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Fraud Rate Within US Legal Immigration System Out of Control

Once again I have decided to provide you with a commentary that was predicated on a news article that was posted on the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) website.

As you may have noticed in reading my commentaries, the ICE website often provides important articles that help to illustrate many of the points I have been hammering away it for many years. The article that I have provided you today was posted on May 24th of this year and is of importance for a number of reasons.

First of all, I want to commend the efforts of the ICE agents who did their jobs efficiently and made certain that Ramiro Nieto Garcia, the defendant reported on in this article, was properly taken into custody when his prison sentence was ended and subsequently handed over to Mexican law enforcement authorities who notified our government that Nieto-Garcia was wanted in conjunction with a 2004 murder.

That is the good news.

Now let us dissect the article and see what can be learned by reading “between the lines.”

Let us start out by considering that according to the article, Nieto-Garcia had been arrested and convicted several times after he unlawfully entered the United States. The obvious question that must be asked is why was he not taken into custody by the INS or ICE upon his release the first time he served his prison sentence for committing a felony? It would seem that he had been released from prison and permitted to be released from custody and not removed from the United States. This afforded him opportunities to commit more felonies.

I would love to know what crimes he committed and if he injured or killed anyone in the United States. Clearly this guy is prone to violence and his presence in our country threatens the lives of the people he interacts with. Based on my experience as an INS special agent I am confident that he most likely lived within the immigrant community in California or wherever he was living when he committed additional crimes.

Additionally, criminal aliens also have two distinct advantages that American criminals do not enjoy. They can easily flee from the United States to evade capture by our law enforcement agencies when they suspect that they are about to be arrested or if they are permitted to post bond pending a trial and, they can threaten to do harm to the family members of the immigrants who live along side them in the immigrant communities in which they live. They use these threats to make certain that no one in the community will talk to the police or to even extort the cooperation of the immigrants in the community to do their “dirty work!”

This reinforces an extremely important issue- while criminal aliens threaten everyone, the people who are generally most at risk from injury or death at the hands of alien criminals are the members of the immigrant community who are living in the same communities as do the criminal aliens. This is not only true for aliens from Mexico or Latin America, but for all immigrant communities of all ethnicities.

In considering the foregoing, here is a question I would love to have the open borders / pro-amnesty advocates answer, “How is the position that I, and others have taken that our nation has the absolute imperative of doing everything reasonable to seek to prevent the entry of alien criminals into our country, an ‘anti-immigrant’ position?”

The best way to protect the lives of the immigrants who live in the United States is to secure our borders against the entry of aliens who are engaged in criminal activities and then to seek to enforce the immigration laws to make certain that criminal aliens are removed from the United States upon the completion of their jail sentences. This is most efficiently accomplished by having local and state law enforcement agencies work in close cooperation with ICE.

Next, I would love to know why Nieto-Garcia was sentenced to serve just 30 months for the crime of illegal reentry as an aggravated felon? The maximum sentence for this crime is 20 years in prison. I am extremely familiar with this law, I worked with Senator Alphonse D’Amato and his staff, back in the early 1980’s when D’Amato was the senior senator from the State of New York, and I persuaded him that the immigration law needed to be amended. Back then there was no specific statute concerning a separate crime of “Unlawful reentry of an aggravated felon.” An alien who was deported and then reentered without first securing the requisite permission of the Attorney General, faced a maximum of two years in jail. No consideration was given to any criminal history the alien might have. Senator D’Amato agreed to amend the INA (Immigration and Nationality Act) and under the amended provisions, criminal convictions became an integral part of the crime. Generally the lowest period of incarceration for such an alien would be approximately 5 years in jail unless there were exceptional circumstances that enabled the judge to make a “downward departure” in the sentence handed down.

Simply stated, I would very much want to know what justification may have existed for the apparent significant downward departure in Nieto-Garcia’s sentence.

Finally I want to call your attention to an important statement to be found at the end of the news release:

“Between Oct. 1, 2010 and April 30, ICE returned to their countries of origin more than 215,900 aliens, including 109,700 aliens with criminal convictions. Of those, 585 were convicted of homicide, 3,177 were convicted sex offenders, and 24,593 were convicted of serious drug offenses.”

Think about how many people were killed, seriously injured or had their worlds turned upside down when a loved one, close friend or business associate was killed or seriously injured by these transnational thugs!

Consider that the statistics quoted above were for aliens removed from the United States in just a seven month period! How many more criminal aliens are still serving out their jail sentences in prisons around the United States!

Now consider how many alien fugitives who are wanted for the commission of serious crimes remain at large and, while they are on the run, are killing and injuring even more victims!

How many transnational criminals should our country permit to enter our country each year? When will the “Fools on the Hill” (our “leaders”) agree that the goal of our government should be to prevent the entry of all such thugs? When will border security be more than a punch line for a speech by President Obama?

I would remind you how Secretary of Homeland Surrender, Janet Napolitano had claimed that running our borders is not a “crime!”

What is even more important about the issue of the enforcement of the immigration laws that Janet Napolitano is quick to make light of, is the intention of those laws- to keep aliens out of the United States whose presence would be harmful or pose a threat to our nation and to our citizens as well as others who are in our country. These laws are also intended to create the legal framework to enable our country to remove aliens whose presence is harmful or poses a threat.

Here is a link to Title 8, United States Code, Section 212, the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that enumerates the various categories of aliens who are statutorily ineligible to enter the United States:

http://www.uscis.gov/ilink/docView/SLB/HTML/SLB/0-0-0-1/0-0-0-29/0-0-0-1956.html

In reviewing the various categories of aliens who are supposed to be prevented from entering the United States include aliens who suffer from dangerous communicable diseases, aliens who suffer mental illness and are prone to violence aliens who are convicted felons, aliens who traffic in narcotics or human beings, aliens who are war criminals or who have committed human rights violations, are engaged in terrorism or in espionage. The list is far longer and you can read all of these reasons that under the law, aliens are supposed to be prevented from entering our country or may be removed (deported) from our country. This section of law is designed to protect our nation and all those who are present in the United States. This section of law is no mere technicality but is of extremely great importance.

It is also important to remember another serious national security issue to aliens who run our nation’s borders- by evading the inspections process, there is no way of our government to know that these aliens are in our country. No record is made of their entry into our country. This not only creates a huge problem for national security but creates another important problem for us all, as well.

Aliens who are arrested often attempt to “get over” by claiming falsely to be United States citizens. Aliens who are admitted via the inspections process are fingerprinted and those fingerprints will show up if they are arrested. This makes it extremely unlikely that such aliens will be able to falsely claim to be citizens of our country. Illegal aliens who run our borders may falsely claim to have been born in the United States and it can, at times, be difficult to establish their true country of citizenship. This provides yet antoher reason why our porous borders must serve to be more than a “speed bump” to aliens seeking to enter our country in violation of law.

I want you to watch these two videos clips of President Obama who, as President, is not only the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces but the “Top Cop” for all federal agencies including CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement):

Governor Brewer of Arizona had a commercial produced to explain why she and the political leaders of her state decided to act when the federal government refused to do its job.

Here is a link to that video that was entitled:

“Mr. President, No One in Arizona is Laughing:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLgZ1LWLlko

on Tuesday, May 10th, President Obama went to El Paso, Texas to once again, push for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

Here is a link to a You Tube video of a portion of what Obama had to say:

“Alligators in the Moat”: Obama Mocks Concerns About Border Security:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAOEInEzpec

A number of years ago, while meeting with a number of members of Congress and their staffers, I was asked about the issue of morale at the former INS. I quickly asserted that morale was not a problem!

The folks who were in attendance at the meeting seemed really surprised. Then someone asked me, “Mr. Cutler, with all of the problems at the INS how could you say that morale is not a problem?”

It is sometimes said that Jewish people often answer a question with another question. Being a Jew from Brooklyn you therefore won’t be surprised that my answer to the question was, indeed, another question, “How can anything that does not exist possibly be a problem!”

Indeed morale was always a huge problem at the INS, an agency that we referred to as the “Step-child of the Department of Justice.”

For years I used to say that the INS was in a state of free-fall and bottom was elusive. Towards the end of my career as the lunacy got even worse I changed that statement and came to the conclusion, “The INS is in a state of free-fall and bottom is illusory! This is not damned bottom!”

Today I cannot imagine what the folks at ICE or CBP must feel when they go on duty each day and listen to speeches by Obama and Napolitano!

While my days of frustration as an INS special agent ended when I retired, I still empathize with the folks who do their best to do their jobs in spite of the “leadership” to be found in Washington. However, as you may know, I often debate various aspects of the immigration issue at a wide variety of venues ranging from television programs to panel discussions and debates at town hall meetings around the United States and on college campuses and high schools.

I cannot tell you how many times those I debate will blithely claim that illegal aliens (“Undocumented Workers”) in their Orwellian jargon, almost never commit crimes!

If you provide them with the statistics as to how many aliens are charged with unlawful reentry or other immigration crimes, they claim that these are “just” immigration offenses that don’t really count as crimes because the laws are so unjust!

In point of fact, most of the aliens who are charged with immigration crimes are only prosecuted when they have been convicted of previous felonies that have nothing to do with immigration laws!

In fact, one of the wonderful advantages to the creation of the “Aggravated Felony” statute concerning unlawful reentry is that prior to the passage of that law, federal prosecutors almost never prosecuted aliens for unlawful reentry because by the time the prosecution was over, the alien was likely to be sentenced to “time served” because the maximum sentence was only two years in jail. That reluctance still exists to prosecute aliens for unlawful reentry unless they meet the legal definition of “Aggravated Felon.”

Our nation provides lawful immigrant status to more than 1.1 million aliens each and every year! Each and everyone of those aliens are immediately placed on a pathway to United States citizenship on the day that they are granted their lawful immigrant status. This huge number of immigrants is far greater that the number of lawful immigrants admitted by any other country on the face of this planet! Additionally, the fraud rate within the legal immigration system is so out of control that there is little integrity to this process!

As I have noted on ever so many other occasions, the difference between an immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a houseguest and a burglar!

The securing of our nation’s borders and the effective enforcement and administration of our nation’s immigration laws are, arguably, among the most important of all missions that are supposed to be carried out by our federal government.

Nothing less than the security of our nation and safety of our citizens hang in the balance!

A country without secure borders can no more stand than can a house without walls!

If our country is to survive and if our children and their children are to get their share of the “American Dream” the citizens of this nation must take their citizenship seriously!

We the People must be the best citizens we can be, citizens who are worthy of the gallantry demonstrated by our valiant men and women in the military, law enforcement and firefighters, who routinely go in harm’s way in defense of this nation and our citizens.

My goal in writing this and other commentaries is to point out our nations many failings before more victims pay the ultimate price for the incompetence and ineptitude of our government.

The first step in problem-solving is to first identify the problems and vulnerabilities and then devise strategies to overcome them.

If you find yourself to be in agreement with this commentary, I ask that you forward it to as many of your friends and family members as possible and encourage them to do the same. We need to create a “Bucket Brigade of Truth!”

The practice of good citizenship does not end in the voting booth, it only begins there.

The large scale apathy demonstrated by citizens of this nation has emboldened elected representatives to all but ignore the needs of the average American citizen in a quest for massive campaign funds and the promises of votes to be ostensibly delivered by special interest groups. There is much that we cannot do but there is one thing that We the People absolutely must do- we must stop sitting on the sidelines!

The collective failure of We the People to get involved in make our concerns known to our politicians have nearly made the concerns of the great majority of the citizens of this nation all but irrelevant to the politicians.

I believe our nation’s is greatly benefited by the rich diversity of our people which is why I could never imagine living anywhere except New York City, arguably the most diverse city in our nation if not, in fact, the world. However, my idea of diversity most certainly does not include members of MS-13, the Mexican drug cartels or members of other transnational gangs or members of al-Qaeda!

If this situation concerns you or especially if it angers you, I ask you to call your Senators and Congressional “Representative. This is not only your right- it is your obligation!

All I ask is that you make it clear to our politicians that we are not as dumb as they hope we are!

We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hang in the balance.

This is neither a Conservative issue, nor is it a Liberal issue- simply stated, this is most certainly an AMERICAN issue!

You are either part of the solution or you are a part of the problem!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

ICE turns over fugitive wanted for murder to Mexican authorities

Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Investigator, an expert witness in more than a dozen Congressional Hearings is a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and an advisor to the ‘911 Families for a Secure America.’ He writes about the nexus between immigration and national security.

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