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Townhall...
Concerns Over Illegal
Immigration Becoming Mainstream
By Rachel Alexander
6/9/2011
Once upon a time opposition to illegal immigration was championed by a
few special interest groups and outspoken leaders like Tom Tancredo and
Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Not so anymore. Regular sheriffs like Arizona’s
Paul Babeu of Pinal County and Larry Dever of Cochise County are
speaking up loudly about their frustrations dealing with it.
The Obama administration gets credit for mainstreaming the issue. Obama
moved the country backwards on fixing the problem by suing Arizona over
SB 1070 and decreasing funding for enforcement. One federal prosecutor
in Texas refuses to prosecute illegal immigrants until they have been
arrested seven times. He will not prosecute them with a felony until
they have been caught 14 times. Even more egregiously, he does not
prosecute coyotes smuggling fewer than six illegal immigrants. These
policies are in place throughout Texas.
All the progress Arizona has made the past few years reducing illegal
immigration and associated crime due to the efforts of Sheriff Arpaio,
Senator Russell Pearce and former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew
Thomas is now being eroded. The Border Patrol reports that 219,300
illegal immigrants were apprehended coming through the Tucson Sector
last year. But as many as 350,000 to 400,000 were not caught, with many
heading north through Sheriff Babeu’s Pinal County. It is a bad time to
be decreasing enforcement efforts. According to Sheriff Dever, illegal
immigration is getting worse. “The bottom line is the people we’re
battling are much more sinister and much more aggressive, much more
determined than they have ever been,” Dever said on NPR. “When they
used to run away, now they want to fight.” The Yuma Sector is the only
sector along the border that has “operational control” over its
126-mile section of the more than 3,000-mile border with Mexico.
More than 50% of illegal immigrants enter the country through the
Tucson sector. Arizona is hit harder by illegal immigration than any
other state in the country. The Bureau of Land Management recently
posted signs 70 miles north of the border in Sheriff Babeu’s Pinal
County warning citizens to stay out of certain areas due to the drug
cartels and coyotes. The violence on the border has moved north, with
much of it taking place 20-40 miles north of the border. Pinal County
has become the number one pass through county in the nation for drug
and human trafficking. Sheriff Babeu says that parts of Arizona are now
controlled by the drug cartels, a $40 billion dollar industry. He
laments, “The criminals have taken over our country, and our government
has become our enemy.”
Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, formerly governor
of Arizona, brazenly declared last year that the border “is as secure
as it ever has been.” The Border Patrol is circulating a PowerPoint
presentation showing that illegal immigration has decreased. But their
chart cherry picks which years and figures to compare. Sheriff Dever
objects to the skewed presentation, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid and buy
into ‘this border is secure’ nonsense.” Dever resigned from the
governmental Alliance to Combat Transnational Threats organization in
February, calling it a charade. Sheriff Babeu accuses the federal
government of trying to brainwash the American people by saying the
border is safe and secure, in order to “lull us into a false sense of
security.”
Outrageously, the federal government is instructing the Border Patrol
to arrest fewer illegal immigrants, as part of a “catch and release”
scheme. This selective enforcement is apparently being done so the
Obama administration can boast that apprehensions of illegal immigrants
have gone down while Obama has been in office. Sheriff Dever was so
furious he testified to Congress last month about the practice. He is
concerned the Obama administration is protecting illegal immigrants
from prosecution, allowing many to get away with commit heinous crimes.
To fix our broken borders, Sheriff Babeu would like the 10-point border
security plan proposed by Arizona’s Senator Jon Kyl implemented. It
calls for 6,000 armed soldiers deployed along the border for up to two
years, 3,000 of them located in Arizona. A double-barrier fence would
be completed in key areas, along 700 miles of the 2,000-mile border.
Currently, there are numerous miles along the border where there is no
fence, or it is easily passed through. Another key component of the
plan would fully fund and enforce Operation Streamline in Arizona’s two
Border Patrol sectors, which puts illegal border crossers behind bars
for 60 days.
Both Sheriffs Babeu and Dever have been named as defendants in the
Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona over SB 1070, as well as
in lawsuits filed by the ACLU and other radical activists. The ACLU has
filed lawsuits against every Sheriff and County Attorney in Arizona.
The organization has forced Babeu and Dever to form a Border Sheriffs’
legal defense fund to assist them in defending the lawsuits. Sheriff
Dever calls the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in May
upholding the gutting of SB 1070 “judicially-imposed amnesty.” “We get
frustrated and disheartened when the White House, which has failed to
secure the border for generations, sues us for trying to fill the legal
vacuum.”
The Obama administration is using the race card to try and convince the
courts to strike down SB 1070 – even though there is language in SB
1070 specifically prohibiting racial profiling. Sheriff Dever finds the
accusations ridiculous that law enforcement is profiling illegal
immigrants based on their race. In an article for the New York Times
entitled “Abandoned at the Border,” Sheriff Dever wrote, “It’s not
really what they look like as much as what they do that concerns me.
Among other things, they generally run off into the desert when they
see our officers approach. Citizens and legal residents don’t normally
do that… In Cochise County, my deputies and I often have to travel many
miles to respond to a resident’s call for assistance. The last thing we
have time to do is harass law-abiding people.”
The liberal Obama administration has revealed its desperation by
resorting to the race card to defeat common sense policies on illegal
immigration. Lacking any substantive arguments to refute reality, they
resort to emotion. Even worse, unlike Sheriffs Dever and Babeu who
formed a private legal defense fund to spare taxpayers the expense of
defending their counties from the lawsuits, Obama is using our money to
fund his race-baiting lawsuit. Obama has gone too far by preventing
regular sheriffs from doing their job.
Read it with links at Townhall
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