On September 21, 2018 Newsweek published a disturbing article that contained infuriating revelations titled Google Brainstormed Ways To Combat Trump’s Travel Ban By Leveraging Search Results For Pro-Immigration Causes.
The Newsweek report stated that Google and their hi-tech colluders took legal action to block the Trump administration from enforcing standing immigration law.
Google, along with Apple, Facebook and other technology companies, filed a joint amicus brief challenging the travel ban, stating that it “inflicts significant harm on American business, innovation and growth.”
It is clear that to the employees and the executives of Google (and other hi-tech companies), America’s borders and immigration laws are impediments to their wealth and to the goals of their companies, rather than what they truly are, our first and last line of defense.
This set the stage for Google’s efforts days after the Trump administration first issued an executive order on immigration in January 2017, which would temporarily prevent the entry of citizens of seven countries from entering the United States, not because of their religion but because they could not be effectively vetted.
The media has repeatedly noted that the countries on the list were “Muslim Majority” countries yet many other “Muslim Majority” countries were not on that list including Indonesia, the most populist ‘Muslim Majority” country on the planet.
Google is determined to obstruct the Trump administration from enforcing long-standing immigration laws to protect America from international terrorists.
Here is how this Newsweek report began:
Google employees brainstormed ways to mitigate the effects of Donald Trump’s travel ban in 2017 by altering search functions to show pro-immigration organizations, new emails showed.
The company’s internal email chain, obtained and reported on by The Wall Street Journal, shows employees at the multibillion-dollar technology company discussing how to combat Trump’s travel ban against seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
Google workers talked about how they could alter their search functions to show their users how to contribute to pro-immigration causes. They also discussed how to alter the search engine so that people could easily contact their lawmakers and government agencies to ask questions about the ban, the emails showed.
Employees also suggested ways to “leverage” Google searches so that they could counter “islamophobic” search results from people looking up terms like “Islam,” “Muslim” and “Iran.”
The article subsequently claimed that the e-mails sent around by Google employees were merely a part of a “brainstorm of ideas.”
There is no comfort to be taken Google’s statement that “[o]ur processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies,” or
from the supposed assurances that Google had never manipulated or modified its search results to promote a particular political ideology or that no such manipulations or modifications were ever employed during the last presidential campaign or after the election when President Trump issued executive orders on immigration.
If members of Google’s management were not in agreement with their subordinates attempts to manipulate or modify search results, why didn’t they stop them?
The Newsweek article noted that a Google employee opined how difficult it would be to implement such changes in the search results, but was quoted as saying, “But I think this is the sort of super timely and imperative information that we need, as we know that this country and Google would not exist without immigration.”
No one in the Trump administration has suggested stopping immigration, yet the quoted Google employee implies as much.
President Trump was only attempting to make certain that our screening process is equal to the task of preventing the entry of international terrorists. Hardly a radical or unreasonable goal!
I am certain that Google maintains strict control over the people who enter their campuses and other facilities, yet Google management and their employees oppose efforts by the Trump administration to similarly control the entry of aliens into the United States.
We must not lose sight of the fact that, no matter how the media and the immigration anarchists may attempt to spin the purpose to the Trump administration’s executive orders, in reality they were issued to protect national security and public safety by enforcing a long-standing provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The administration’s actions were, in fact, consistent with the findings, recommendations and warnings of the 9/11 Commission.
The first paragraph of the preface of the official report, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel stated:
It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.
We must start by unraveling the lies and falsehoods about the supposed “Travel Ban” which was never a travel ban at all, but actually an entry restriction that was intended to protect the United States from the entry of aliens who could not be screened, thereby preventing our CBP (Customs and Border Protection) inspectors from halting entry of terrorists into the United States.
What was almost never noted in the media was that the official title of those executive orders was, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United States.”
That title unambiguously established the purpose of the supposedly “controversial” executive order.
My July 23, 2017 article, Courting Disaster: Supreme Court Decides Against Homeland Security included two versions of the executive order that the Trump administration issued to act as the proclamation required in the section of law, provided below. The administration made it abundantly clear that the actions were being taken to protect America and to prevent the entry of aliens who may have connections with terrorism.
Furthermore, Trump’s blocking the entry of aliens from countries associated with terrorism (and where vetting was problematic) did not emerge by executive fiat the way that Mr. Obama created DACA out of thin air.
In point of irrefutable fact, the authority for the President of the United States to block the entry of aliens is a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), specifically 8 U.S. Code § 1182(f) which states:
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
An overview of the INA is provided on the official USCIS website, making clear that the current immigration laws have their foundation in the The McCarran-Walter bill of 1952.
That section of law gives the President of the United States sole authority with wide-ranging discretion to exclude any and all aliens whose presence “…would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” That standard sets as low a bar as could be imagined.
This was certainly not a “Travel Ban” but was a form of entry restriction that was solidly grounded in law. Incidentally, prior administrations, such as the administration of Jimmy Carter, invoked that very same section of law when the U.S. Embassy at Tehran was seized by Iranian radicals and American officials were taken hostage. In that instance, the aliens were citizens of Iran.
On the other hand, Google, as was reported by CNN on August 2, 2018, has no problem helping China maintain a strangle-hold on it citizens:
The Intercept reported Wednesday that Google plans to launch a search app in China that would block sensitive websites and search terms to comply with Chinese government censorship.
Perhaps Google’s management was planning to employ censorship strategies in the United States that are not unlike strategies Google is willing to employ to censor the internet in China.
In any event, the “Tech Giants” have found in the radical leftists of the United States kindred spirits who are determined to undermine national security and to extinguish freedom of speech, and with it, all other freedoms we cherish so dearly.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine. The featured image that appeared in the original column is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
