The political persecution of Cory Voorhis

Posted: October 10, 2009
1:00 am Eastern
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

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 trespass" was used as the lesser offense to avoid deportation. Most likely there were more than 1,000 cases of sweetheart plea bargains for illegal aliens under Ritter's tenure as Denver district attorney. How many exist in other cities? How many times have ICE legal staff – in Denver and elsewhere – assisted in the obstruction of our criminal-alien deportation laws?

Such questions are asked by citizens who know police officers have been killed, children molested and stores robbed by illegal aliens who escaped deportation after serving jail time. Of the more than 400,000 illegal aliens convicted of crimes in 2007, less than 25 percent were deported after completing their terms.

And now, the sequel! Who was the person on gubernatorial candidate Bill Ritter's campaign team who made the first call in September 2006 to the Denver D.A.'s office to inquire about the illegal alien mentioned in the newspapers stories? Was that person also on a leave of absence from the Denver D.A.'s office to work in the Ritter campaign? Was it the same person who then was subsequently rewarded with a job as a principal deputy to Governor Ritter? Is it the same person who was Ritter's in-house authority on immigration issues and was his personal representative on a 2008 Colorado Department of Public Safety task force appointed to look into immigration enforcement policies? Has that same person, Stephanie Villafuerte, now been nominated by President Obama to be the next U.S. attorney for Colorado? The answer to all the above questions is ... yes.

As the U.S. attorney, will Stephanie Villafuerte offer help in investigating the corruption, perjury and malfeasance rampant in the Denver regional office of ICE? Will she be an advocate for the effective enforcement of our nation's immigration laws after participating in the disgusting vendetta against ICE agent Cory Voorhis? The answer to those questions is probably ... no se puede.

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