3/31/14, "Politicized Immigration Policy Frees 68,000 Criminals," IBD Editorial
"Lawlessness: The federal government let nearly 68,000 illegal aliens with criminal records go free in 2013. When it's law and order vs. future votes for Democrats, we all know which wins under this administration.
A new study from Washington's Center For Immigration Studies (CIS) found that the Obama administration in 2013 released 67,879 illegal aliens who had been convicted of a criminal offense — 35% of the total number of the aliens with criminal convictions encountered by law enforcement.
The vast majority, the CIS report said, were due to "the Obama administration's prosecutorial discretion policies, not because the aliens were not deportable."
So much for President Obama's claim last June that "today, deportation of criminals is at its highest level ever" because "we focused our enforcement efforts on criminals who are here illegally and who are endangering our communities."
Illegal alien advocacy groups even lambast Obama as "deporter in chief." But as The Blaze's Washington correspondent, Fred Lucas, reported last month, the administration's claims are purposely misleading, based on "the strictest legal definition of deportation."
Moreover, "the administration in 2009 changed the metric for measuring even that legal definition."
Homeland Security plays a statistical shell game of "removals" vs. "returns," said Jessica Vaughn, author of the Center's study. If you actually "count the number of people sent out of the country, it's not even close to a record. It's the lowest since the 1970s."
How low? There were 229,968 returns in 2012 vs. 1.6 million returns in 2000, the last full year of the Clinton administration. Homeland Security defines a "return" — which is how deportations were previously measured — as "the confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal."
The administration itself even admits this, if you look hard enough. "In 2012, 229,968 aliens were returned to their home countries without an order of removal, a decline of 29% from 2011 and the lowest number since 1969," Homeland Security's Office of Immigration Statistics says in a statement buried deep in its report on enforcement actions for 2012.
When your policy is intentionally hostile toward deportation, naturally you're not going to be fussy about deporting criminals. So it shouldn't be surprising that the CIS found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "charged only 195,000, or 25%, out of 722,000 potentially deportable aliens they encountered," most of whom came to the federal agency's attention after a local arrest and incarceration.
It is also no surprise that ICE reports there are over 870,000 aliens who have been ordered removed, but who remain within the country in defiance of our laws.
How can our government let so many criminals go instead of deporting them, as the law demands? "Eleven million people living in the shadows, I believe, are already American citizens," Vice President Joseph Biden told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
And the repeat crimes so many of these illegals with criminal records will commit against Americans is a perfectly acceptable price to pay, apparently, to win millions of new Democratic votes Obama's aggressive, lawless open-door immigration policies in the years ahead.
So the next time you read about an illegal alien committing a violent crime, remember: The victim of that crime is a martyr for a future socialistic America."
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3/30/14, "68,000 illegal aliens with criminal records caught and released," Washington Times, Stephen Dinan, "Obama policy weak on enforcement"
"Immigration agents tried to deport only about a fourth of the cases they encountered in 2013, said a report being released Monday from the Center for Immigration Studies that shows just how much President Obama’s policies have cut down on potential enforcement.
Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, called it a form of “catch and release.” She said agents at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement received more than 720,000 hits on immigrants who could be eligible for deportation but filed charges against fewer than 195,000 of them.
Of those let go, 68,000 had criminal convictions on their records. All told, more than 870,000 immigrants have been ordered removed from the U.S. but are defying the government and refusing to leave.
“These numbers confirm that interior enforcement has been anything but tough — that in fact, ICE is releasing more illegal aliens and more criminal aliens than they’re trying to remove,” said Ms. Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates a crackdown on immigration.
The American Immigration Council, though, said the numbers were “completely misleading” and that many of those ICE agents encountered were likely kicked out of the country even if they weren’t officially put into deportation proceedings.
The AIC said the more than 720,000 immigrants ICE encountered also likely included many legal immigrants whose “interaction with law enforcement was so minor that they are not even legally subject to removal.”
“CIS is essentially asserting that a legal-permanent resident or a recently naturalized citizen with a broken tail light should be charged by ICE and removed from the country although there is no basis in law for such action,” said Benjamin Johnson, AIC’s executive director.
The debate over deportations comes as President Obama is under pressure to cut deportations even more.
In meetings with immigrant rights activists this month, Mr. Obama promised to devise more “humane” policies that would carve even more illegal immigrants out of deportation rules.
Democrats, looking to shift the pressure, announced a petition drive last week to try to force House Republicans to bring a broad bill legalizing most illegal immigrants to the chamber floor for a vote.
“The only opposition seems to be among House Republicans,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat.
Still, immigrant rights groups are targeting Democrats. One group has announced plans to demonstrate outside of Democratic Party offices across the country to demand that Mr. Obama halt deportations on a broader scale.
Two years ago, the president announced a policy granting tentative legal status to more than 500,000 young adult illegal immigrants. The Homeland Security Department also has issued several policy memos pushing most other illegal immigrants down the list of deportation priorities.
All of that has led to an overall drop in deportations by about 10 percent in 2013 to just under 370,000. Deportations are on pace for another 10 percent drop this year, to about 325,000.
Homeland Security officials say they are budgeted to deport about 400,000 immigrants a year.
Immigrant rights activists call that the deportation quota and say Mr. Obama has had to go beyond serious criminals and rank-and-file immigrants to boost his numbers.
However, Ms. Vaughan’s study suggests that ICE doesn’t even go after all of the criminals it encounters. In 2013, ICE agents reported coming across 193,000 immigrants with criminal records — more serious than traffic offenses — yet they tried to deport only 125,000.
She said that in Arizona, ICE agents are even releasing illegal immigrants convicted of identity theft.
“The preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that immigration enforcement in America has collapsed,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who has fought legalization efforts in Congress. “Even those with criminal convictions are being released. DHS is a department in crisis.”
An illegal immigrant’s chances of facing arrest and deportation proceedings often seem to depend on where they are caught.
Agents in the Los Angeles office released 81 percent of the immigrants they encountered. Down the road in San Diego, agents released only 5 percent, according to the report.
Ms. Vaughan said the ICE encounters weren’t random. In each case, there had been either a database hit or a specific lead that showed the immigrant may qualify for deportation — though in many cases, the investigation may have found they were not eligible for removal.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden may have tipped the administration’s hand on expanding the categories of those exempt from deportation. Speaking to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce last week, he praised illegal immigrants as exemplary.
“I believe they’re already American citizens,” Mr. Biden said.
Some activists argue that breaking immigration laws and ignoring previous deportations shouldn’t be enough to get kicked out. They received backing last week when John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE, penned an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times arguing that those folks aren’t public safety threats and should be allowed to stay.
“To be sure, those who repeatedly cross our borders illegally or abscond from the immigration court bear culpability. However, making this population a priority detracts from ICE’s ability to track down and arrest the increasing number of much more serious public safety threats the agency identifies,” he wrote."
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Added: Both political parties favor open borders, no deportations, lots of violent crime. Jeb Bush encourages child abuse and traffickers:
Jeb Bush: "People who come here legally and illegally are the risk takers,” said Bush. “If you’re living in a rural area of Guatemala and you come, you’re a bigger risk taker than those who stay.” 3/21/14
3/29/14, "Mexico finds 370 abandoned immigrant children," Reuters, Mexico City
"In one week, 370 immigrant children, most of them from Central America, were found abandoned in Mexico, after traffickers promised to take them to the United States but left them to their own devices after being paid thousands of dollars, authorities said.
Almost half of them, 163 children under the age of 18, were found traveling alone, Mexico's National Migration Institute (INM) said in a statement.
Each month, thousands of immigrants, mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, attempt to emigrate to the United States, crossing several borders in the process, despite the threat from drug gangs that kidnap, murder and rape women.
The children told federal migration agents that their 'guides' abandoned them after accepting $3,000 to $5,000 in payments, INM said.
The children and young people, who came from three of the poorest countries in Central America, were found between March 17 and 24, in 14 different states in Mexico.
"The majority of the children showed signs of extreme fatigue, foot injuries, dehydration and disorientation whereby they didn't know where they had been abandoned," INM said.
Many immigrants are able to get to the U.S. and then entrust their children to the traffickers who pay large sums of money for them.
In the week the children were found, a total of 1,895 immigrants from various countries were detected in Mexico from countries as far away as Somalia, Japan and Syria, among others."
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3/22/14, "Bush supports Common Core, says illegal immigrants are risk-takers," blog.al.com, Cassie Fambro
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