Christmas Criminality: My Herod of the Hemisphere award goes to…

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COMMENTARY King Herod — a monstrous ruler who in the Christmas story forced Jesus' family to flee their country — has plenty of modern heirs driving the western hemisphere's migrant crisis today.

And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. -Matthew 2:14-15

The story of the newborn Jesus’ family fleeing their homeland into Egypt to escape the wrath of monstrous King Herod the Great is an integral part of the Christian narrative I grew up with.

And it’s a Christmas chapter that’s powerfully relevant today.

The world these days feels unusually full of Herods driving desperate families and children out of their countries to take sanctuary in modern Egypts. One of the more homicidal Herods, Bashar al-Assad, was finally forced out of power in Syria last week. Far too many, like the generals running Sudan’s Mad Max civil war, won’t budge.

But we’ve got more than our share of Herods in the Americas — the revolting rulers most responsible for the migrant crisis convulsing the western hemisphere and especially the U.S. southern border.

READ MORE: Trump betrays MAGA — and the hemisphere — on birthright citizenship

So, what better time than Christmas for my first annual ranking of our really rank Herods of the Hemisphere?

The putrid first-place prize had to go to left-wing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.

For the past 11 years. Maduro has commandeered the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history, an economic implosion that hurled the world’s most oil-rich nation over a cliff and into the financial abyss, while he and his cronies robbed the country blind.

He’s ordered brutal crackdowns on dissent, earning crimes-against-humanity accusations from the U.N. And he’s committed brutish thefts of democratic elections, like the presidential contest he lost by a landslide last summer before sending the actual winner into exile — while arresting and jailing more than 100 minors because they too had the courage to protest the fraud.

All that has pushed a quarter of his population — almost 8 million people — to leave Venezuela over the past decade. The refugees include infants and children, among them traumatized tots my colleagues and I have talked to in recent years after they trekked through the treacherous Darién jungle between Colombia and Panama en route to the U.S. — many showing signs, like black hair turning blond, that they’d experienced serious malnutrition back in Venezuela.

That’s Herodic overachievement there, damas y caballeros .

Maduro's brutal, brutish rule has driven a quarter of Venezuela's population to flee. That's Herodic overachievement there, damas y caballeros .

But Maduro had close competition, believe me. My No. 2 pick for Herod of the Hemisphere doesn’t actually hold political office — but he is, in fact, the de facto ruler of Haiti, and as such he’s responsible for the Herodic horror that’s forced tens of thousands of people there to flee.

May I present: Haiti’s top gang lord, Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, whose forces control 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and much of the rest of the country.

Criminal confederation

This year alone, the powerful and bloodthirsty gangs that belong to Cherizier’s criminal confederation — known surreally in Creole as Viv Ansam , or Live Together — are responsible for more than 4,000 murders in Haiti, according to the U.N.

Haitian gang lord Jimmy "Barbecue" Cherizier rallying his criminal troops in Port-au-Prince in 2022.

Their heavily armed violence, including ransom kidnappings and the hijackings of food, medicine, fuel and other necessities, has all but shut down Haiti’s already threadbare economy, while leaving more than 700,000 people there displaced and homeless.

As for Haiti’s children: minors have been recruited so relentlessly that they’re now estimated to make up half the gangs’ membership — while gang sexual violence against girls has risen 1,000% this year, according to human rights reports.

My No. 3 Herod of the Hemisphere is not surprisingly Cuba’s regime, whose communist cocktail of iron-fisted political repression and ideology-addled economic ineptitude led to an exodus of a tenth of the island’s population between 2022 and 2023 — and likely as much between 2023 and this year.

No. 4 is Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. He delights not only in expelling hundreds of thousands of his countrymen — more than 5% of his population since 2018 — but in stripping them of citizenship, too, leaving them stateless refugees to boot.

And No. 5: U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, for derailing a reform bill this year that would have rebooted long overdue efforts to fix America’s wrecked immigration system — so that Trump, in his next presidency, can reboot inhumane policies like migrant family separation and mass deportations.

Congratulations, gentlemen. History — and Christmas — will no doubt remember you as unkindly as they remember King Herod.

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