Sweetheart deals for illegal aliens — and Obama’s nominee for US attorney in Colorado
By Michelle Malkin • October 12, 2009 11:22 AM

Tom Tancredo reports on corruption at the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and the continued plight of agent Cory Voorhis (via WND):

The federal government’s continued persecution of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, agent Cory Voorhis should alarm all Americans. Voorhis has been targeted for removal from his job because he dared to blow the whistle on politicians who were scheming with ICE bureaucrats to help criminal aliens avoid deportation – hundreds of them.

Voorhis went public in September 2006 with facts about the plea-bargaining practices of former Denver District attorney Bill Ritter, who happened to also be a candidate for governor of Colorado. During Ritter’s tenure as district attorney, 241 illegal aliens were given sweetheart deals for the explicit purpose of helping them minimize the risk of deportation. Some of them went on to commit other, more serious crimes, and when one of those cases was made public with Voorhis’ help, he was targeted for criminal investigation at the behest of the Ritter for Governor campaign.

Voorhis deserved a medal for his actions, but instead he was charged with violations of federal criminal law and then removed from his job after a federal court jury acquitted him of all charges after only two hours of deliberation. ICE managers were so embarrassed by this reversal, they launched a two-year effort to have him fired despite that acquittal. It has now been revealed that agency managers gave false testimony against Voorhis at his trial, yet no one at the top levels of the Department of Homeland Security had the courage to put a stop to the vendetta.

Voorhis has incurred more than $500,000 in legal bills and there is still no end in sight. His petition for reinstatement is now under review by an administrative judge attached to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

What is going on here? Why does ICE persist in trying to destroy a man whose only controversial action was to bring to the public’s attention information on certain criminal aliens already available to any enterprising reporter?

Aha! There’s the rub. If enterprising reporters started digging into the records of the plea-bargaining practices of prosecutors in sanctuary cities like Denver and San Francisco, who knows what mischief might ensue? In the agency’s view, Voorhis must be punished for throwing a huge public spotlight on these practices.

In retrospect, it is clear ICE overreacted. No reporter has bothered to look into the case histories of the other 240 plea-bargain cases uncovered in 2008. In fact, those 241 cases were only a sampling from a five-year period and were only the cases where “agricultural trespassâ€