By THE WASHINGTON TIMES - - Wednesday, March 16, 2016

President Obama regards himself as a conjurer of deep thoughts, a living example of “The Thinker” immortalized in the Rodin sculpture. Neither the bronze ponderer will budge from his stone nor the president from his radical blueprint for a new America. Mr. Obama’s stubborn devotion to his agenda of change reveals a closed mind with lethal consequences. There are more than a hundred Americans who should be alive but are not, along with thousands of surviving victims of lesser crimes, the grim result of the president’s determination to keep the nation’s southern border porous. He may consider that a small price to pay for reshaping the nation to match his vision, but he’s not the one who must pay.

Department of Homeland Security data released this week reveals that over the past five years, 124 illegal immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and released rather than sent back stayed to commit murder in the United States. Another 156 immigrant evildoers were arrested and released at least twice, for a combined 1,776 convictions for crimes that include drug possession, burglary and larceny. They returned to America’s streets, mostly in California. Of all the criminal aliens arrested in 2014, only 3 percent were ultimately sent back to their home countries.

Such extreme malfeasance invites an inevitable conclusion. “The Obama administration appears to be indifferent to the harm its policies are inflicting in American communities,” says Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that analyzed the Homeland Security statistics. These numbers are not all, covering only federal releases, not by “sanctuary cities” or local law enforcement officers.

The family and friends of Kate Steinle know the pain wrought by such misfeasance. Miss Steinle, 32, was shot in the back last summer as she strolled with her father on a San Francisco pier, by an illegal who had been deported five times. So, too, the family of Grant Ronnebeck, a 21-year-old Arizona store clerk shot in the head in an argument over a pack of cigarettes, by a man who police say was awaiting deportation following multiple arrests. Other families across the country tell similar stories.

Human experience is a relentless gauntlet of choices, and no one is guaranteed immunity from tragedy. For the lives lost or altered because officials, including the president, who should know better but don’t, mocking the law and subverting security are unforgivable. The blood of the dead is a stain that cannot be rubbed out.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would perpetuate Mr. Obama’s immigration schemes. Victims of these crimes are the collateral damage in the president’s determined campaign to change America. Rather than share with the world the nation’s love of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the president has opened the floodgates to a plague of uncontrolled immigration. Worst of all, the president knows exactly what he’s doing.

EDITORIAL: President Obama's collateral damage of illegal immigration - Washington Times