Disappearing into the Shadows

From The Washington Times:

On any given day, nearly 20 illegal immigrant children skip their deportation hearings and disappear into the shadows, the Trump administration said Thursday, putting contours on the difficulty the government faces in trying to stop the flow and protect the children. More than 200,000 of the juveniles — known in government speak as Unaccompanied Alien Children, or UAC — have been released into communities in recent years and remain there, many of them ignoring deportation orders and others awaiting a judge’s ruling. Yet top senators say many of them are “lost,” with the federal government having no clue where they are, how to deport them, or even whether they’re being abused.

“Shocking,” said Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio Republican and chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is probing the matter. Government officials insisted the children aren’t lost — as least as long as they’re in federal custody, meaning in one of the dozens of dorms taxpayers fund to hold the children across the country. But that’s usually just an intermediary step. The goal, written into the law, is to release the children quickly to sponsors, who then are supposed to take care of them. (Read more.)

On the diversity of illegal immigration. From The Hoover Institute:

I used to ride a bicycle in our environs. I quit for a variety of reasons. If one is bit by unlicensed and unvaccinated roaming dogs— and there are many out here— and if their masters do not speak English or do not have legal status, then a nightmare follows of trying to get authorities to find the dogs and impound them before the owners or the dogs disappear. It is up to the bitten whether the decision to play the odds and not get painful, and sometimes dangerous, rabies shots is prudent or suicidal. As a doctor put it to me when I was bitten: “Rabid dogs are almost unheard of in the United States, but I have no idea of what is true of Mexico. Your call.”

Less dramatically, I got tired of watching local canteen trucks drive out on our rural roads, pull their drainage plugs, and dump cooking waste or toss leftovers on the road.

Sometimes there is more comedy than melodrama out in rural Fresno County. About two months I noticed that a number of my roadside cypress trees seemed ailing. I tried gopher bait, given what I thought were strange burrows near the trunks.

Then one evening I heard voices near the trees. Two immigrants, neither speaking English, were digging with hand-held hoes for what they said were hongos. They produced a large clear plastic bag that instead seemed full, of all things, harvested truffles—which I had never seen or heard of in the area.

I couldn’t figure out whether the forest humus ground up from fallen Sierra trees I had purchased, or the roots of the cypresses themselves, had spawned truffles— or whether they were even truffles or perhaps some sort of strange looking subterranean tree growths or mushrooms. In broken Spanish, I politely asked that they not periodically dig up my tree cypress-tree roots but could sell their already collected hongos in their bags at the local swap meet as they said they had intended. We left amicably enough.

On lots of occasions, drivers (almost always on Sunday afternoons) have veered off the road, torn out vines or trees, left their wrecked vehicles, and run away. Authorities belatedly arrive and explain there is no valid registration, insurance, or known licensed driver to be found—but that the damage in the thousands of dollars cannot be mitigated by selling the abandoned car, which must be impounded.

Identity theft is a problem. The IRS has reported over one million cases of likely illegal immigrants using false or multiple identities. Once I went online and discovered my checking account was suddenly in arrears by several thousand dollars. When I pulled up the cancelled checks, I saw perfect replicas of my own, with the proper bank and router numbers in the lower left corner of the checks—but at top with the name and address of a different person and with the reverse of the check stamped with his ID at a local Spanish-language market. The bank said I could call police investigators or simply file a claim that it would quickly cover. And it did. I have not written a local check to any person or business since.

Hot pursuit by local authorities that blast into private driveways is scary. On one occasion the sheriffs and police lost their fleeing target (who later turned out to be a felon with arrest warrants) and gave up the chase. An hour later in the dead of night I heard the accomplice near our patio. He had apparently jumped out the passenger door of the car and hid under our pecan tree. I held him at gunpoint until the flummoxed authorities returned.

When my daughter was thirteen, she and I were broadsided in our pickup by a driver who ran a stop sign. I called the local police. We were bruised but not hurt; the truck dented but drivable. She waited behind the pickup as I chased the driver who had fled on foot from his overturned car. I caught him just when the police arrived.

Rural Central California is sort of ground zero for illegal immigration and its auxiliary effects. From experience, I can attest that the vast majority of illegal aliens are fine people, hard-working, and whose first and second offenses of entering and residing illegally in the United States were not followed by third and fourth acts of criminality.

Certainly after twenty-one years of teaching Latin, Greek, and humanities to immigrants at CSU Fresno, both legal and illegal, I believed that the melting pot can still work and most Hispanic arrivals integrate, assimilate, and intermarry with increasingly frequency despite the often-shrill protestations of campus identity politics advocates.

But the numbers of illegal immigrants have become so large—ranging from an estimated 11–20 million now residing in the United States—that both pessimism and optimism are now warranted. If only ten percent have criminal records or inordinately break laws, then the good news is that many millions more are likely working and crime free. The bad news is that somewhere between one and two million have entered our country illegally and repaid that generosity with criminality or ID theft or fraud. (Read more.)

A mother whose son was murdered by an illegal speaks out. From David Harris, Jr:

Angel mom Mary Ann Mendoza lost her son, Brandon, who was a police officer. He was hit by a drunk driver who is an illegal alien. Needless to say, she is no fan of Elizabeth Warren and the Democratic party, who represent illegal aliens over American citizens. Her son was a police officer, and she became an activist after her son’s death, fighting against illegal immigration. She read what Warren had to say about the Mollie Tibbetts murder, and it set her off.

Warren said “I’m so sorry for the family here. One of the things we have to remember is that we need an immigration system that is effective, that focuses on where real problems are.” From The Conservative Tribune

Mendoza appeared on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” show and laid into Warren and her comments. “I was disgusted by Senator Elizabeth Warren, hearing her speak today. And what I want to say to her is, ‘Stop lying to the American people, because you don’t care what is happening to the victims of illegal alien crime.’”

“Because if you did, you would be standing up for us and you would be doing something about it.” But the Angel Mom was far from finished with the Democrat senator: “We have pleaded with these politicians to do something to protect American citizens, and they are ramping up their protection of illegal alien criminals.” Mendoza then went on to name some of the victims of illegal aliens and the appalling sentences given to them for their crimes. The Daily Mail wrote that in the case of her own son’s death, the drunk driver, Silva-Coronoa, died in the crash. (Read more.)

UPDATE:  The point is not that illegal immigrants commit more crimes than American citizens; they do not; there are not enough of them. The point is that illegals add to the burden of crime that we already have. The fact that they are here illegally makes them felons for disregarding federal law. And some are involved in the drug and human trafficking on both sides of the border which has a high cost in human suffering. From the Texas Department of Public Safety:

 These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign nationals in the country illegally commit more crimes than other groups. It simply identifies thousands of crimes that should not have occurred and thousands of victims that should not have been victimized because the perpetrator should not be here. (Read more.)

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