliens from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador continually are pushing toward our border.  Mexico is warning that the “mother of all caravans” – over 20,000 people – is gathering in Honduras.  Border apprehensions exceeded 100,000 in March – the highest monthly total in twelve years.

I just visited the border yet again recently.  Unfortunately, the news is not getting better.  Indeed, there is no end in sight for the current crisis.  Worse, official U.S. policy is creating three massive incentives for the caravans to keep coming.

These three incentives are policies of Obama’s that the Trump DHS has kept instead of eliminating.  Why?

The Russian navy, the Military-Maritime Fleet (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot—VMF), always a poor relation to the Russian Land Forces given geography and national traditions, has been contracting in size since 1985.

Now, as Izvestia announced last month, it is going to decline still further because of a decision by the Ministry of Defense to scrap two major surface vessels and four submarines rather than modernize these aging Soviet-era naval assets (Izvestia, April 18).

Defenders of this decision say these ships will be replaced by more capable vessels, but even they concede that the new craft are not going to join the fleet anytime soon.

All this has sparked a debate in Moscow about whether the Russian VMF is capable of supporting Moscow in the war that Vladimir Putin keeps saying is coming or even in more limited theaters. The overwhelming answer from independent experts is “No.”

A version of Les Misérables, new to U.S. viewers, began airing on PBS last week. While even nominally civilized people of the West were cognizant of the cruelty human beings were capable of for hundreds of years, Victor Hugo's novel of 1862 was an exceptional rendition of man's capacity for barbarity.

While Lincoln and the abolitionists were fighting to end slavery in America after having won independence from England, France was still suffering the disastrous consequences of its own ten-year revolution.

That nation lacked the spirit of humanity that animated our revolution and resulted in the American Constitution.  Their revolution devolved into mass murder.  The Reign of Terror began when the Jacobins seized power in 1793.  Thousands were guillotined, and Christianity was eradicated.

Sound familiar?  Our Left has driven itself into a Jacobin frenzy.  If they could guillotine President Trump and every one of his supporters and get away with it, many leftists would.

On Monday (4/22), the Trump Administration announced full sanctions on all countries importing Iranian oil would be in effect next week on May 2.  In announcing the decision, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said:

"The goal remains simple: to deprive the outlaw regime of the funds it had used to destabilize the Middle East for four decades and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country… We have made our demands very clear to the ayatollah and his cronies:

End your pursuit of nuclear weapons, stop testing and proliferating ballistic missiles, stop sponsoring and committing terrorism, halt the arbitrary detention of US citizens. Our pressure is aimed at ending these and others and it will continue to accelerate until Iran is willing to address them.”

China, India and Turkey can do little to resist Donald Trump’s extra-territorial sanctions against Iran.  Why? Washington has established hegemonic control over global finance and the dollarized payments system.

The cost of defying the White House on a large scale is punitively high. A cell at the US Treasury called the Office of Foreign Assets Control – or simply OFAC to its victims – has perfected the art of economic strangulation through the global banking, insurance and shipping nexus.

On April 9, Israeli voters went to the polls and reelected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a landslide to serve a fifth term as prime minister.

American Jewish leaders on both sides of the partisan aisle routinely applaud Israel’s democracy. They argue that it is Israel’s democracy that forms the basis of U.S. support for the Jewish state.

In light of this consistent position, American Jewish leaders across the partisan divide could have been expected to celebrate the elections and the vibrancy of Israeli democracy and the independent mindedness of Israeli voters.

But this did not happen. While conservative Jewish American groups congratulated Israelis for their open democracy, liberal American Jewish groups responded to the Israeli election results by throwing a collective fit.  Such is the tragedy of liberal American Jewry.

Hamas has left Gaza in shambles. Life there is difficult, sad and abnormal.

Only buildings with generators actually maintain steady power. The lack of power affects everything from preserving fresh food to treating sewage.

If a person in Gaza falls ill, he is likely to find trained medical professionals unable to help because of the lack of equipment and medicines. The people there — even the talented and educated — can’t find jobs. The store shelves are empty.

The shoreline, which in many other places in the Mediterranean would be filled with beach resorts, is covered in the raw sewage and debris from successive wars. The cost of conflict is seen in all aspects of life in Gaza.

America and the world wants to help – but the terrorists of Hamas won’t allow it.