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More Mind-Boggling Immigration News
April 15, 2005

RUSH: Folks, I am at a loss. Do not ask me to explain this because I don't have an answer. Like you, all I have are questions. (Washington Times) "One million people facing immigration proceedings have been released into the general population, the government's chief of detention and removal told the Senate yesterday, prompting some Republicans to say the Bush administration is 'not serious' about the problem. 'We have a million individuals who are in some phase of immigration proceedings released,' said Victor X. Cerda, the acting director of detention and removal operations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). He said of those people, 465,000 are fugitive aliens who have been ordered deported. About 80,000 of those are criminal aliens who have committed an offense in addition to immigration violations, but he couldn't provide an exact number. His comments came as an immigration debate in the Senate blocked most progress on the emergency war-spending bill. Pending amendments include cracking down on illegal immigrants' use of driver's licenses, increasing visas for seasonal nonimmigrant workers and legalizing up to 1 million illegal aliens who work in agriculture and their families." You see, this points up. I can partially explain this. Immigration for Republicans splits them up, because you have a lot of Republicans in the food business who want the labor that illegal immigrants provide them, and then they will say, "That's what gets us our cheap food." Of course then nobody adds up the cost of higher taxes to support them on their healthcare and child care and prenatal care, bathroom care, school care, all the other care that they get that we end up paying for -- and of course, you don't want to aggravate your big agribusiness contributors and supporters.

On the other hand, you've got the anti-immigration crowd, the anti-illegal immigration crowd, which just doesn't understand this. "'Yesterday's hearing before two subcommittees of the judiciary committee is supposed to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive immigrant bill,' said John Cornyn, the Texas Republican. 'No serious discussion of comprehensive immigration reform is possible without a review of our nation's ability to effectively secure the borders and enforce its laws,' Cornyn said.Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican; Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, demanded to know why Mr. Cerda was not doing more to have illegal aliens removed." This is unbelievable. Well, I mean, it's totally believable in the context, but it's unbelievable. A million of them have just been released; 465,000 of them are fugitives who have been ordered deported; 80,000 of those are criminal and they've just been released into the general population! There was no real reason given. Senator Kennedy meanwhile said he agreed with Mr. Bush's characterization of the guys down there, the Minutemen as vigilantes, "and he told Mr. Cerda to let him know what the Department of Homeland Security's policy was on dealing with vigilantes."

So Ted Kennedy is more concerned with what the government's going to do about the Minutemen down there on the Arizona-Mexico border than he's concerned with one million illegal immigrants being released into the general population. A little update story on this. It was either yesterday or the day before we told you about 11 illegal aliens released by federal authorities after a traffic stop in Fairfax County. It was on Sunday, so I would have told you about this on Monday or Tuesday. They were released and told they had to come back the next day, and I told you the last has been seen of them. They're not going to show up. Well, guess what? None of them came back. None of them came back, "and I think the fact that these aliens failed to appear showed the challenges of immigration enforcement," said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Well, duh! You had them. You let them go. You tell them to show back up the next day and they don't show up and you're talking -- you had them, you had them! I mean, you had Jesse James in the jail. You turned him loose and said come back tomorrow. Were you're surprised when he didn't come back? Then you complain about how this is illustrative of the problems in enforcing immigration law. None of this makes any sense. I'm sorry, I throw my hands up. I don't understand it. I don't understand the White House on this. I don't understand Republicans who don't see a problem with this, and I'm going to tell you, it is a burgeoning problem and it's going to cause politicians in both parties who are on the wrong side of this big, big trouble in not the not-too-distant future.

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