CAIR - Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform

 
 
Article
 
 
Facts contradict illegals' fear of deportation
 
by Mike McGarry
Aspen Daily News
August 23, 2003
 
www.aspendailynews.com
 
 
"Just the facts, ma'am, just stick to the facts" - Detective Joe Friday, Dragnet.
 
On Sunday, July 29, the Aspen Daily News published the story, "Small offenses can mean return home for illegals." The gist of the article was that illegal aliens in the Roaring Fork Valley are under a constant threat of deportation arising from otherwise innocuous local police contacts, such as minor traffic infractions.
 
The facts and players cited in the article require a closer look because, except for a grave compounding of their original sin of breaking and entering (into the country), almost nobody gets sent home. You would really have to be one of the clinically hapless, those who always find themselves under the path of a falling safe or tumbling into open manholes, to be awarded that all-expense-paid trip to the border.

The federal immigration authorities

Indeed, only a very tiny fraction of the eight-to-13 million illegals in the U.S. today are repatriated. Many local jurisdictions in the country refuse to inquire into immigration status of foreign nationals, even - believe it or not! - in cases involving multiple murders. Between 1995 and 2000, more than 35,000 imprisoned criminal aliens, instead of being deported after completing their sentences, were released by the INS back into an unsuspecting U.S. population, and more than one-third went on to perpetrate more crimes, including 98 murders, 44 kidnappings and 142 sexual attacks. The Federal Bureau of Prisons says 29 percent of the federal prison population is now made up of criminal aliens. One can't help wondering if they too will be dropped off in the neighborhood once they've done their time.
 
Today in the U.S. there are 320,000 to 400,000 "absconders" (including 110,000 from terrorist-nurturing countries), foreigners ordered removed from the country by immigration judges but whose removals the INS failed to enforce. The Feds haven't the damnedest idea where they are or what they're up to. And in spite of the exigent circumstances brought by 9-11 and disarming governmental assurances that the borders have been "tightened," every month more than 80,000 illegals from all over the world successfully saunter through our Swiss cheese borders and permanently settle in.
 
Early indications are that the much ballyhooed recent INS reorganization into the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (BICE) is in name only - that BICE in effect is the very same striped feline that was the paper tiger INS.

The immigration lawyers

Immigration Lawyer: "Now that the immigration judge has accepted your claim that you have a well-founded fear of persecution were you to be deported to your native country, tell me truly, was your claim really valid?"
 
Client: "Well, after hearing your amazing argument in court this morning, I'm beginning to think it was."
 
Immigration lawyers are the bottom feeders in a profession fat with bottom feeders. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) had 68 members in 1970, when nontraditional mass immigration was just getting up and running. Now AILA boasts more than 8,000 card-carrying members and metastasizing daily. Like a roost of engorged vultures frenzy feeding on the spoils of a wagon train massacre, for more than 30 years AILA's lawyers have been pushing and getting their way for more and more mass immigration to further bloat their tummies and wallets.
 
Journalist and repentant immigration lawyer, Matt Hayes, disclosed that Jeanne Butterfield, AILA's head lawyer and grande dame of immigration lawyering, is an ideological admixture and darling of Middle East terrorist organizations and the (Trotskyite) World Worker's Party. It's no wonder that when the Berlin Wall fell, the Marxist lawyers hightailed it for the protective covering of radical multiculturalism and behind the disguise of a benign-sounding lawyers' association.
 
Ask an immigration lawyer how much she charges for processing a relatively simple adjustment-of-status packet for an illegal, and she will immediately change the subject to her magnanimous pro bono work. Fact is, these lawyer opportunists are changing obscene amounts of money for processing the most perfunctory of immigration paperwork.
 
Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Hear Ye! Now comes Glenwood Springs lawyer John Reardon, sounding and looking every bit the immigration lawyer he is: bombastic, posturing and shedding crocodile tears for illegals, while gaining a real name for himself advocating on behalf of his clients - those who broke into the country and commit multiple misdemeanors and felonies to perpetuate themselves here. So if you see immigration lawyer Reardon on the street, ask him how much on average he gouges from his clients, but don't let him change the subject.

Local law enforcement

The Daily News article obliquely revealed that Pitkin County taxpayers are paying the wages of Maria Munday, the Latino-Anglo liaison officer for the sheriff's office, to advise illegals how to avoid detection so they won't lose their "American dream." Section 274 of the Immigration and Nationality Act provides criminal penalties for any act that "encourages or induces an alien to...reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such...residence is or will be in violation of law."
 
To prove a local official has "encouraged or induced" illegal aliens, it only need be shown, through evidence broadly construed, she knowingly helped or advised the aliens, or emboldened them, or made them more confident in their continued illegal residence in the United States. However, don't look for that or other immigration statutes to be enforced. With thousands of illegals walking the Valley's streets with impunity, we obviously live in a time of very selective enforcement of our laws.

Catholic Church/Catholic Charities

It is impossible to mention Catholic Charities, cited in the article, without also mentioning the Catholic Church. The Church may be thought of as company headquarters and Catholic Charities its field operations. To talk about one, then, is to talk about both.
 
A dutiful former alter boy and a Catholic school kid, with a priest and nun in my extended family, I solicited for various worthy Catholic charities. But the contemporary Church isn't the one of my boyhood experience. As we read daily, the Church has degenerated into something more akin to an ongoing criminal enterprise than a house of the Lord.
 
A more accurate means of understanding the relationship of company headquarters to its field operations is to call to mind the characters in Oliver Twist: the Church would be the nefarious schemer, Fagin, who daily sends his army of street-urchin pickpockets, Catholic Charities, out to work the crowds. (These remarks are not directed at the Church's laity, perhaps the greatest victims of the Church hierarchy's long, steep fall from grace.)
 
For the uninitiated, the Church has long forsaken the biblical admonition, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," while it has been encouraging mass illegal immigration. Former Border Patrol agents report that the Church utilizes some of its properties and churches as sanctuaries and safe houses for illegals. Meanwhile, the Conference of Catholic Bishops continues its protracted assault on the U.S. Congress, lobbying to legalize the presence of the millions of illegals in the country.
 
The Conference of Catholic Bishops, by the way, is that very same assemblage of fossilized, supposedly neuter-gendered males who - because they have fallen so far and are in such pervasive, collective denial - to this day just cannot for the life of them provide the implied answer to the rhetorical question: What should a man of the cloth, an emissary of God on earth, not do if he finds himself in a back room of an empty church with an awestruck, vulnerable little guy excited about his first altar-boy assignment?
 
That's why devoted Catholic and current Gov. of Oklahoma, Frank Keating, resigned in disgust from the (Potemkin village) committee charged with - wink, wink - monitoring the progress of the Church's sex abuse "reforms." Keating likened the bishops' skullduggery and cult of secrecy to those of La Cosa Nostra.
 
So you might understand my dismay when the Pitkin County Commissioners acknowledged they were writing thousands of dollars in checks to Catholic Charities to provide free legal aid to illegals and for "promoting cultural diversity," that is, for promoting social engineering. That was a particularly distasteful bowl of swill to be force-fed, because the county was simultaneously telling its senior citizens, some of our most frail, vulnerable citizens, that budget woes would require eliminating needed senior services.
 
Adding insult to those injuries was the knowledge that some of those tax dollars earmarked to make life more comfortable for illegals were picked by the urchins from the pockets of our senior citizens, many of whom are on very modest fixed incomes. Writing in The New Yorker magazine, reform-minded priest and beloved pastor, Father Walter Cuenin, from the otherwise remarkably criminal Archdiocese of Boston, urged Catholics to bypass the various Catholic charities and instead contribute directly to the causes of their choice.
 
So why do you suppose the Church has been encroaching so on Caesar's exclusive immigration prerogatives, particularly when the bishops in Rome have engaged in an especially hypocritical version of NIMBYism, by cranking on the Italian government to curtail Moslem immigration into Italy? (In a display of papal chutzpah, then-president Clinton, president to the most generous immigrant-receiving country on earth, was the object of an inelegant scolding by the Pope for not completely throwing open our nation's borders to all comers.)
 
The answer is singular, coarse and blatantly self-serving: the Church needs a continuous intravenous drip of millions of warm immigrant bodies to infuse life into the moribund corpus of the Church, to fortify through numbers its political power base, to bring nourishment, strength and numbers to the emaciated priest and nun corps and to fill all those cold pews left vacant by the Church's hemorrhaging populations of the faithful, alienated and dispossessed.

The Prosecutor

Recently, three criminal insides were sentenced for selling Colorado driver's licenses out of a licensing station in Glenwood Springs to some 300 eager customers, likely all illegals. Knowingly possessing such a license is a felony carrying a presumption of intent to defraud. Not mentioned in the Daily News article, but conspicuous by his absence, was district attorney Mack Myers. We telephoned Myers and asked when we could expect to be reading about the arrests and prosecutions of the 300 felons. (We first had to voice our objection to his using the word "victims" when referring to the 300 crooks.)
 
He told us that to protect his witness opportunities for prosecuting the three inside perps, he needed the cooperation of some of the 300, suggesting he couldn't get that cooperation were he prosecuting them. Tilt! The insiders never went to trial; their cases were disposed of through plea bargains.
 
He then posed the plaintive question, "How would I know how to find them?" He seemed oblivious that all those purloined driver's licenses bore the names, addresses and finger print information of their felonious holders - a prosecutor's dream - and that information was very likely in his files, possibly next to the bulging file of all those citizens prosecuted by the DA's office with the help of the now infamous cop who was convicted for official misconduct.
 
With that, we rolled our eyes, slowly and gently returned the telephone handset to its cradle and went to lunch. The jive we got from the DA demonstrates just how deeply entrenched and defiant the selective enforcement of our laws has become - where illegals prevail and citizens go to jail.

Epilogue

So you see, all the fact, all the players--all the king's horses and all the king's men in our upside-down, inside-out Bizzaro World, where everything is opposite - are conspiring to ensure only a handful of illegals receive their pink slips, for "small offenses" or high crimes.
 
To be eligible for a free ride home, an illegal would have to do something tantamount to throwing himself in front of a speeding BICE vehicle on a donut run, and there's no guarantee that would do it. Even the relatively few who are deported, just as the woman profiled in the article, turn right around and re-enter the nation's premises by climbing in through the unlocked bathroom window - yet another felony. Ho, hum.
 
Mike McGarry is an Aspen resident who knows he's going straight to hell when he dies, so he doesn't give a rip who creates suffering for themselves over what he writes.
 
 
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