Thread: Laos refused to take back ex-con gunman who shot Fresno sheriffs

Laos refused to take back ex-con gunman who shot Fresno sheriffs

By Malia Zimmerman
Published September 07, 2016 FoxNews.com

The convicted rapist who shot two corrections officers in Fresno, Calif., last week was an illegal immigrant who was only in the U.S. because his homeland refused to take him, federal officials confirmed Wednesday.

Thong Vang, a 37-year-old Laotian national who completed a 16-year rape sentence two years ago and was slated for deportation, instead was freed when Laotian officials did not respond to a request by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to assist in his removal.

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Thong Vang served 16 years for rape, but was freed when Laos would not take him back. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office)


“When Laotian officials failed to respond to that request, ICE released Mr. Vang in December, 2014 due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis,” ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice said.

The ruling Kice cited held that immigrants under order of deportation but whom no other country will accept may not be held indefinitely, absent special circumstances. Last year, 3,735 illegal immigrant criminals from Laos were ordered deported but instead freed when the country refused to cooperate.

"This is another horrifying example of the consequences of failing to push the issue of deportations with uncooperative countries," said Jessica Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies for the Center for Immigration Studies. "Laos has been a problem for many years, and there are more than 3,700 criminals still here as a result, but still the State Department has not lifted a finger to take action against that government. Instead, they keep issuing visas – they gave out more than 11,000 temporary visas in the last five years in Laos, despite the requirement in federal law that they impose visa sanctions on countries that won’t take back their citizens."

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Toamalama Scanlan, (l.), and Juanita Davila, (r.), were shot when they confronted Vang. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office)


Vaughan said she hopes the wounded officers will recover, and that they and Fresno County officials will ask the federal government for an explanation for why nothing has been done about this problem, and call for action before others are hurt.

By contrast, some 67,792 Mexican nationals slated for removal could not be deported and nearly 29,000 Cubans were also freed after deportation failed.

The issue made national headlines in June, when the Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, blasted the department for not doing more to ensure deportation of a Haitian national who murdered a Connecticut woman after being released from prison.

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The office was crowded Saturday morning when Vang pulled out a handgun and opened fire, officials said. (Fresno County Sheriff's Office)


The Connecticut case prompted House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, to blast the State Department at a July hearing for not doing more to force recalcitrant countries to take back their criminals.

The law states that the State Department must stop issuing visas to citizens of such countries until they cooperate with removals.

“He should have automatically been deported back to his home country of Haiti after he was released from prison,” Chaffetz thundered. “But instead, he was released from custody because Haiti refused to take him back and we just accepted that. We just said, ‘Ok Haiti, we’ll go ahead and keep him here in the United States.’”

The case involving Laotian national Vang comes even as President Obama is in the Southeast Asian country on a diplomatic mission. It is not known if Obama raised the issue of improving cooperation on deportations.

“ICE continues to work through diplomatic channels with its partners at the Department of State to increase repatriation,” Kice said in a statement. “The U.S. government remains firm and focused in its resolve to engage all nations that deny or unreasonably delay the acceptance of their nationals.”

Despite ICE’s inability to deport Vang, the agency had him under supervision and he was complying with orders to report on a regular basis, Kice said.

Vang was in the main lobby of the Fresno County Jail Saturday morning when he opened fire with a handgun, wounding Juanita Davila and Toamalama Scanlan. Davila was listed in critical but stable condition and Scanlan was in critical condition.

Fresno police officials said Vang was acting bizarrely and had been stopped from cutting to the front of the visitation line. Davila and Scanlan were shot when they approached Vang and told him to take a seat.

Vang dropped his weapon and surrendered after the shooting.

Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims told reporters after the incident that Vang belongs behind bars, in whatever country happens to hold him.

“This suspect is a prison inmate, a convict, a parole, and maybe that’s where he belongs for the rest of his life,” she said.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/09/07...-sheriffs.html

This should be an additional argument to support ICE detainers. A good example of when the chain of border enforcement authority breaks down---as many sanctuary governments today seek to break down that chain as well. The results are the same---people who should be out of the country failing to be removed. In the eyes of the law, there criminal status is nor the question---it is their immigration status. The sanctuary apologists have tried to make the case---from Obama all the way down---that criminal status should affect naturalization or admission status. I don't see anything that would indicate that was the Congressional intent.

“The Supreme Court’s 2001 decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, the requirements of which applied in the case of Jacques, limits ICE’s ability to detain individuals with final orders of removal,” the agency said.

Criminal aliens released in U.S. because home countries reject them

The 2001 Supreme Court case Zadvydas v. Davis explains why ICE is required to release foreigners who have been convicted of crimes. In its 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the indefinite detention of removable aliens for greater than six months is unconstitutional unless there is “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

Meet Thong Vang: Illegal Alien Child Rapist Hillary’s State Department Did Not Deport, Shoots Two Officers



by JULIA HAHN
8 Sep 2016
Washington D.C.
864 comments

An illegal alien and convicted child rapist was able to shoot two California corrections officers on Saturday because Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused to enforce the law and take actions that would have forced his home country to repatriate him.

On Saturday, Thong Vang, a 37-year-old Laotian national, shot and critically injured two corrections officers in Fresno, California. Vang had previously served sixteen years in prison for gang raping three girls under the age of 14

As KFSN-TV Fresno reported:

Vang last appeared in court in 1998, on charges related to the abduction, forced confinement and rape of three girls aged between 12 and 14. The girls were taken to a Motel 6 motel and held for two days, forced to have sex with multiple men and boys. Vang was then 22 and a member of a Hmong gang known as the Mongolian Boys Society. Vang and the others were convicted of violent forcible rape and sent to prison. Vang was released on parole two years ago.

Following his parole in 2014, Vang was supposed to be deported. Instead, he was released into the U.S. interior.

Immigration experts say that’s because Hillary Clinton failed to comply with a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that her State Department signed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2011.

The memorandum required the State Department to apply diplomatic pressure to foreign countries to repatriate their citizens. Immigration experts say that because Clinton refused to comply with the MoU, Laos was under no pressure to cooperate with the U.S. and begin repatriating its citizens. As a result, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was forced to release the convicted child rapist, who had ties to a gang-related sex-slave ring, back into American communities.

As Fox News reported, Vang is just one of thousands of illegal criminal aliens from Laos who were released to roam free inside the United States. “Last year, 3,735 illegal immigrant criminals from Laos were ordered deported but instead freed when the country refused to cooperate.”

While Laos refused to take back its criminal citizens, the State Department reportedly continued to issue more than 11,000 temporary visas to Laos over the last five years. Center for Immigration Studies’ Jessica Vaughan said:

"Federal law requires that the U.S. impose visa sanctions on countries that won’t take back their citizens, Laos is one of the most uncooperative countries in the world in terms of taking back its citizens. In 2011, Hillary Clinton signed a formal agreement between the State Department and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that pledged she would take action and put diplomatic pressure on uncooperative countries to take back their citizens, but instead Clinton’s State Department gave Laos a pass on this issue."

Ian Smith, an attorney with the nonpartisan Immigration Reform Law Institute said:

"Under federal law, there already exists a requirement to use visa sanctions in order to do that. Under the Obama Administration, Secretary Hillary Clinton said that the State Department would use the MoU to work with DHS to pressure countries to remove its citizens. But her State Department did nothing with regards to Laos. They refused over and over again to invoke targeted visa sanctions on the nation. They just kept handing out visas for the people of Laos, even though Laos was refusing to take back any of their criminals who were in our country."

Vaughn explained:

"Clinton refused to use this very sharply focused tool [i.e. visa sanctions] to try to get Laos to take back convicted criminals, and as a result Americans have gotten hurt. There’s a public safety cost for her refusal to act on this… If she had done her job and complied with the law while she was Secretary of State, this criminal [Vang] more than likely would have been deported in 2014, just as ICE wanted, and he wouldn’t have been here to shoot up a jail waiting room."

NumbersUSA Director of Government Relations, Rosemary Jenks, said this failure to enforce U.S. immigration law “seems par for the course with the Obama-Clinton administration.”

“If you have a pool of convicted, violent criminals in the country, and you have an easy, legal way to get them out, what possible excuse can this administration come up with for not doing that?” Jenks asked.

According to reports, the two unarmed prison officers whom Vang shot in the neck and head area remain in critical condition. The Daily Mail writes that Officer Toamalama Scanlan was “a father-of-six, ten-year veteran of the force and a high school football coach.” Officer Juanita Davila was “a mother and grandmother who had worked at the Fresno County jail for 18 years.”

http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presid...-two-officers/