The suffering and anger of a grieving father tore the air at the State of the Union address Thursday night.
It happened when President Joe Biden was speaking about his record on safety. “All Americans deserve the freedom to be safe,” Biden said, “and America is safer today than when I took office.”
That was too much for one man in the gallery. “Abbey Gate!” he screamed in an anguished voice, “Second Battalion, First Marines!” Still shouting, he was hustled out the doors of the chamber.
That man is Steve Nikoui, who was the guest of Florida Congressman and U.S. Army veteran Brian Mast. Nikoui is the father of Lance Corporal Kareem Nikoui, a U.S. Marine from Southern California. Lance Corporal Nikoui was one of 13 U.S. military service members killed by a suicide bomber at Kabul Airport’s Abbey Gate in August 2021, during the Biden administration’s hideously incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan. He was 20 years old.
Steve Nikoui was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for interrupting Biden’s speech with his unbearable pain.
Another family grieving the loss of a child to the catastrophic failures of the Biden administration turned down an invitation to attend the State of the Union. The parents of 22-year-old Georgia nursing student Laken Riley stayed home, having buried their daughter just days before.
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled Biden to “Say her name” when he mentioned the border. Biden was prepared for the taunt. He had pre-positioned a campaign button with Laken Riley’s name on it, and he held it up for the cameras. “Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal,” Biden fumbled.
“He should have said ‘undocumented,’” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN later.
Laken Riley was out for a run on the University of Georgia campus when she was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a criminal illegal alien who could have been held in custody and deported, but instead was released into the United States.
She’s far from the only victim of “undocumented” violent criminals.
Last week a stunning report was released by the Center for Immigration Studies about President Biden’s use of his “parole” authority under the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The language of the law (updated in 1996 in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act) allows the government to “parole into the United States temporarily” individuals who otherwise are not eligible to be admitted, but “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
The Biden administration has defined “case-by-case” to mean that every month, up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can use a cell phone app called CBP One to get permission to fly into the United States from their home countries and be “paroled” for two years, with work authorization.
These migrants have to pay for their flights, and they’re supposed to have a financial sponsor or other contact in the U.S. The app runs some kind of biometric identification and criminal background check, although law enforcement officials have said digital criminal records in some countries may not be shared with the U.S. or may not exist.
The Biden administration began this expanded parole program in 2022. Through December 2023, it has allowed 327,000 people to fly into U.S. cities from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The Associated Press reported that about 1 million people have come into the United States through the parole program by land or air. In another expansion of the program, migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and Ecuador can now use the app to fly in and be paroled into the United States.
The Center for Immigration Studies filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out which foreign airports the migrants were departing and at which U.S. airports they were arriving. The government refused to say, asserting that to divulge the information would create “operational vulnerabilities” at airports.
How reassuring.
The parole program accounts for only a fraction of the millions of illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S. under the Biden administration’s policies. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that there were more than 300,000 encounters with illegal migrants at the southwest border just in December, without counting “gotaways” who were detected but not apprehended.
Meanwhile, Biden used his State of the Union speech to rage against lawmakers for hesitating to send even more of your tax dollars to Ukraine. He invoked the name of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to demand that lawmakers “wake up” to the threat posed by Russia. Maybe Biden can’t remember that Russia was a U.S. ally in World War II, or that FDR sat next to Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta Conference where the postwar world was arranged.
Biden’s faulty memory also confuses the events of Jan. 6 with the U.S. Civil War, even though the riot was a full hour and a half shorter than a screening of “Gone With the Wind.”
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History is not Biden’s best subject. He thinks a “two-state solution” is still a live option in the Middle East, and a pier built by the U.S. military on the coast of Gaza will be “temporary” and only used to resupply such things as diapers and dinners. History says otherwise.
Biden’s foreign policy has been a worsening catastrophe. He has led the United States into a dangerous proxy war with Russia, abandoning deterrence and diplomacy for a taxpayer-funded arms bazaar that enriches cronies and donors. He is sending U.S. service members to the Gaza coast for operations that could become a trip wire for a wider conflict. He has made national security and public safety secondary to his policy goal of enabling millions of illegal immigrants, even from terrorism-infested countries, to come right in.
Some presidents have achievements in foreign policy that help them win re-election even when their domestic policies fail.
Biden is 0 for 2.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley