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GET-TOUGH EFFORT ON IMMIGRANTS INCLUDES
FUGITIVE SQUAD |
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By Mary Beth Sheridan,
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — The rendezvous was in front of Shoe City. In the frosty darkness, four Homeland Security officers strapped bulletproof vests over their sweatshirts and checked their pistols. It was 5 a.m., and the voice of their supervisor, Raymond Smith, sliced through the silence in the parking lot of a Maryland shopping center.
“Take a look at this,” said Smith. He passed around a folder on their first target, a 25-year-old West African. The immigrant had been ordered deported in 2003 but never left the United States. Now, he was living in a Hyattsville, Md. apartment — or so Smith hoped.
”We’ve got a 50-50 chance of getting him,” he said.
Smith is part of an effort to track down 370,000 “absconders”—illegal immigrants who have disobeyed orders to leave the country. As part of a get-tough approach after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Homeland Security Department has deployed 18 fugitive squads to catch these immigrants, including a team in Maryland.
A morning with Smith’s team shows how difficult it is to find absconders, part of a rising tide of illegal immigration. The fugitive squads average 35 captures a day across the country. But each day, another 70 are ordered deported and fail to comply, officials say.
The absconder program began as the immigration system was facing a volley of criticism after the Sept. 11 attacks. What better place to start fixing the system, officials reasoned, than the absconders? Unlike most of the country’s 8 million or more illegal immigrants, the absconders were known to the government—because they’d been detained briefly on immigration charges or had applied for legal status. And they’d had their day in court.
But by early 2003, authorities had resolved only 38 percent of those cases, either by detaining the immigrants or by confirming that they had left the country or gotten legal status, according to the 9/11 Commission. In a report on terrorist travel, the commission concluded: “It is very difficult to find alien absconders without extraordinary effort or pure luck.”
The search for the absconders wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. When the program was announced in December 2001, officials said they would put the absconders’ names into FBI’s National Crime Information Center database. That would allow local and state police to identify whether people they stopped for routine infractions were on the list.
But after three years, only 38,521 names are in the database—about 10 percent of the absconders—said Russ Knocke, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. “It’s a workload issue,” he explained.
Dozens of federal lawmakers have backed measures to enlist local and state police in the effort to detain illegal immigrants, including absconders. But the idea has been fiercely opposed by immigrant advocates and some politicians, who believe it would shatter the trust between police and immigrant communities, making it harder to solve crimes. Some also worry it could foster ethnic profiling.
For all their frustrations, the fugitive teams have made progress. In the first seven months of fiscal 2004, they apprehended 7,239 absconders, twice as many as in the same period a year earlier, according to ICE statistics. The agency is now drawing up plans for 30 more teams. But budget problems have bedeviled ICE, and Knocke said it wasn’t clear if all 30 teams would be fielded by the end of 2005.
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DCN CHALLENGES 2005 COLORADO GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO ACT
A LETTER TO MEMBERS OF THE 2005 COLORADO GENERAL ASSEMBLY CALLS FOR ACTION TO STOP PROVISION OF COLORADO GOVERNMENT SERVICES TO ILLEGAL ALIENS |
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EVERGREEN, CO - Defend Colorado Now (DCN), the Issue Committee that stands ready to place a Colorado Constitutional Amendment on the 2006 ballot, which would preclude persons who are in the United States unlawfully from receiving a wide range of Colorado government services, announced today that a letter had been sent to all members of the Colorado General Assembly requesting legislative action in this year’s session to accomplish the goals of the DCN constitutional amendment. (The letter can be viewed at the DCN website.)
At a breakfast meeting today in Evergreen, Dr. William Herron, chairman of Defend Colorado Now, reminded attendees that DCN had announced in mid-2004 that it would give Colorado Legislators the opportunity to undertake new legislation in the 2005 session before it fully launched its ballot initiative. He outlined DCN’s position, saying “The State legislature needs to examine the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the current operations of state agencies. This is especially urgent in light of the state’s budget problems. Why should we be cutting education, law enforcement and health programs when untold millions are being spent on services to people who are violating the law?”
Herron also briefly commented on the recent passage of the anti-illegal alien initiative (Prop 200) in Arizona, noting that it passed by a wide margin although it was opposed by the usual suspects: pandering elected officials, the Catholic Church, the Mexican Consulate, the Chamber of Commerce - everyone except a majority of the American citizens in Arizona. He added, “If the Colorado Legislature doesn’t take corrective action, we are ready to move forward in 2006.”
In the letter’s final paragraph, DCN asked “the legislative leadership of both political parties to transcend the pull of the usual factions and to do what is right for the rule of law and for the future of Colorado’s lawful residents and their children. Those who would do otherwise should be encouraged by the Colorado electorate to remove themselves from future leadership roles in our political process.”
The letter was officially sent by the Executive Board of DCN (William Herron, Marlene Guerrero, Terry Paulson, and Jan Herron) on behalf of DCN supporters and volunteers, who are expected to follow the action or inaction in the 2005 Legislative session on a special “Capitol Blog” that is being set up by DCN and its organizational partners (e.g., see coloradowatch.org) to track the 2005 session in detail. Herron ended the meeting by saying, “When voters evaluate candidates in the 2006 election, it will be worthwhile for them to know who the ‘pro-illegal alien candidates’ are. DCN will be at the Colorado Capitol throughout the session to make sure that the word gets out.”
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IF ELECTED OFFICIALS SUFFERED WHAT THE PEOPLE SUFFER, THE BORDER WOULD BE SECURE |
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By Frosty Wooldridge
December 31, 2004
NewsWithViews.com
http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty19.htm
Why are President Bush and our Congress allowing an unending line of 15 million illegal aliens to roam around our country against immigration protections voted into law by U.S. citizens? Why would he strip security provisions out of the H.R.10 Intelligence Bill that our FBI and CIA reported vital for Homeland Security? Why would he pretend to dead-bolt the front door while he left the back door open to 4,000 illegal aliens crossing our borders nightly in Arizona—alone? His gloating over the Intel Bill manifests balderdash when he shortchanges Americans while creating a false sense of security.
Why are he and the Congress in violation of their oath of office—Section IV Article 4 of the U.S. Constitution? The answer is simple. Congress and President Bush do not suffer the consequences of this invasion of our country. However, if they were, they would stop this national nightmare in a month.
Last year, Phoenix, Arizona suffered 57,600 cars stolen by illegal aliens (500,000 illegals in that state) for use in drug smuggling and alien trafficking. If that many cars were stolen daily out of the U.S. Congressional parking lots, we’d see troops on the border within days. This year, over two million illegal aliens dropped 16 million pounds of trash (eight pounds per illegal alien according to Time Magazine) in the Arizona desert. Additionally, they left millions of piles of human defecation in the desert along with plastic, clothes, backpacks and used food cans. They cut fences, killed cattle and broke into ranchers’ houses all along the border. If they had crossed over Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch with the same damage and trash, our president would have taken immediate action to stop the invasion.
Last summer in Boulder, Colorado, eight American daughters suffered rapes by eight illegal alien Mexicans who fled back to Mexico. All those women were somebody’s daughters and under the age of twenty-two. If Bush’s daughters, Jenna and Barbara, suffered gang rape like the Boulder women, Mrs. Laura Bush would force Mr. Bush to take action. Instead, he and his daughters read about it in the safety of their gated homes and bodyguards.
Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of California, who, after neglecting her job serving American citizens by not closing the borders, wants to give illegal aliens driver’s licenses. Never mind they are federal criminals and there are 15 million of them and 19 of them with driver’s licenses—piloted jetliners into the World Trade Centers. Never mind that the CIA and FBI warned against such action. If Nancy Pelosi was the mother of the Colorado University quarterback John Hessler, who was smashed—head-on—in the middle of the night by illegal aliens in a stolen car, she would be nursing her son. Hessler suffered severe brain damage and sits daily in a wheelchair trying to regain his life-but cannot. If it had happened to her family like it did to the Hessler family, Nancy Pelosi would put troops on the borders and begin deportations.
In Los Angeles with over one million illegal aliens, thousands of drivers roll around the city with little signs that read, “F**K YOU, THIS IS MEXICO.” If thousands of illegal aliens without driver’s licenses rolled around Washington, DC daily with those little flashing L.E.D. signs in their back windows, the Beltway Boys would get a different perspective of the glories of “multiculturalism” and “diversity” they shove down our throats by allowing these unlawful foreigners in our country against our laws.
Each year, $120 billion in drugs crosses the Mexican borders into America. Those drugs addict and enslave millions of our kids. They become the reason for murders, prostitution, addiction and family chaos. They are the reason for the useless 30-year long and $80 billion spent annually for the “War on Drugs.”
If those drug lords addicted Senator Bill Frist’s or Representative Hastert’s children, the top senator and congressman would close down the borders. Because illegal alien migration into the USA continues unabated for the past 20 years, we now have 16,000 new cases of incurable MDR tuberculosis in the past five years. We suffer 7,000 new cases of leprosy. We tolerate 100,000 new cases of hepatitis “A” in our society. Chagas Disease, which affects 14 million South Americans and kills 50,000 annually, streams across our borders as unchecked thousands of them enter our society.
If Arizona Senator John McCain or Senator Kyl’s daughters or their families caught any one of these diseases and died--you better believe they’d close the borders with troops. If Governor Bill Owens of Colorado, Napolitano of Arizona, Swartzenegger of California and Minnesota Governor Pawlenty suffered their family members being displaced by illegal aliens from summer jobs or their kids contracted TB from illegals or daughters raped by illegal aliens—you can bet you would hear an outcry for immigration enforcement. Rape, death and disease become real personal and real ‘local’ when it hits them in their homes.
In Wisconsin last month, Governor Doyle and church groups forced 75,000 Third World Hmong Stone Age people onto American citizens in the name of “multiculturalism” and “diversity.” If it had been their kids and families shot up, (six deaths from being shot in the back), by deer hunter turned ‘human hunter,’ Hmong immigrant Chai Vang, you wouldn’t see more forced immigration from incompatible cultures onto our people. The press explained the deaths with ‘political correctness’ when in reality, it was Hmong balkanization being forced upon Americans.
What is happening to us isn’t happening to Laura Bush, Mrs. Frist, Nancy Pelosi, Senator McCain, Swartzenegger, Kennedy, Kyle, Hastert, Jeb Bush, David Dreier, Mrs. Bill Owens or Mrs. Pataki, Representative Chris Cannon, Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and the majority of Congress. If they were personally affected by the taxes, costs, drugs, murders, rapes, language chaos in our schools, diseases, hospitals collapsing and splitting of our country into multicultural destruction-illegal alien migration would stop with one stroke of the pen by President Bush and finalized in one vote by Congress. When such obvious destruction threatened us, the president and Congress acted hours after December 7, 1941.
It should have happened the day after September 11, 2001. Our borders should be closed and immigration should be stopped. However, our borders are as open today as they were on 9/11. Bush stands as the biggest proponent for open borders. That’s why we Americans must create a ‘critical mass’ of protest. I’m not kidding when I say that this country will collapse into internal civil conflict in this decade if we don’t stop the flow of three million illegal aliens annually. We need a ten-year moratorium on all immigration. We are in SO much trouble. Write me for the 20 point action plan and send it to all your Internet friends. You, your family and this country are in for the fight of our lives. Conviction without action is worthless.
© 2004 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved
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UNHOLY BORDER ALLIANCE |
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By Erick Stakelbeck
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 3, 2005
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16509
The new intelligence reform bill signed into law by President Bush on December 17 may ultimately end up being remembered more for the provisions it didn’t contain rather than those it did.
After much heated debate, House and Senate negotiators ultimately threw out proposed provisions to the bill that would have tightened immigration laws. Although House Speaker Dennis Hastert has promised to bring drivers’ license standards, asylum procedures and other border security provisions back to the House floor by early 2005, in the meantime, the very real danger that Islamist terrorists will infiltrate America’s porous southern border persists.
Roughly 60,000 illegal immigrants designated as “other-than-Mexican,” or OTMs, were detained last year along the U.S.-Mexico border, including a sizable number from Arab and Muslim countries. And if recent reports are any indication, they may be getting some troubling new help in their efforts to enter the United States.
In a December 4 incident that received scant media attention, a Bangladeshi Muslim man named Fakhrul Islam was among a group of 13 illegal aliens arrested near Brownsville, Texas, just across the border from Mexico. Border Patrol agents have said that one of the men detained along with Islam was a member of Mara Salvatrucha, a violent Salvadoran criminal gang with more than 300,000 members across Central and North America, including powerful enterprises in several major U.S. cities.
Mara Salvatrucha, also commonly known as “MS-13” due to its members’ proclivity for sporting tattoos of the number 13, is involved in a smorgasbord of illegal activity, including the smuggling of drugs, weapons and people across the Mexican border. The gang controls many of the smuggling routes from Mexico into the U.S., a fact that has not escaped Al-Qaeda operatives eager to carry out attacks on American soil.
In July, Adnan El-Shukrijumah, a high-ranking Al-Qaeda leader and one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, was spotted in Honduras meeting with members of MS-13. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that El-Shukrijumah, who he has described as a “clear and present danger to America,” is seeking ways to infiltrate the U.S. via the Mexican border, and is willing to pay top dollar in order to do so.
El-Shukrijumah, reportedly last seen in August in northern Mexico knows that the potential killing of innocent American civilians would certainly not deter MS-13 from working with Al-Qaeda: the gang is thought to be responsible for thousands of murders and maimings throughout the Western Hemisphere; and, like Islamist terrorists, decapitations and home-made bombs are part of its grisly arsenal.
With a ruthless, money-driven cabal like MS-13 controlling much of the illegal traffic between the U.S. and Mexico, there’s no telling how many Islamist terrorists have already taken advantage. That someone of Middle Eastern descent could blend in with a large group of Mexicans with similarly dark complexions — thereby escaping closer scrutiny from border patrols — is all too feasible. Then again, an October intelligence report supplied to the Department of Homeland Security by Russian security services said that a group of 25 backpack-carrying Chechen terrorists — all white — illegally entered Arizona by way of Mexico last summer. Furthermore, in September, Farida Ahmed, a South African Muslim woman, pleaded guilty in a Texas court to illegal entry, lying to a federal agent and using an altered passport. Ahmed had been detained by Border Patrol officers in July as she tried to board a plane for New York out of Texas.
At the time of her arrest, Ahmed was carrying $7,300 in various currencies as well as a fake South African passport that was missing pages. She admitted to entering the U.S. illegally by wading across the Rio Grande, and her travel itinerary showed that on her way to America, she had stopped in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, just as several of the 9/11 hijackers had done.
It was announced last week that Ahmed is due to be deported. But many non-Mexican illegal aliens like Ahmed are invariably released by immigration officials who simply don’t have the detention space to hold them. Worse, up to 85 percent of them skip their scheduled immigration hearings, only to disappear into American society. While entry into the U.S. is their primary goal in establishing a base in Latin America, Islamist terrorists — well-aware of the allure Marxism once held for many south of the border — also see the region as a potential breeding ground for Islamic converts due to its poor economic and social conditions and corrupt governments. For instance, the Shia terrorist group Hezbollah wields a strong presence in the “tri-border region,” a lawless, crime-ridden area where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay intersect. Both Osama bin Laden and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are also said to have spent time there, during the 1990’s.
It was Mohammed who in 2002 encouraged alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla to “enter the United States by way of Mexico” in order to carry out attacks on U.S. targets, according to Deputy Attorney General James Comey. Ironically, before converting to Islam and volunteering his services to Al-Qaeda, Padilla belonged to the Chicago chapter of the Latin Kings — like MS-13, a violent Hispanic criminal gang. Although U.S. agents were able to collar Padilla before he could carry out a terrorist attack, the U.S. border strategy, as presently construed, may one day soon yield a much less savory result. Come January, lawmakers should take notice.
Erick Stakelbeck is senior writer at the Investigative Project, a Washington, D.C.-based counter-terrorism research institute.
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BORDER ISSUES FAIR AT SAHUARITA CHURCH |
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The Friends of BorderLinks will present a Border Issues Fair on Friday, January 14, 2005, from 2:00-6:00 p.m. at Good Shepherd United Church of Christ, 17750 South La Canada in Sahuarita.
Seven organizations working to give humanitarian suport and education will be presenting information:
Border Action Network
BorderLinks
Humane Borders
Derechos Humanos
Just Coffee
No More Deaths (No mas muerte)
Samaritans
The Border Issues Fair presents an opportunity to learn more about the reasons why Central and South Americans are risking their lives to come across our border, as well as to learn more about the groups who are offering humanitarian support to immigrants and learn about ways you can help. The program will include: Displays from different countries.
Presentations by each group.
A key-note address by Rick Ufford-Chase, Director, BorderLinks. A Sonoran Supper prepared by the volunteers of Casa Misericordia in Nogales. The cost for the supper is $5. Families and Youth are welcome.
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