Thread: Illegal immigrant's deadly crash not a 'crime of violence,' ICE says

Illegal Immigrants

Illegal immigrant's deadly crash not a 'crime of violence,' ICE says

Published April 06, 2016 FoxNews.com



Edwin Mejia posted bail and fled after he was arrested for vehicular manslaughter.

An illegal immigrant -- who police said was drunk while street racing when he killed a Nebraska woman in a car crash -- wasn’t detained by immigration officials because his offense did “not constitute a crime of violence,” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said in a March letter to Congress.

Edwin Mejia, 19, is accused of being drunk and driving recklessly when his vehicle slammed into 21-year-old Sarah Root’s car in January.

Root died at the hospital. Mejia later posted bond and fled. He’s been added to ICE’s “Most Wanted” list.

“Mr. Mejia should not need to be on this list – he should be in jail,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said in a March 30 statement. “ICE originally said that Mr. Mejia was not an ‘enforcement priority,’ but this morning he was placed on their Most Wanted list. The public still does not have a complete account of what went wrong.”

Sasse has been pressing for answers since his office issued a Feb. 29 letter to ICE Director Sarah Saldana. He called Saldana’s eventual response “bureaucratic nonsense” and wrote to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on April 4 seeking a response that was not “an embarrassment to the hardworking men and women” at DHS.

Border agents first encountered Mejia in May 2013 when the 16-year-old arrived in Nogales, Ariz., from Honduras and was designated as an unaccompanied child, according to ICE’s initial response letter to Sasse. “As required by law,” Mejia was transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which then shipped him to Omaha in 2014 to live with his brother. It’s not clear if Mejia’s brother was legally in the U.S.

After Mejia’s January 2016 arrest for motor vehicle homicide, ICE officials “encountered Mr. Mejia just once,” but they did not file a detainer.

While Mejia’s actions didn’t fit the requirements for issuing a mandatory detainer, DHS personnel have discretionary ability to issue a detainer if the “removal of such alien would serve an important federal interest.”

“After further review, we believe that further enforcement action would have served an important federal interest in this case…,” the ICE response letter said.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/04/06/illegal-immigrants-deadly-crash-not-crime-violence-ice-says.html

“After further review, we believe that further enforcement action would have served an important federal interest in this case…,” the ICE response letter said.

And that's all you have to say for yourselves? Really?

"important federal interest" .... what does that mean?

What about the interest of the rule of law, the interest of justice, the interest of common sense, the interest of national security, the interest of the family who lost their loved one, the interest of the victim he killed, the interest of the general public, the interest of US citizens who want a country safe from all the ravages of illegal immigration?

There is no "federal" interest separate from or paramount to the interests of the citizens of the United States, our country and our laws that protect it.

POSTED AT 10:41 AM ON APRIL 12, 2016 BY JAZZ SHAW

Precisely how many more of these stories do we need to see?

Out in Nebraska, Senator Ben Sasse is up in arms after an illegal immigrant accused of killing a woman with his car while driving drunk was released from custody and then failed to show up for court mandated appointments. Who could have possibly seen that one coming? (Fox News)

Immigration officials have placed a 19-year-old Honduran who entered the United States as part of the so-called border surge of 2014 on its Most Wanted list for disappearing while out on bail on charges of killing a Nebraska woman while driving drunk.

But Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska) says the action by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is too little, too late.

On his website Sasse said that Edwin Mejia, whose whereabouts are unknown and also goes by the name Eswin, should never have been released after he killed 21-year-old Sarah Root in January while he driving drunk at a high speed. Root had graduated from college just hours before the fatal accident.

Sasse has every reason to be upset. The police knew that Mejia was an illegal alien as soon as he was picked up. At his initial hearing, despite objections from prosecutors, the Honduran “undocumented immigrant” was released on bail with an order to show up for Breathalyzer testing twice per day until his next court appearance. They never saw him again.

How on Earth could the court not even suspect that someone who had just been identified as being in the country illegally while killing a woman with his car might go on the lam? More to the point, where was ICE during all of this? As Sasse correctly notes, immigration control has the option to place a detainer on illegals as soon as they are in custody, allowing the local cops to hold them until ICE can show up, take them into custody and hold them for either further criminal prosecution or deportation hearings. The Douglas County Police Department supposedly put in a request with ICE to do just that, but they passed on the opportunity, saying that the culprit’s actions, “did not meet ICE’s enforcement priorities.”

Given the marching orders coming out of the White House for the past couple of years, you can almost understand how they might have allowed Meijia to walk if he’d simply been picked up for a bar brawl or some other minor infraction, but we’re supposed to be holding on to felons, aren’t we? And this guy was in a cell because he’d just killed somebody. (Allegedly) This isn’t San Francisco or some other “sanctuary city” we’re talking about here. It’s Omaha, Nebraska. The problem wasn’t the locals in this case, but ICE itself and their refusal to do what’s called for when we’ve got an illegal alien in a cell with ample evidence to suspect they are guilty of a serious crime.

Don’t pin this one on Mayor Jean Stothert or the city council. This is a failure of policy at the federal level and it’s sadly not the only case of its kind out there. The locals can only do so much if they can’t secure the help of the feds and immigration control.



http://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/1...g-local-woman/