Tag Archives: Illegal Immigration

News

Are illegal immigrants more likely to commit crimes than the general public?

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Kathryn Steinle was murdered by an illegal immigrant.
Kathryn Steinle was murdered by an illegal immigrant.

So we had a case in the news where an illegal immigrant who had been arrested and deported numerous times was allowed to stay in the U.S. thanks to San Francisco’s very Democrat “sanctuary city” policy. All the people running for the Democrat presidential nomination support sanctuary cities, and amnesty for illegal immigrants as well. But how do these policies affect American taxpayers?

Breitbart News has the numbers from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Excerpt:

While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.

Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.

Now a lot of those convictions will be related to immigration… what happens when we take those out?

The sentencing rate is still higher than normal:

Eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants would account for 13.6 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.

All that crime is not only dangerous and expensive, but we have to pay for the fails and law enforcement to catch them, too. Now, let’s review Hillary Clinton’s views on illegal immigration.

The Washington Times reports that she favors amnesty:

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Tuesday that if elected, she would try to expand President Obama’s deportation amnesty to more illegal immigrants, saying this administration has left out a number of aliens who deserve to be granted legal status.

Speaking in Las Vegas at a Cinco de Mayo meeting focused on immigration, Mrs. Clinton also called for granting attorneys to illegal immigrants facing the complex immigration system, and said she would like to re-examine detention to ensure more illegal immigrants are released as they await deportation.

Mrs. Clinton delivered on just about every question from immigrant rights activists, who had been pressing her to reject Mr. Obama’s detention policies and go beyond his amnesty.

The Daily Caller reminds us that she also supports sanctuary cities:

Clinton last weighed in publicly on sanctuary cities during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“You would allow the sanctuary cities to disobey the federal law?” Clinton was asked by Tim Russert during a Sept. 6, 2007, debate at Dartmouth College.

“Well, I don’t think there is any choice,” she responded.

Clinton said she backed the sanctuary city concept because without it, illegal immigrants refuse to cooperate with police because they are afraid of being deported.

“Local law enforcement has a different job than federal immigration enforcement,” Clinton said. “The problem is the federal government has totally abdicated its responsibility.”

Clinton again expressed her support for sanctuary cities in a 2008 interview with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.

“Are you going to crack down on the sanctuary cities?” O’Reilly asked.

“No, I’m not,” Clinton said, eliciting a shocked response from the host.

I’m all for more skilled immigration, but that’s not what is happening on our southern border. If Hillary becomes president, that situation will only get worse.

News

Illegal immigrant murderer chose San Francisco because it’s a sanctuary city

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Breitbart News reports on the recent murder of a young woman in northern California.

Excerpt:

Five-time deportee, seven-time convicted felon Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez said in a new interview Sunday with a local ABC News affiliate that he came to San Francisco because he knew the sanctuary city would not hand him over to immigration officials.

[…]Lopez-Sanchez has confessed to shooting Kathryn Steinle last Wednesday at Pier 14.

Had San Francisco authorities not refused a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer request, Lopez-Sanchez may not have been in the United States and Steinle might still be alive.

[…]An ICE official told Breitbart News that ICE Enforcement and Removal had begun processing the suspect for reinstatement of removal from the U.S. in March. But instead Lopez-Sanchez was transferred on March 26 from the Bureau of Prisons in another city to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department (SFSD) because of a drug warrant. ICE then filed the detainer request to be notified prior to Lopez-Sanchez’s release from custody.

A San Francisco court dismissed Lopez-Sanchez’s drug charges on March 27.

San Francisco and SFSD policy is to deny ICE detainer requests, barring special circumstances, such as a warrant for a suspected violent offender. The ICE detainer request was denied, and on April 15, 2015 Lopez-Sanchez was released. Two and a half months later Kate Steinle was killed.

The 2013 “Trust Act,” signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, gave California cities like San Francisco more leeway in deciding whether to comply with immigration authorities.

When I was listening to Ben Shapiro talk about this story while driving home last night, I was thinking about how much of a mistake it is to live in areas that are dominated by the secular left. You can see how many times common sense and the rule of law were disregarded.

The true horror of this story is that the victim paid taxes that were used to pay the people who refused to deport her murderer. She paid taxes and the state used them to pass policies and laws that protected her murderer.

The Breitbart News article  closed with this:

The same night Steinle was shot and killed, a four-time deported illegal alien in Laredo, Texas, murdered his wife with a hammer, according to his own admission. Breitbart Texas previously reported that Laredo Police Department admitted three prior violent encounters with the man. Federal agents told Breitbart Texas that Laredo police failed to inform Border Patrol of the encounters with the illegally present foreign national.

It was suggested that the woman would still be alive today, had police reported the man to Border Patrol.

The police are paid by taxpayers, but sometimes they don’t protect taxpayers. Sometimes, they have other priorities – political correctness and compassion.

What is interesting is the Obama administration response to the Steinle murder:

Referring to the shooting death last week of Kathryn Steinle, allegedly shot by a Mexican man who has been deported five times, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the U.S. would be safer if Republican lawmakers had approved comprehensive immigration reform backed by the president.

“The president has done everything within his power to make sure that we’re focusing our law enforcement resources on criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety,” Mr. Earnest said.

So, the Democrat solution to the problem of illegal immigrants murdering taxpayers is to give the murderers citizenship. I’m not sure that this will solve the problem.

Here’s another one from Breitbart News:

A six-time-deported illegal immigrant is charged in the felony hit-and-run of an Arizona mother and her two young children. The man allegedly admitted to being high on marijuana while causing the severe lacerations to a five-year-old boy. The five-year-old and a two-year-old were both taken to an area hospital.

And The Stream reports that the federal government released him to San Francisco knowing it was a “sanctuary city”:

This is a national story, because the federal government released accused shooter Francisco Sanchez to a San Francisco jail in March and the jail released Sanchez to the streets April 15 after the district attorney dropped a 20-year-old charge for marijuana possession. Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said he did so in keeping with San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy.

Individual anecdotes are useful to illustrate, but for real knowledge, I need to see the aggregate data.

And here it is, from The Daily Signal:

According to a recent study released from the Center for Immigration Studies, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released 30,558 criminally-convicted illegal immigrants, with a total of 79,059 convictions altogether, in 2014.

Furthermore, the CIS report shows that among the 904,000 illegal immigrants who have ignored orders to leave the U.S., approximately 167,527 of these are convicted criminal immigrants.

Likewise, CIS’s April 2015 statistics indicate ICE has only arrested 11,983 at-large convicted criminal immigrants—despite the fact 168,000 criminal immigrants were identified.

Is government as responsive to the needs of taxpayers as private companies are to the needs of their customers? Or is government more concerned about the rule of law, or not offending their favored groups? Maybe we should think twice about voting for bigger government.

News

What happens to crime rates if we punish police officers for stopping crime?

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This story from Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal is scary.

She writes:

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

What could the cause of this be? Well, it’s the backlash against police officers who defend themselves from assault by criminals who attack them:

Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

The state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, wants to create a special state prosecutor dedicated solely to prosecuting cops who use lethal force. New York Gov.Andrew Cuomo would appoint an independent monitor whenever a grand jury fails to indict an officer for homicide and there are “doubts” about the fairness of the proceeding (read: in every instance of a non-indictment); the governor could then turn over the case to a special prosecutor for a second grand jury proceeding.

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chiefSam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014.

But there’s more – there’s also leniency towards property and drug crime, and criminals are getting the message:

As attorney general, Eric Holder pressed the cause of ending “mass incarceration” on racial grounds; elected officials across the political spectrum have jumped on board. A 2014 California voter initiative has retroactively downgraded a range of property and drug felonies to misdemeanors, including forcible theft of guns, purses and laptops. More than 3,000 felons have already been released from California prisons, according to the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles County. Burglary, larceny and car theft have surged in the county, the association reports.

“There are no real consequences for committing property crimes anymore,” Los Angeles Police Lt. Armando Munoz told Downtown News earlier this month, “and the criminals know this.” The Milwaukee district attorney, John Chisholm, is diverting many property and drug criminals to rehabilitation programs to reduce the number of blacks in Wisconsin prisons; critics see the rise in Milwaukee crime as one result.

Yes, this is what happens with the leftist mainstream media and the Democrats who run big cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, Seattle, etc. get together and decide that they are more opposed to police officers than they are to criminals. If we as a society choose to intimidate and persecute the police for doing their jobs, then crime goes up. What’s my counter to this? Well, it might be time to start thinking about moving out of big cities, especially ones that are run by Democrats. I just don’t see how this is going to get fixed in the near-term, given that Obama rolled back welfare reform, and welfare is what causes women to have children before they get married. Fatherless children are more likely to become criminals. The decline of marriage and family that everyone seems to be celebrating as “tolerance” will just make more delinquent children. So, just when we most need the police (since we insist on attack marriage with welfare, no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage) we are actively working to undermine them.

But that’s not all I am seeing that troubles me. I see a lot of support for amnesty, and that means a lot more Democrat voters in the future, especially in states with a high concentration of illegal immigrants. Not only that, but there are problems of underfunded pensions at the state level, and the trillion dollar student loan bubble, and the problem of continued funding of entitlement programs like Social Security. And of course we have the $10 trillion that the Democrats added to the debt, and the problems in so many countries in the Middle East, like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria. The whole Middle East is on fire, and this is bound to affect us as our defense spending declines.

How to respond to this? I think having earnings and savings is key, and maybe trying to move away from areas that are likely to have high crime, and strains on state and local budgets from illegal immigrants, pension obligations, etc. I really have no answer to the student loan bubble, the entitlements, the debt and the foreign policy threats. What I am doing is focusing on earning money (through work) and saving it by restricting spending on luxury items, e.g. – travel, fun, etc.