Results 1 to 2 of 2

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #1
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    California
    Posts
    65,443

    ICE failure to detect, deport criminal aliens shows distorte

    Breach of duty
    ICE failure to detect, deport criminal aliens shows distorted priorities
    Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
    Nov. 22, 2008, 9:38AM

    The exact shape of immigration reform may be subject to endless debate. But there's something close to consensus on what to do with undocumented immigrants already in our midst who commit violent crimes: Confine them to prison and then deport them.

    As last week's lengthy Chronicle report showed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of Homeland Security, has failed to do this. In hundreds of area cases, ICE neglected to remove, or even identify, convicted criminals who are undocumented and eligible for deportation.

    The breach of duty is troubling for several reasons.

    Crime victims and their families surely feel galled to know those who preyed on them shouldn't have even been inside our borders.

    But the findings should also disturb all those who know that the huge majority of immigrants come here to fill jobs and care for their families. The kind of criminals the Chronicle exposed are anomalous among illegal immigrants — and for this reason, all the more dangerous.

    ICE must know this. Yet of 3,500 Harris County inmates who volunteered that they were undocumented, the agency failed to detain about 75 percent. .

    It's essential to note that almost all these inmates had committed misdemeanors. But several hundred felons also slipped back into the community after serving time — though they legally should be deported. Roughly 80 of these were later charged with serious crimes, including capital murder.

    On Friday, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff wrote an angry defense of the agency to Gov. Rick Perry, complaining that "Harris County did not share with ICE existing lists it maintains of detainees who reported they were foreign born."

    But if this were truly the cause of ICE's failures, the protective agency had a duty to report it to Texas officials and to Congress.

    ICE representatives also told the Chronicle they had strengthened their staffing and are identifying more deportable criminals before they can post bond and vanish.

    But the costly and flamboyant ways ICE spent its resources this year suggest the agency could do much more.

    Consider the Shipley Do-Nut raid on April 17. This massive operation yielded a grand total of 20 workers suspected of a civil violation: being in the United States illegally. There are, of course, about 12 million others at large guilty of the same violation.

    To achieve this feat of public safety, ICE agents mobilized no less than 50 specialized vehicles, including vans and an ambulance, before descending on the Shipley office as a backup helicopter circled overhead.

    Just two months later, the cash-strapped, overwhelmed agency raided the Action Rags USA plant in Houston, snaring 166 workers committing the civil infraction of working while being in the country illegally.

    About 70 percent of these workers were women with babies or children at home. In addition to the time and money spent conducting this raid, ICE paid three planted informants a total of $13,200 — along with immigration benefits, because they were also undocumented. (These rewards may have undermined ICE's case because they gave informants an incentive to testify on ICE's behalf.)

    Nationally, only two percent of the arrests from these lavish raid efforts include employers, research shows. (In the Shipley case, the firm's president personally pleaded guilty to employing undocumented workers, earning probation and a $6,000 fine.)

    "Once again the federal government has it backwards," Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, a former state judge and prosecutor, observed to the Chronicle. "It is a waste of time if we don't go after the business owners who are knowingly hiring illegals."

    The raids are an even more astounding waste considering the tiny proportion of undocumented immigrants who actually represent a criminal threat.

    Because undocumented immigrants need such focus to get here — and then support their families — their communities are often safer from crime than those of native-born Americans.

    Immigrants overall come here to work, avoid most government services they're legally entitled to, and shrink from anything that would jeopardize their families' security. As a result, sociologist Ruben Rumbaut reports, "incarceration rates are lowest among immigrant young men, even among the least educated, but they increase sharply by the second generation."

    Overall, first-generation immigrants are 45 percent less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans are.

    But this also means that those undocumented immigrants who do commit serious crimes are outliers. They somehow lack the reasons most immigrants have to obey authorities — often because they are mentally ill or career predators.

    The most efficient way to identify these dangerous offenders, of course, is not rag-factory raids but careful scrutiny of jail facilities.

    Laws are in place to deport criminals for fairly low-level violations. And though identifying citizenship is challenging, it is in the end Homeland Security's job to reliably do so.

    In the meantime, even if it takes longer to process outgoing jail inmates, ICE agents should be at the county jail working on this job around the clock. Even if it takes time away from those raids on rag workers.

    http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/edi ... 26565.html
    Support our FIGHT AGAINST illegal immigration & Amnesty by joining our E-mail Alerts at https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

  2. #2
    Senior Member bigtex's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Houston, Texas
    Posts
    3,362
    I have said all along, these ICE raids are just an attempt by ICE to make it look like they are doing something. Just like the increased hassling of American tourists they do at our borders and airports. Meanwhile we have about 20 million illegals walking the streets.

    As for Perry, He has been in office since George Bush left 8 years ago. Perry has done nothing to rid out state of illegals. Instead he has pandered to them and made it clear he wants them to be here. Proof, the Trans Texas Corridor where he was willing to see Texas and America out for the sake of his pals in Mexico. Perry has done nothing but push Bush's agenda. He fought to insure illegals had a chance to pay the same amount as other Texans despite an American from another state having to pay much more.

    Perry also vowed to enact a guest worker program and said he opposes legislation to remove citizenship rights from the Texas-born children of immigrants. Perry also did what he could to fight any attempts to put up a border fence. His comments were, “The only thing a wall would possibly accomplish is to help the ladder business.â€
    Certified Member
    The Sons of the Republic of Texas

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •