July 25, 2025

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

Off-duty Border Protection Officer Shot In N.Y.C Amid Growing Violence Against ICE In ‘Sanctuary Cities’ As U.S. Sues 

By Manzanita Miller  

Democrat leaders’ attempt to devise “sanctuary cities” that restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from performing their jobs and deporting illegal criminals is backfiring after a tragic incident in New York City left an off-duty border patrol agent in the hospital with gunshot wounds.  

A 42-year-old border patrol agent who was off-duty was shot June 19 in a park in upper Manhattan in an alleged robbery attempt by two Dominican men according to multiple reports. Video of the incident released by the Department of Homeland Security shows one of the suspects approaching the off-duty officer on the evening of June 19. 

According to President Donald Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the two suspects who carried out the attempted robbery were Dominican nationals with criminal records and in the country illegally.    

“Our officer was off duty on Saturday evening when him and his friend were attacked”, Noem said Monday in a statement. “They were attacked by two individuals that were set on robbing them, and thankfully he had his service weapon and was able to defend himself and his friend.”  

Noem went on to name the officer’s alleged attackers, both of whom she reported are Dominican foreign nationals, and both of whom are reportedly inside the United States illegally.   

One man, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, had allegedly been arrested in four separate incidents in New York City. The other alleged attacker, also a Dominican national, is reported to be Christian Aybar-Berroa, a man who reportedly entered the United States in 2022 and was ordered to leave by an immigration judge in 2023 but clearly did not obey the order.   

According to Noem’s statement, the border patrol officer was shot and injured and is in the hospital fighting for his life. The tragic shooting of the officer in New York City is just one example of escalating violence in so-called sanctuary cities, particularly against law enforcement.   

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) statistics released July 15, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are facing an 830 percent increase in assaults from January 21st to July 14th compared with the same period in 2024.  

The Trump Administration’s response to the tragedy in New York City has been swift.  President Donald Trump’s efforts to secure the border and improve safety in U.S. cities will now include sending more Immigration and Customs agents into these so-called “sanctuary cities” to clean them up.   

“The sanctuary cities are now our priority,” said White House border czar Tom Homan who joined Noem Monday for a statement. “We’re going to flood the zone”, Homan said. “So what are we going to do, more agents in New York City, to look for that bad guy, so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want, more agents in the community and more agents in the work site.”      

Now, the U.S. is suing New York City and challenging the city’s sanctuary policies as a violation of the Constitution’s Article VI supremacy clause making the Constitution and all laws made pursuant to it, including immigration laws, the “supreme law of the land”.   

New York City has been one of the cities least willing to work with the Department of Homeland security and ICE to detain criminals. DHS reported on X that in the last six months under President Trump and Secretary Noem, ICE has issued over 6,000 detainer requests in N.Y.C., a more than 400 percent increase compared to the Biden administration. However, DHS reports that N.Y.C. politicians have honored only a handful of these requests, allowing criminals to continue roaming the streets, many with violent records.    

Despite rising crime in U.S. cities, particularly those that attempt to shield criminals from incarceration and deportation through “sanctuary” status, Democrat officials appear unwilling to curb the behavior of repeat criminals to protect residents. It is no wonder that the Democratic Party is facing its lowest approval rating in decades, and repeatedly labeled as weak, woke, and ineffective by voters.  

Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.  

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/07/off-duty-border-protection-officer-shot-in-n-y-c-amid-growing-violence-against-ice-in-sanctuary-cities-as-u-s-sues/  

How The Insanity Ends 

By John Gill 

We are all living in a bubble, a pressurized ball that gets inundated with messages, “news”, opinion-manipulation and unending social engineering. The results are more evident every day.  It is, in a word, insane. 

Trying to avoid the onslaught of communication is not an effective response. Those who do bath in it then impact those who are trying not to. The end result is an ever-expanding population that is trapped in the information vortex, consuming the non-stop deluge of rumors, stories and “analysis”. 

Let’s take a couple of examples. 

A major in-house organ of the globalist left, the Atlantic, runs a story about food being destroyed by the Trump Administration. Most of the story is an emotion laden tirade about the children that will starve and the damage to be done, all because Trump ended the corrupt and graft-ridden USAID. This had the effect of spawning dozens of stories in the known tactics of recycling distorted information so widely that it would then be presented as fact with the resulting hatred and anger at the Administration. 

But the story was truly distorted. As reported by Reuters — hardly a pro-Trump outlet — the food in question was in a warehouse in Dubai for emergency use only in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A large quantity was about to reach its expiration date so it had to be used or destroyed. Over half was deployed but a bit under half had to be destroyed. 

Now think for one minute about how the equivalent of K-Rations got to an expiration date? It had to be sitting there a good while. Why wasn’t a system in place to alert those in charge of impending expiration? And why was it a lower-level employee who alerted the newly installed Trump official about the problem — who immediately responded and saved over 600 million tons — and not the so-called Senior Executive? 

An honest story would have asked that question; or at least reported as did Reuters on the real numbers and circumstances. But no, for those at the Atlantic reporting was not the mission, causing harm and creating hate was the mission. 

Is this only an issue on the radical Left? 

No, it is sadly not.   

Reporting from conservative and pro-MAGA outlets regularly understate the damage done in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force. The right to retribution for the horror of October 7, 2023 has become for some a license to ignore or write-off some truly horrendous actions. And those who want to put a stop to the slaughter are lumped into one definition of pro-Palestinian Hamas-loving gang of terrorists. That, to be direct, is not true. There is a cost to the war in human suffering that should not be ignored. 

There are many people on the right who are concerned about and outright oppose the Israeli actions. They are isolated and ignored. The impact is to further polarize the public around an issue that is so multi-faceted that it makes a prism look flat. 

What these examples, and countless others, have in common is the end result — division, anger, emotional responses and in some cases violence that is driving us and many other nations in the West toward civil war.   

Once seen in this light, a couple of things jump to mind. The first is how to short-circuit the messaging barrage, how reduce the negative effect? And the second is the very fundamental Cui Bono — who benefits from this destructive behavior that is literally creating insanity in the world? 

Short-circuiting the process is both easy and very difficult. The first step is to question everything. Understand from the thing you read in the morning that someone is trying to manipulate you into a position or state of mind that serves them.  Do not accept any of it, whether it comes from Donald Trump or AOC. As with the food story, just a quick google search yielded the facts, in that case from Reuters. In other cases it will require the suspension of personal biases to look for facts. 

But that is not all of it. Even if you are able to walk away from the emotionally charged propaganda, those close to you may not. And, as a result, their actions will affect you. So, spreading the doctrine of “question everything” has to become a movement. It cannot and should not be tied to any party or position or person. It is a way to block the impact of a communications machine that has nothing but ill-will as it purpose. That is the hard part, getting others to use the question-everything approach and avoiding the trap of emotion and blind acceptance. 

The second question of Who Benefits from all of this is more difficult to pin down. But it is clear that there are those in the dark recesses that seek to stir division and hatred for their own gain. Those who have never believed in free peoples running their own lives gain. Those who relentlessly push for global power and control gain from chaos. And, to be blunt, the international bankers gain. The phrase, “the time to buy is when there is blood in the streets” comes to mind. 

Most certainly, those who look to use chaos and disruption gain. And with the information environment so spread out and fractured, it is fairly easy to accomplish. The insanity of our current political and social world must be addressed, we cannot as a people or as individuals allow it to continue on its current trajectory. Changing that trajectory will be the greatest challenge of the next ten years but will decide if we as a nation dedicated to individual liberty can survive or continue down the path of delusion, manipulation and ultimate slavery. 

John Gill is a contributor to Americans for Limited Government. 

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/07/how-the-insanity-ends/