ICE Criminal Enforcement Illegal Aliens Logical?
After listenng for years to ICE and its high level politicians who head the Department of Homeland Security repeat over and over that they believe they are most effective in their immigration enforcement policies by focusing on criminal illegal aliens that have committed serious crimes and getting them arrested and deported is their top priority I say "BS" to this approach as illogical and meaningless.
Think about it. If State and local law enforcement operated the same way under the same philosophies of just focusing their attention and resources to criminals who commit serious crimes known as felonies, and ignored other criminal crimes such as misdemeanors as being low priority, the amount of chaos we would have in our cities within the criminal elements who now see they have a free pass to commit low level crimes.
ICE logic is ill conceived and without merit if they believe that this is the most effective strategy to illegal immigration enforcement.
Lets examine why we have criminal laws in place and how we as a society have determined what is considered serious thus a felony and what is considered not as serious but still important to citizens.
A criminal state statute making certain offenses against a citizens person or their property an illegal act and criminalizing that act is to accomplish two things in its basic form.
1. To act as a deterrent to prevent the act from even occuring.
2. To punish the person who has violated that act and encourage them to not commit any further acts of same or similar nature.
The level of deterrence and the level of punishment trully determine the level of crimes that are purpretrated against citizens occuring.
We don't have near the amount of capital offenses in our country as non-capital offenses and the reason is the amount of deterrence and the amount of punishment.
Many local law enforcement agencies recognize the value of law enforcement of all categories and levels from misdemeanors to felonies and have developed a communications system with each other to address its enforcement.
You will find daily examples of this such as in cities such as Mesa where a Mesa police officer makes a traffic stop and discovers during the traffic stop the subject has a misdemeanor warrant out of Phoenix. In the interest of justice to all citizens they have systems in place where they will confirm the warrant with the originating city and arrange to meet that cities police office at their closest jurisdictional boundary line and turn that subject over to their custody for prosecution. We don't currently have this system with ICE for illegal aliens discovered as they do not want this type of system for just one alien detained.
All the cities and county's have this type of cooperating system in the geographical area of their respective state. Why? Because State and local law enforcement agencies know the value of enforcing all laws is trully instrumental to a law and order society that instills a sense of order amongst the citizens they serve and protect.
Imagine what our cities would be like if we didn't have that level of cooperation amongst local law enforcement and each city took the same stance as ICE in only focusing on what they call "serious criminal illegal aliens" and the cities only focused on what they call "serious criminal suspects" and allowed all non-felony crimes to go un-enforced and not prosecuted.
I have personally seen ICE refuse to pick up a person from police because there was only one in custody by the police and therefore causing the police to have to let the subject go due to a lack of any other violations as to arrest them on.
ICE likes to come and get them if their is a boatload of them in police custody such as 8 or more to make it worthwhile of their time and resources. This creates a lot of ill will by local police officers towards ICE officers as a result thus causing many police officers to not even bother checking a suspected person immigration status or calling ICE if they only have one or two detained.
My feelings are our immigration laws need to be changed with a new mandate that ICE agents must respond to any local or state law enforcement agency when they are advised that an agency has a suspected illegal alien either detained or in their custody. They need to stop playing the game of going only after serious criminal offenders and go after all offenders and quit playing the "you do not have enough aliens to be worth our time" game.
This issue is a National Defense issue and a National Security issue and as such needs to be treated by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security as such.
In my opinion one legal US Citizen death or injury by an illegal alien is an act of terrorism!
