One Thousand New Crimes, and How Many More to Come?

By Dan Cadman on February 2, 2015

Anyone who doubts we're living in an American Potemkin village where the subject of immigration is concerned should read, and carefully juxtapose, the following three excerpts, two from the president and a more recent one from the Washington Times.

[W]e're going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security. Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids.

— President Barak Obama, nationally televised speech on immigration executive actions, November 20, 2014

Yes, passions still fly on immigration, but surely we can all see something of ourselves in the striving young student, and agree that no one benefits when a hardworking mom is taken from her child, and that it's possible to shape a law that upholds our tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

— President Barak Obama, State of the Union Address, January 30, 2014

Illegal immigrants released from custody committed 1,000 new crimes
One thousand of the 36,000 illegal immigrant criminals the government released in 2013 have gone on to commit other crimes, including child sex abuse, hit-and-run and child cruelty, according to new data released Friday evening.

— Headline and first paragraph of a Washington Times article, January 30, 2015

Even as the administration continues to dismantle effective immigration enforcement — not just in the interior of the country, but even at the border as is obvious from the recent surge (which has resulted in almost no removals) — it continues to mislead the American public over the direction, intent, and consequences of its activities. Make no doubt that we are all much less safe because of them, despite what the president and his minions may be saying. Note that the Times article is discussing only the crimes committed by alien criminals released in 2013. How about those released since then, during 2014? And what about those among the hundreds of thousands about to receive benefits under the president's unconstitutional executive immigration actions?

So what, then, is Congress doing about this? Very little. A "border security bill" was introduced into the House that was so phony, so flawed, and so unlikely to have any salutary impact on the problems the nation confronts that it was immediately condemned by several unions representing border patrol agents and officers of other DHS immigration agencies as well, leading to its near-immediate withdrawal. (Let's hope the withdrawal isn't just a duck-and-feint maneuver while House leaders wait for public attention to wander.)

And how about suing the president for constitutional violations, as House leaders promised, oh-so-long-ago? Now that truly was a duck-and-feint, intended to ameliorate with words, not acts. They've left that to the states to accomplish.

The president's overreach has been so great, and congressional reaction to the power grab so underwhelming, that both have become the butt of pointed humor by satirist Andy Borowitz in a recent "Borowitz Report". The "report" is funny in the painful way that many pieces of humor are when they point out unvarnished truths we shy away from confronting.

The problem is that a refusal or unwillingness on the part of Congress to confront the president's illegal actions on immigration is resulting in thousands of victims, as the Washington Times article clearly shows.