Remember the victims of illegal immigrants' crimes

PRESIDENT Bush accuses those of us who want to secure America's borders and fully enforce our immigration laws of lacking "compassion."

Huh. Well, I have yet to hear an ounce of compassion from President Bush for America's countless casualties of lax immigration enforcement. Where's the sympathy for innocent, law-abiding citizens who have lost their lives at the hands of illegal aliens and their open-borders enablers?

Nope, we haven't heard a word about the victims as the White House pours on its unadulterated pro-illegal alien rhetoric and "undocumented workers do the jobs Americans won't do" propaganda — all in support of a massive, ill-timed, bureaucratic nightmare-inducing amnesty plan that will inevitably increase illegal immigration.

Last week, a notorious illegal alien serial killer who traipsed freely across the U.S.-Mexico border during a 25-year, escalating crime spree, popped up in the news again. The case of Angel Resendiz, a convicted death row murderer in President Bush's home state of Texas, is a timely reminder of the deadly costs of our continued homeland security chaos.

Time and again, illegal alien day laborer Resendiz broke the law getting into our country; broke more laws while in the country; and then broke the law repeatedly and brazenly after being released, deported and allowed to return. His most brutal acts included the slayings of 12 people, ranging in age from 16 to 81, which ended in 1999 when Resendiz surrendered to a Texas Ranger in El Paso. For the last seven years, Resendiz has been perched comfortably on Death Row — eating chocolate cream pies, watching Spanish-language television, whining about depression and selling locks of his hair on Internet auction sites.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html

City Journal Home. City Journal
The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Why can’t our immigration authorities deport the hordes of illegal felons in our cities?
Heather Mac Donald
Winter 2004

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation........

Read article at:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html

Dallas Police Officer Brian Jackson, 28 Murdered by illegal alien!

Officer Brian Jackson would still be alive if our borders were secured and this illegal alien had been deported after his first convictions in the hands of US Law Enforcement.

Officer Brian Jackson Across the force, Dallas police officers are grieving for one of their own after he was killed in a gunfight early Sunday morning.....

illegal immigration, murder, police, laws, crimes, gangs, deaths, immigrants, guns, drugs

11/14/2005
From WFAA-TV Staff Reports

Police said Officer Brian Jackson, 28, was shot under the arm in the 2400 block of North Henderson Avenue in East Dallas after he chased a gunman on foot who had reportedly threatened his ex-girlfriend and fired a shot in her home.

A homeowner said Juan Lizcano, 29, hid in his front yard on the 2400 block of Madera Street and then fired on the officer when he came through the front gate.

Two officers attempted CPR on Jackson, but by the time doctors at Baylor Medical Center had a chance to try and save his life, Jackson was already gone.

He had been married just two months when he gave his life wearing the badge he earned five years ago.

As police continue to investigate further into the shooting, many of them also mourn the loss of their fellow officer. It was the first on-duty police fatality in Dallas since 2001, and the first on Chief David Kunkle's watch.

"He was a very kind, compassionate man who cared very deeply about his wife, his family and his job," Kunkle said.

Lizcano was arrested for the shooting, along with a friend, Jose Fernandez, who police found in Lizcano's car.

However, Fernandez is no longer in Dallas police custody after investigators questioned and released him.

Fernandez said he and Lizcano went out Saturday evening to a nightclub off Interstate 35 near Manana Drive.

Juan Lizcano sits in the back of a patrol car after he allegedly fatally shot Officer Brian Jackson. There, he said Lizcano became drunk and later pulled out a gun in his truck and said he was going to kill his ex-girlfriend.

He was with Lizcano when he said the suspect drove to his ex-girlfriend's home.

"He was jealous," Fernandez said. "He believed the woman was with another guy."

Fernandez said he tried to stop Lizcano from going inside the woman's house, but he wouldn't listen.

"I stayed in the truck, and then the police arrived," he said. "And they got me out of the truck and then I heard many gunshots."

This wasn't Lizcano's first violent run-in with the police. He was first booked in September for threatening to kill his ex-girlfriend with a knife. Six days later, he posed again for a mug shot for a charge of driving while intoxicated.

Finally, his latest mug shot was for the murder of Jackson.

Lizcano's friends said he was typically a nice guy, but would become violent when he started drinking.

"I didn't think he would ever do that," said friend Joe Gallegos.

Friends of Lizcano said he had worked as a landscaper and had been in the United States for the past two years as an illegal immigrant.
http://www.alipac.us/article869.html

INS: Just following 'standard procedure'

By Michelle Malkin

Oct 30, 2002

Immigration and Naturalization Service officials told The Washington Times this week that the fatally flawed release of illegal alien sniper suspect Lee Malvo from federal custody in January 2002 "followed standard procedure." For once, these INS bureaucrats are telling you the truth. The INS -- along with the immigration court system, which is a separate fiefdom administered by the Executive Office for Immigration Review in Falls Church, Va. -- routinely ignores its laws, policies and front-line employees' best judgment on detaining and deporting immigration outlaws. -- In September, Maximiliano Silerio Esparza, an illegal alien from El Salvador, was indicted on charges of brutally raping two nuns who were praying on a walking path in Klamath Falls, Ore. -- and then strangling one of them to death with her own rosary beads. Esparza was detained twice earlier this year by the U.S. Border Patrol, but was released both times. According to The Oregonian, Esparza was let loose under INS's cost-saving catch-and-release policy. He previously served time in jail in California, had been arrested later in Portland on drug charges, and had an outstanding warrant for his arrest at the time of the alleged rapes and murder. Federal law mandates that immigration authorities detain criminal aliens with extensive rap sheets such as Esparza's until their deportation outside the U.S. But following INS "standard procedure," Esparza was set free in violation of the law. -- In March, a Los Angeles sheriff's deputy pulled over Armando Garcia for a routine traffic stop in a San Gabriel Valley suburb. Garcia walked toward the officer, pulled out a 9 mm semiautomatic pistol, and fired at close range several times before fleeing. The deputy died of gunshot wounds to the head. Garcia was an illegal alien from Mexico who had been previously deported three times in 1992, 1994 and 2001 and convicted of two felonies while in America. Garcia had an extensive criminal history, from drug dealing and weapons violations to suspected murder. Following "standard procedure," neither the INS nor the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles took any measures to keep Garcia off the streets and enforce a federal law requiring criminal prosecution for illegal re-entry into the United States. Garcia remains a fugitive. -- Edward Nathaniel Bell, a resident alien from Jamaica, shot and killed Sergeant Ricky Timbrook in Winchester, Va., in October 1999. Two years earlier, Bell was arrested and convicted for illegal possession of a concealed and loaded handgun. The arresting officer was Sgt. Timbrook. After the conviction, the INS started deportation proceedings, but Bell knew how to play the game. He posted $3,500 bail, was released, and then won numerous delays in his case. While free, Bell talked of shooting Timbrook and showed off a gun, according to acquaintances who testified at Bell's capital murder trial. After being charged with Sgt. Timbrook's murder, Bell actually had the gall to apply for American citizenship. Following "standard procedure," his long-delayed final hearing in Immigration Court had been scheduled just days after Timbrook's murder. -- In August, Miguel Angel Heredia Juarez, an illegal alien from Mexico, was convicted for viciously raping and beating a 19-year old North Bend, Wash., woman. Juarez was on probation at the time, after serving time in prison for threatening to kill someone. According to the Eastside Journal, Juarez had been previously convicted of four other felonies, including theft and assault, since illegally crossing the Mexican border five years ago. Criminal aliens are supposed to be taken immediately into INS custody after serving their sentences, but as the Justice Department's Inspector General reported earlier this month, the INS lets tens of thousands of them run loose. Following "standard procedure," INS's failure to track foreign-born inmates led to the release of 35,318 criminal aliens into the general population in 2000 -- roughly one-third of whom went on to commit serious crimes. -- Nicolas Solorio Vasquez, an illegal alien from Mexico, gunned down a Washington State police officer during a traffic stop in Pasco, Wash., in October 1999. Prior to the shooting, Vasquez had been deported three times by the INS. After each release, he re-entered the country illegally and headed back up to the Pacific Northwest to commit more crimes. On July 26, 1999, police booked Vasquez into a Franklin County jail for unlawful delivery of cocaine and heroin. The INS should have taken Vasquez into custody immediately upon his release, but failed to pick him up. The officer's widow in the Vasquez case, Billie Saunders, is doing what many more victims of lax immigration enforcement should do when Washington won't step up to the plate: She is suing the INS in federal court for failing to enforce the law. INS lawyers argued in court hearings on the Vasquez case this week that it is neither the government's responsibility nor duty to stop the release of illegal aliens who go on to terrorize and kill American citizens. You know: Standard procedure.

Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com. She has also authored books such as Unhinged and In Defense of Internment.
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/michellemalkin/2002/10/30/164775.html

Sanctuary Cities: A New Civil War
Illegal Immigration Focus II

By Edward J. Erler
Posted September 7, 2005

The ghost of John C. Calhoun still stalks the land. Calhoun, of course, was the leading architect of nullification—and secession. Almost everyone believes the issues of nullification (the doctrine that federal law can be negated by state laws) and secession were resolved by the North's victory in the Civil War and the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments. But nullification has once again reared its hoary head, this time in the guise of "sanctuary cities."

SANCTUARY POLICIES

Across the nation cities from New York to Houston to San Diego forbid city officials—including police—from inquiring into anyone's immigration status or cooperating with immigration officials. The police may not stop or detain persons solely due to their immigration status or even inquire into their status while making routine traffic stops or misdemeanor arrests. These policies have, in effect, created safe havens for illegal immigrants, including criminal aliens.

Cities began adopting sanctuary laws in the 1980s, supposedly to foster trust between illegal immigrants and police. Proponents argued that crimes would not be reported, witnesses to crime would not come forth and immigrants wouldn't cooperate with police if they feared deportation. Yet the policies adopted reflect the power of immigration advocacy groups more than concerns about crime prevention. Politicians in large cities with significant immigrant populations simply surrendered to the demands of immigrant rights groups that sought to minimize—if not extinguish—the distinction between legal immigrants and illegal aliens. Nor is it only immigrants' rights groups that promote sanctuary cities. Business interests want a steady source of cheap, compliant and exploitable labor; the minions of the welfare state want to magnify their power by extending the largess of the administrative state to those who will, in all likelihood, take their place in the so-called "underclass."

The resulting policies not only tolerate crime—after all, illegal immigrants are lawbreakers—but actively abet and protect criminal activity by handcuffing the powers of the police.

Currently over 400,000 illegal immigrants within our borders have received final deportation orders from a federal judge but have failed to show up for deportation. Nearly a quarter of these absconders are convicted criminals. In sanctuary cities police may not inquire into the deportation status of these aliens or apprehend them until they have committed another crime.

Fox News reports that illegal aliens account for nearly 25 percent of California's prison population, far in excess of their numbers in the general population. When these aliens finish their sentences they are subject to deportation.Yet it has been estimated that fewer than 50 percent of these criminals are actually deported.

If criminal aliens are released in sanctuary cities they are not reported to immigration authorities who might begin deportation proceedings. Thus sanctuary cities harbor deportable criminal aliens, placing them beyond the reach of immigration laws until they commit further crimes—and even then they might not come to the attention of immigration officers, depending on the severity of the crime.

An example: a notorious and brutal rape was committed in New York in 2002. Four of the perpetrators were illegal aliens who had been in police custody before the crime but were released without notification to immigration officials who might have taken them into custody pending deportation proceedings. Instead the City's sanctuary policy prohibited any officials from making the notification. The public outrage over this incident momentarily brought the policy into question. Ultimately Mayor Bloomberg repealed it by executive order—only to see it return, slightly modified, shortly thereafter in response to pressure from immigrant advocacy groups.

Even criminal aliens who are actually deported later receive sanctuary in these cities upon their return to the United States. Even if, for example, a Los Angeles police officer knows from personal experience that an alien has returned and is thus committing a felony simply by his presence, the officer may not arrest him until he commits another crime. Such returnees naturally look to sanctuary cities as safe havens.

SANCTUARY POLICIES AND CRIMINAL GANGS

State Representative Russell Pearce recently introduced a bill in the Arizona legislature that would allow police to enforce federal immigration laws. "We have an invasion going on," Pearce says. As violent gangs flock to the United States, he argues, sanctuary cities make it easier for them to operate. In Phoenix, Arizona's largest city, sanctuary policies limit the ability of the police "to enforce the law," he says. Similarly, Department of Homeland Security officials routinely say that criminal alien gangs have become a dangerous epidemic abetted by sanctuary cities.

Los Angeles' sanctuary policy, known as "Special Order 40," prevents police from arresting anyone based solely on their immigration status, or from notifying immigration officials about an illegal immigrant. In January 2004 Manhattan Institute scholar. Heather Mac Donald wrote that "dozens of gang members from Mara Salvatrucha, a ruthless Salvadoran gang, have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country after deportation is a felony. Yet if an LAPD officer arrests an illegal gang-banger for felonious reentry, it is the officer who will be treated as a criminal for violating an LAPD rule."

According to the National Drug Intelligence Center, an agency of the Justice Department, there may be as many as 10,000 members of Mara Salvatrucha spread across the country. The gang, also known as MS-13, engages in cross-border drug and weapons smuggling, illegal immigrant smuggling, purveying false documents, robbery and murder. In California the gang has allied itself with the Mexican Mafia to control the notorious gang culture that dominates the state prison system. Central American authorities blame MS-13 for a wave of murders in the region, including the killing of 28 women and children during a Honduras bus hijacking. Officials speculate that the gang perpetrated this mass murder simply to intimidate authorities with its brazenness and ruthlessness. There is even speculation that MS-13 may be cooperating with al-Qaeda in smuggling operations across the border.

Recently MS-13 leaders boldly threatened to retaliate against the Minuteman project, a group of civilian volunteers who sought to reduce illegal immigration by staking out portions of our southern border. In some states the gang has issued "green lights" to kill police officers. In recent months, federal authorities have become more aggressive in arresting MS-13 gang members. Among those arrested so far more than half had prior arrests or convictions for drug possession, murder, assault, arson or weapons violations.

In sanctuary cities the power of the police to deal with such violent gangs has been severely limited. At most they can keep these repeat felons under surveillance until they commit another crime. Clearly Special Order 40 endangers public safety, especially among the immigrant population itself. Mac Donald rightly notes that "the biggest myth about sanctuary laws is that they are immigrant-friendly. To the contrary: they leave lawabiding immigrants vulnerable to violence."

MEXICO AS A SANCTUARY

At the same time that the U.S. provides sanctuary cities for illegal aliens, Mexico has become a sanctuary for criminals fleeing the United States. More than 60 murderers, including cop killers, have fled to Mexico from Los Angeles County alone. In another recent case an illegal immigrant killed Officer David March in Los Angeles before fleeing to Mexico.

The whereabouts of these killers is known to Mexican authorities—in one case a notorious copkiller is living openly and could be arrested at any time. Mexican officials, however, refuse to extradite these killers because they might face either the death penalty or life in prison without parole. (Mexico's human rights sensitivities are such that it will not allow extraditions where murderers might face those penalties.) As many as two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants in Los Angeles were for illegal immigrants, many of whom have presumably fled to Mexico.

President Bush has frequently advocated policies of "compassion to our neighbors to the South." Calls for compassion, however, have only provoked contempt from Mexico.This was entirely predictable since compassion as the basis for foreign policy is not only unrealistic but is sure to be perceived as weakness. Instead of compassion, the U.S. should demand simple justice—the return of these violent criminals who have received sanctuary in Mexico.

SANCTUARY CITIES ARE ILLEGAL

What is most remarkable about sanctuary cities is that they are illegal. In 1996 Congress passed two laws dealing with the subject: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Under both statutes state and local governments could no longer prohibit employees from inquiring about immigration status or tipping off immigration authorities. The Court of Appeals upheld both provisions in New York v. U.S. (1999).

The Appeals Court remarked that "the City's sovereignty argument asks us to turn the Tenth Amendment's shield against the federal government's using state and local governments to enact and administer federal programs into a sword allowing states and localities to engage in passive resistance that frustrates federal programs." The court concluded that where the federal government has undoubted power to act, as in the case of immigration, the Supremacy Clause "bars states from taking actions that frustrate federal laws and regulatory schemes. We therefore hold that states do not retain under the Tenth Amendment an untrammeled right to forbid all voluntary cooperation by state or local officials with particular programs."

REEVALUATING SANCTUARY POLICIES

Some California jurisdictions have announced that they will reevaluate their sanctuary policies. Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona is proposing the most significant change: he plans to train hundreds of officers to enforce immigration laws. A recent LA Times editorial calls this plan "overly broad, dangerously so." The editorial, however, characterizes as "understandable" the Los Angeles County Sheriff 's plan "to ascertain the immigration status of convicted felons in county jails." It almost defies understanding that this was not already standard procedure.

The biggest political imbroglio has been occasioned by the LAPD's announcement that that it would issue a "clarification" of Special Order 40. This plan, however, has come to naught due to pressure from Latino activists. In a meeting with Latino groups, who expressed fears that any modification of the Special Order would lead to racial profiling, Police Chief William Bratton gave assurances that "we are not proposing to change a single word of Special Order 40." Rather, under the guise of "clarification" police officers will be allowed to inquire about immigration status in three well-defined situations: when a police officer recognizes a suspect who has been deported as the result of a prior conviction; if police intelligence identifies a person as a returned deportee; and if officers learn that someone already under arrest has been deported and subsequently returned illegally.

Returning to the U.S. after deportation is a federal felony that carries a penalty of 10 to 20 years in prison. LAPD arrests about 200 returned felons every month.These "clarifications" are surely improvements—but only of a rather cosmetic kind. They touch only on the most glaring and egregious defects of Special Order 40. Sanctuary should be removed for all law-breakers—including illegal immigrants—not just those criminals who are deported and return. The safety of the community should command more respect than just "clarifications" to a bankrupt and illegal policy.

Edward J. Erler is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute and professor of political science at California State San Bernardino.

http://www.claremont.org/projects/local_gov/Newsletter/sanctuarycities.html

2005 April 21 Thursday
Heather Mac Donald On Illegal Alien Gangs And Restrictions On Police

Heather Mac Donald testifies about illegal alien gangs before the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims.

Sanctuary laws, present in such cities as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin, Houston, and San Francisco, generally forbid local police officers from inquiring into a suspect’s immigration status or reporting it to federal authorities. Such laws place a higher priority on protecting illegal aliens from deportation than on protecting legal immigrants and citizens from assault, rape, arson, and other crimes.

Let’s say a Los Angeles police officer sees a member of Mara Salvatrucha hanging out at Hollywood and Vine. The gang member has previously been deported for aggravated assault; his mere presence back in the country following deportation is a federal felony. Under the prevailing understanding of Los Angeles’s sanctuary law (special order 40), if that officer merely inquires into the gangbanger’s immigration status, the officer will face departmental punishment.

To get the felon off the street, the cop has to wait until he has probable cause to arrest the gangbanger for a non-immigration crime, such as murder or robbery. It is by no means certain that that officer will successfully build a non-immigrant case against the gangster, however, since witnesses to gang crime often fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Meanwhile, the gangbanger is free to prey on law-abiding members of his community, many of them immigrants themselves.

This is an extraordinarily inefficient way to reduce crime. If an officer has grounds for arresting a criminal now, it is perverse to ask him to wait until some later date when maybe, if he is lucky, he will have an additional ground for arrest

The refusal to allow police to arrest illegal alien gangbangers just for being here illegally amounts to a death sentence for those they go on to kill and severe emotional agony for who they go on to rape or maim.

If all the illegals were deported our problem with Hispanic gangs would greatly decrease.

--A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations. It commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

--Immigration and Customs Enforcement conservatively puts the number of illegals in Mara Salvatrucha as a “majority;” police officers, by contrast, assert that the gang is overwhelmingly illegal.

--Law enforcement officials estimate that 20% of gang members in San Diego County are illegal, according to the Union-Tribune.

-- The L.A. County Sheriff reported in 2000 that 23% of inmates in county jails were deportable, according to the New York Times.

--The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

-- In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide in the first half of 2004 (which totaled 1,200 to 1,500) targeted illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) were for illegal aliens.

The stories of some of these criminal illegals are horrible.

Five months ago, Carlos Barrera, an illegal Mexican in Hollywood, Ca., mugged three people, burglarized two apartments, and tried to rape a five-year-old girl. Barrera had been deported four years ago after serving time for robbery, drugs, and burglary. Since his reentry following deportation, he had been stopped twice for traffic violations. But thanks to special order 40, the police had never mentioned him to the immigration authorities, reports the New York Times.

In September, 2003, the Miami police arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation. Pursuant to Miami’s sanctuary law, however, the police had never checked his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his deportable status, and could have forestalled the rapes.

This is all more evidence that the US government's lax border and immigration enforcement amounts to our collectively saying "It's being-hit-on-the-head lessons in here". How long will it take for the cries of "Stop hitting me!!" to get loud enough to bring about a change?

Over on the Immigration Blog Heather reports that black left-liberal Congressional Represenative Maxine Waters demands real border control.

Enter Maxine Waters. Waters has poisoned racial politics in Los Angeles for years; she essentially declared the Los Angeles riots a strike against racial injustice. Never saw a cop she doesn’t think is a racist. Yet here she was at the hearing declaring herself absolutely fed up with the race war between Hispanics and blacks that is raging on the streets of downtown L.A. “Why isn’t anyone talking about the Mexican Mafia (a gang of illegal Mexicans that controls the California prison system)?” she thundered. ‘I don’t care if you’re pink or purple or white or black or brown, I want you out if you’re committing crimes.’ There is no excuse not to control the border, she said. ‘I’m a liberal with a capital ‘L’,’ she said, ‘but I’m sick of it.’

Waters' timing was impeccable. A day after she spoke, 100 black and Hispanic students at Jefferson High School in South L.A. attacked each other in a race- and gang-driven brawl; three days later, the same thing happened, this time, students also hurled bottles at the police. Principal Norm Morrow told the Los Angeles Times:"We just have a lot of issues with race," said Morrow. "It's coming out of the community, into the school." Cops in riot gear now patrol the school.

Also see Michelle Malkin on an MS-13 gang member who just killed an 18 month old baby in Houston. Also see my post "More Bad News On Hispanic Gangs And High School Graduation Rates"

By Randall Parker at 2005 April 21 11:57 AM Immigration Crime | TrackBack
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002730.html

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