Reports are emerging that the Trump administration is once again considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as an officially classified terrorist organization. This ultimate no-brainer move will serve to empower policymakers and government officials to crack down on the double-dealing Islamist extremist organization, which seeks to undermine the United States and our allies abroad.

The New York Times reports:

The White House is pushing to issue an order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, bringing the weight of American sanctions against a storied and influential Islamist political movement with millions of members across the Middle East, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by an Egyptian preacher named Hassan al-Banna, who is a revered, almost holy figure in the fundamentalist Islamic community. 

Al-Banna said of his group’s founding ideology: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” The MB leader, who later became a staunch admirer of Adolf Hitler, called on his followers to constantly “prepare for jihad” and be “lovers of death.”

The Muslim Brotherhood originally sought to seize control of Egypt before pursuing a worldwide expansion. Since the day of the organization’s founding right up to modern day, its leaders have consistently endorsed violent action as a means to achieve its ends. However, unlike groups such as ISIS or al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, while sharing those groups’ ideology, has preferred to take a long-term strategic course, instead of pursuing immediate violent action, to achieve its endgame.

Terrorism experts often describe the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway to violence and further extremism, as proven by its rogues’ gallery of terrorist alumni, which includes Osama bin Laden, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and current al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, to name a few.

Today, the Muslim Brotherhood and its devotees find sanctuary in many nations, but its most prominent backers are the nations of Qatar and Turkey, which not only provide safe havens for the group’s top leaders, but also remain devotees to the group’s global Islamist agenda. Qatar is home to the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who has publicly endorsed suicide bombings against American soldiers deployed abroad. 

If the Muslim Brotherhood is classified as a terrorist group in the U.S., it remains unclear what would become of its offshoots in the United States, such as the terror-tied Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), among others. A terrorist designation could also provide legal hurdles for new Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who have consistently advocated for those groups and even keynoted several fundraisers for the MB-tied outfits. 

Since the early days of the Trump administration, conservatives and a widespread coalition of national security experts have been advocating for the White House to pursue the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist designation. Previous efforts to push the terrorist designation regularly hit a standstill, as it seemingly did not have the support of key cabinet members. However, both national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been major advocates for a Muslim Brotherhood terrorist designation. Bolton has voiced his support publicly for the measure, while Pompeo cosponsored a bill supporting the designation while he was in Congress.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots have been classified as a terrorist organization in several nations, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Israel, Russia, and elsewhere. The United States currently classifies the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, as a foreign terrorist organization.

In 1984, the WSJ published an op-ed, “In Praise of Huddled Masses.” "We propose a five-word constitutional amendment: There shall be open borders.” Well, 35 years later, that is exactly what we have. Our government is now telling us that the laws, which actually say the opposite, compel them to let anyone in. We didn’t even need a constitutional amendment to create open borders. We just needed judges.

As we allow nearly everyone into our country and release them into our communities, the “mother of all caravans” is forming in Honduras, according to media in Mexico. Was there ever a time in history when we allowed this to go on? Remember, our current laws have been in place since 1952, and the updated asylum statutes have been in place since 1980. We’ve been through this before, only then, as I demonstrated with the case of the Haitian boat people in 1993, our government shut it down immediately. But there is another case we should study that is even a better apples-to-apples comparison to what is going on today, and that is the way we shut down the asylum surge of Nicaraguans in south Texas in 1989.

Following the coup of Sandinista Marxists against the Somoza dynasty in 1979, a number of people fled the country and requested asylum at our border. In total, 126,000 applied for asylum, but that was spread out over the period 1981-1990. However, unlike with those coming now from the Northern Triangle countries (and increasingly from Nicaragua), many of these individuals were legitimate asylees, and some were actually wealthy individuals tied to the ruling family or the Contras, whom the U.S. was supporting against the Sandinistas. In fact, this was a part of the strategy of the Reagan administration to combat communism. So, we definitely had a vested interest, unlike today, in bringing some of these people in.

But towards the end of the 1980s, the migration became a flow of impoverished individuals simply fleeing economic conditions in Nicaragua. In 1988, Hurricane Joan left 432 people dead and 230,000 homeless. It was certainly a sad situation, as we see today with the devastation of hurricanes in the Caribbean, but it clearly has nothing to do with asylum. According to the Congressional Research Service, between June 1988 and March 1989, the totality of this iteration of Nicaraguan migration, 18,000 Nicaraguans crossed the border at Brownsville, Texas, most of them declaring asylum. That was regarded as an emergency situation at the time.

Now, think about that for a moment. The entire crisis was over 18,000 individuals coming in over nine months. We’ve had hundreds of thousands of Central American families and teens come in over the past nine months, and the trajectory has just accelerated to unprecedented levels with no end in sight.

What did the Bush 41 administration do when the Nicaraguan crisis was about one-twentieth the size of today’s crisis? Beginning in March 1989, the Bush administration detained all of the asylum-seekers in tent cities in south Texas, similar to the procedure used in Florida during the first wave of Haitian boat people in 1981. Bush’s Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) began immediately rejecting the unqualified claims during initial screenings. As I have suggested the administration do today, they sent all their adjudicators to the tent cities, denied the claims, and immediately sent unqualified claimants back, which is what is actually required by law.

''We intend to send a strong signal to those people who have the mistaken idea that by merely filing a frivolous asylum claim, they may stay in the United States,'' said Alan C. Nelson, then commissioner of the INS. He added, ''This willful manipulation of America's generosity must and will stop.''

And indeed, the message reverberated loud and clear to the next group of potential migrants. According to an April 10 archived article of the Miami Herald, “U.S. Border Patrol statistics compiled in McAllen, Texas, showed that 603 non-Mexican aliens were arrested between Brownsville and Laredo in the first 10 days of April, down from 1,899 for the same period in March.”

So, was the signal sent to the next wave of bogus asylum seekers?

According to the Herald, “The Border Patrol estimates that the Nicaraguans who left home before Feb. 20 had all passed through the immigrant pipeline by March 12. For the month since then, arrests of non-Mexicans each week have declined steadily, from 711 to 438. … The number of asylum applicants has dwindled spectacularly. Since Feb. 20, the figure has dropped to 10 per week, down from December, when 2,000 people per week presented themselves at south Texas centers to ask for asylum, INS says.”

That flow was slowed to a trickle after just a few months and 18,000 asylum requests, even though there were more legitimate requests among them than today’s. In fact, according to the New York Times, “Initially, as many as 87 percent of asylum claims by Nicaraguans were approved.” Now there have been hundreds of thousands of Central American families all coming in for economic reasons. There have been no coups in their home countries or any political dynamic that would create legitimate asylees. Violence has actually been down in all three Central American countries.

The obvious question is how many more illegal immigrants need to scam this system for our government to react? Texas cities are now being overrun by the cost of this humanitarian and security crisis, something that was not allowed to happen in 1989.

It’s important to remember that nothing has changed since 1989. Our immigration system is operating under the same laws passed in 1952 and 1980. If anything, we toughened up asylum law, among other parts of the INA, in 1996. What was good then is good now. And as far as the Flores settlement is concerned, the 1997 agreement that supposedly binds our government to release at least the children within 20 days, Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas believes it no longer applied as of 2013.

Moreover, this administration can promulgate a new regulation and vitiate the Flores agreement. On September 7, 2018, the administration moved to promulgate a new regulation on detaining minors, and the 45-day period for public comment has long passed. It’s unclear why the administration has not moved to implement the changed policy.

Finally, even if still abiding by the Flores 20-day limit, DHS should be able to adjudicate the cases in less than 20 days if it implements the emergency plan to construct tent cities.

Either way, the administration is going to have to assert precedent, statute, case law, and separation of powers to stand up to the lower court resistance, because no other era of our government would have allowed this to continue for nearly this long.

What we need now even more than a wall is a will — a will to enforce the laws we already have.

It's no secret that President Trump loves to be vindicated. However, it's difficult to achieve vindication without clarity. Here's how President Trump could clarify things, leading to his vindication on two current battlefronts.

1) Agree to talk with Mueller -- but only on live television.

The tangible results of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe have primarily consisted of two things: a never-ending leakocracy providing content for media hostile to the Trump administration, and charging people with crimes that don't actually directly tie into the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency.

As we saw during the campaign, nobody is a better advocate for Trump than Trump himself. His current surrogate on the Mueller front, Rudy Giuliani, is frankly a clown show doing more to drive up Democrat voter turnout against the president than change the narrative. For example, since Giuliani began weirdly discussing the prospect of the president pardoning himself on May 30th (why would an innocent man need to pardon himself, after all?), the Democrats have doubled their lead in the generic congressional ballot, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average.

The president should call Mueller's bluff himself. Don't wait for a subpoena. Don't negotiate questions. But tell Mueller to go big or go home, and he will talk with him on one condition -- that it's on live television.

Live television is the president's natural habitat and the environment that has done more to help his political fortunes than any other, whether it be a rally, a moving speech before a joint session of Congress, or disemboweling dissemblers in the mainstream media during a press conference.

Therefore, he should seek to end this endless probe once and for all, but on his home turf, not in a situation behind closed doors that could be leaked as a negative portrayal or with approved questions that will do nothing but provide further fodder for his political opponents by making it look like Trump is hiding something. If there's nothing to hide, then tell Mueller to bring his best, you'll do the same, and may the best man win with the nation watching.

Because other than the measly 835,000 average viewers watching CNN's imploding prime-time lineup each weeknight, the rest of America is tired of the story and wants to move on. So tell Mueller to put up or shut up, and to your face, Mr. President.