By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Political appointee Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security, expressed perplexity at the idea his department isn’t doing its job, the Washington Examiner reported.
The Examiner posted on April 27 that Johnson had just told ABC’s This Week: “I don’t understand those who say we are not enforcing the law. We are enforcing the law every day.”
However, at the beginning of April, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in Arizona’s most populous county, had written directly to Johnson to complain that his federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) wasn’t doing its job at all, with illegal aliens here repeatedly arrested for serious offenses.
Arpaio told Johnson on April 1 this was placing his deputies, other police officers “and the entire community” in danger.
Nearly a month later, the sheriff’s office told The Wanderer that Johnson hadn’t replied to Arpaio. On April 29 Lisa Allen, Arpaio’s media-relations director, expressed “very limited hope that Washington, D.C., officials would respond to inquiries.”
Once again Arpaio, a Catholic, was having to deal with the grim realities of serious alien crime, while his Church’s U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops overlooks this as it focuses on making the maximum number of illegal aliens into U.S. citizens.
The bishops fail to give necessary emphasis to serious reforms needed to improve lives in the aliens’ own home countries.
In addition, 22 Republican U.S. senators sternly warned Obama in an April 24 letter that his weak policies against illegal immigrants are “allowing preventable crimes harming innocent people to take place every day.”
Meanwhile, Breitbart News reported on April 25 that new threats against U.S. law enforcers were issued from within Mexico after a southeastern Arizona policeman fatally shot a driver who, the officer said, tried to run him down in Cochise County.
Arizona’s Cochise County borders Mexico and is a high-activity area for illegal alien and drug trafficking, often controlled by dangerous Mexican cartels.
Breitbart said that the dead man, Lauro Jesus Avechuco, had a “history of arrests for possession of marijuana, aggravated DUI, felony flight, and assault.”
The local Sierra Vista Herald reported that an unidentified passenger in Avechuco’s vehicle fled the scene.
The April 27 Washington Examiner story showed Jeh Johnson to be more concerned with promoting Obama’s open-borders agenda than enforcing border security, as he is required to do.
The story quoted Johnson as telling This Week: “We have an immigration system in this country that is not working. Comprehensive immigration reform would fix that. This is something we need to do, I am confident it will happen.”
The Washington Post reported on April 24 that 22 Republican U.S. senators wrote a letter to Obama to express “grave concerns” that his administration was preparing to ignore still more immigration law as it pursues its agenda.
The Post also said that Homeland Security’s Johnson “met with several members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus…to [begin] discussing the administration’s plans.”
The GOP senators, the Post said, “say that any such changes ‘would represent a near complete abandonment of basic immigration enforcement and discard the rule of law and the notion that the United States has enforceable borders’.”
However, the newspaper added that the four GOP senators who belong to the Senate’s “Gang of Eight,” who devised last year’s “comprehensive immigration reform” bill, didn’t join in signing the letter. They’re the Arizona establishment’s own open-borders John McCain and Jeff Flake, as well as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham and Florida’s Marco Rubio.
The Examiner story also quoted Johnson speaking in a way that, a person might think, would indicate how the administration may try further to evade immigration laws on the books.
“Immigration laws or any other law needs to comport with American values,” Johnson was quoted; “one of those American values is respect for human dignity. I also believe one of those American values is respect for the sanctity of the family unit.”
One can foresee the lawless Obama declaring that he’s waiving any immigration law that doesn’t “comport with American values,” as he sees them.
An observer can only wonder what other violations Obama would ignore if the lawbreaker would have to go to jail and thereby be separated from “the sanctity of the family unit.”
In his April 1 letter of complaint to Johnson, Maricopa County Sheriff Arpaio wrote in part: “A review by my office over a recent three-month period revealed that one out of three illegal immigrants arrested by local law enforcement in Maricopa County and booked into my jails had previously been arrested on a wide range of serious criminal charges, despite being turned over to ICE.
“Four hundred nineteen out of 1,348 illegal aliens, fully 31 percent,” Arpaio wrote, “who had been arrested and charged, often multiple times — many more than a dozen times — in our county…should have been deported, as a minimal, automatic response to their arrests.
“This recidivism rate means one of two things,” Arpaio continued; “either ICE is choosing not to detain, let alone deport, these prisoners, and instead quietly releasing them back onto our streets, or the federal effort to control the border is a spectacular failure, with many of these illegal immigrants crossing and re-crossing the border at will.
“This flagrant disregard of the law, or incompetence in enforcing it, endangers both my deputies, other police officers, and the entire community, when ICE releases dangerous individuals, a problem compounded when ICE doesn’t bother to alert law enforcement beforehand,” the sheriff wrote.
“In addition,” Arpaio wrote, “this is costing the taxpayers a fortune to pay for this charade of arresting, releasing, re-arresting, [and] so on, causing law enforcement to spend its officers’ time on this pointless carousel, instead of stopping and investigating other crimes.”
In their April 24 letter to Obama, the 22 Republican senators sternly said, “Your actions demonstrate an astonishing disregard for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the rights of American citizens and legal residents.”
They quoted Chris Crane, the president of the National ICE Council, as testifying before Congress that he thinks Americans believe ICE officers are empowered to enforce the law, but instead the officers are punished by ICE itself if they make lawful arrests.
The GOP senators told Obama that “countless dangerous offenders are released back onto the streets on a continual basis. Since ICE frequently takes no action until after the most serious crimes have occurred and the offenders have been tried and imprisoned, the administration is allowing preventable crimes harming innocent people to take place every day.”
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