Thread: Family Sues San Francisco Saying Sanctuary Law to Blame for

I just found this on the minuteman website. Good for them, I hope they win. Hopefully the ACLU will keep it's nose out of this unlike in Colorado.

A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado against the Weld County district attorney, Kenneth R. Buck, and Sheriff John Cooke, was successful in convincing a state judge to order a halt Monday to an identity theft investigation that has implicated more than 1,000 suspected illegal immigrants. Dan Frosch of the New York Times gives the whole story in this article.


Family Sues San Francisco Saying Sanctuary Law to Blame for Murder of Father, Two Sons
Wednesday, April 08, 2009


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Edwin Ramos
Edwin Ramos
The family of a father and two sons allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant last year reportedly is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming its "sanctuary city" policy contributed to their deaths.

Anthony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16, were returning from a picnic when they were gunned down on June 16, allegedly by Salvadoran national Edwin Ramos, 22.

The case prompted public outcry after it emerged that Ramos was convicted of two gang-related felonies when he was 17, but local officials did not contact federal agencies to determine his immigration status.

The Bologna family filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that the city's sanctuary policy shielding illegal immigrants from questions about their citizenship status — even those charged with a crime — was to blame, KCBS San Francisco reported.

"The city adopted and enforced a policy that was actually inconsistent with and prohibited by federal law," Bologna family attorney Michael Kelly was quoted as saying.

The city declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted by local media.

Mayor Gavin Newsom would only say, in a written statement, that he was "deeply sympathetic to the Bologna family's devastating loss. A terrible crime was committed, and my heart goes out to the family."

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Ramos has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder in the Bologna case.

He also faces various other gang-related charges including multiple murders.

"It should have been resolved at the beginning, when this guy had done more than one crime in the city," Bologna's widow told FOX News in July. "I want justice. I want the people to see. If my family wasn’t safe, what makes you think yours will be?"

Maybe there's hope.

Discouraged Welcome, welcome.

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-152698-bologna.html / duplicate

This is a sad story.

Here's a link to the New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/us/14 ... nty&st=cse

The article does not include any info re what specifically prompted District Attorney Buck to seize the tax records. Mr. Buck says that it's about protecting people from identity theft. So far, so good. But I wish that the article included info re what alerted him to the possibility that identities had been stolen.

I don't know if this is just careless reporting or another effort by the NYT to disparage opposition to open borders.

I wonder if the Bologna widow's attorney would like to know that:

One of the more popular claims by illegal immigration proponents is that those who enter the U.S. by breaking the law are invariably "hard-working" and "law-abiding" once they get here.

That argument, however, has one major flaw. According to Justice Department statistics and the analysis of immigration experts, the "law-abiding" claim often isn't true.

As Investors Business Daily reported in March 2005:

"The U.S. Justice Department estimated that 270,000 illegal immigrants served jail time nationally in 2003. Of those, 108,000 were in California. Some estimates show illegals now make up half of California's prison population, creating a massive criminal subculture that strains state budgets and creates a nightmare for local police forces."

Citing an Urban Institute study, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies Steven Camorata noted in 2004: "Roughly 17 percent of the prison population at the federal level are illegal aliens. That's a huge number since illegal aliens only account for about 3 percent of the total population."

Former California Gov. Pete Wilson places the percentage of illegal aliens in U.S. prisons even higher. In 2001, he told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly:

"We had problems related to the costs of educating children who were acknowledged to be in the country illegally, healthcare costs. One in five in our prison population were illegal immigrants who had been convicted of a felony after entering the country illegally."

EDIT: Just learned that Kris Kobach is one of the Bologna family's attorneys. Kobach has had several articles published in scholarly journals and is the author of "The Senate Immigration Bill Rewards Lawbreaking: "Why the DREAM Act Is a Nightmare, " a backgrounder from the Heritage Foundation, available here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... id=1098880