Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

I've been sitting on this thread for like two weeks now because I didn't want to post it during the Church shootup and then the Confederate flag started getting banned and then gay marriage was legalized, so ignore/adjust for any "yesterday/etc".

Now, I know we all have differing opinions on immigration and amnesty in the US, but surely we can all agree that people who come here illegally and are then convicted of serious crimes have no business being allowed to stay.

The ICE (Immigration Customs and Enforcement) has recently been forced (via lawsuit) to publish some immigration statistics that have the Senators of the Judiciary Committee upset. The ICE released at least 36,000 convicted criminal illegal immigrants in 2013 alone (a huge jump from the average 4,000 per year since 2008, but that's what you get when Obama tells the feds to ignore the law), and over 1,000 had been rearrested in the same year. 121 are now facing murder charges, but 24 of those have already been re-released once again.

The ICE refers to a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, Zadvydas v. Davis, that says the US can not indefinitely hold illegal immigrants designated for deportation whose countries will not take them back. They can only be held for 6 months, then must be released. This is supposed to come with an exception for "dangerous individuals" but Obama has directed the ICE to ignore the parts of federal immigration law he finds inconvenient.

Now, the Boston Globe lead a lawsuit and investigative report into the number of criminally convicted illegal immigrants convicted as well as their crimes. The severity of the cases they have found are chilling.

{ Immigration officials tried to deport Luis-Leyva Vargas, 47, to Cuba after he served three years in a Florida prison for unlawful sex with a teen. In 2008, officials released him. Two years later, he kidnapped an 18-year-old in Rockingham County, Va., at knifepoint and raped her. Now he is serving a 55-year prison sentence.

Felix Rodriguez, a 67-year-old sex offender convicted of raping children as young as 4 in the 1990s, was freed in 2009, also because Cuba would not take him back. Months later, he fatally shot his girlfriend in Kansas City. He pleaded guilty and is serving 10 years in a Missouri prison.

Andrew Rui Stanley, convicted in 2000 of multiple counts of sodomizing a child when Stanley was 14, was released in 2009 after Brazil failed to provide a passport needed to send him home. For the next two years, he viciously abused three children in St. Louis and now, at age 31, will be in prison for the rest of his life.

Anyone searching New York State’s public sex offender registry for Hagie Kamara, 44, who raped a 12-year-old girl in 2001, might have been relieved to find out that he was still incarcerated. Same for Alberto Fernandez, 64, who served time for brandishing a knife at a 15-year-old boy in 1984 and raping him.

The Globe found those sex offender entries were wrong. Immigration released both men six years ago and they never showed up at their local police agency to register their new address. New York officials said immigration never notified them that the men had been released.

The same happened in Indiana, where the state’s sex offender registry said Domingo Rebollar, convicted of child molesting in 2007, was still in prison. But according to the federal records, ICE released him in 2011 when he could not be deported.

The Globe discovered similar cases in Texas and Georgia. In Texas, officials said Friday that ICE did not notify them of an immigrant’s release, and they planned to investigate. Georgia sex-offender registry officials did not respond to requests for comment. }

So taking all of this in, what do you think?

Should we appeal the SCOTUS and have the initial ruling reviewed?

Do you think it's reasonable to indefinitely detain illegal immigrant convicted criminals whose countries wont take them back, or do you think they have a right to be released?

Do you think we should care that other countries don't want their criminals back, or should we send them home on a plane anyway and let them deal with it on their own? {"Some say the Obama administration should do more to force other countries to take back their criminals, such as denying visas to their citizens if they wish to travel to the United States."}

& what can we do about the irresponsible policies of the ICE, who fail to alert state officials when releasing child rapists into communities?

Policy as it is now too frequently sees end results like this:

Suspect in crash that killed local sports journalist previously deported 3 times

so I also have to ask, what should we be doing to keep deported criminals out of the country for good?

This case is now picking up national media attention.

Californian woman shot dead at random by illegal immigrant who had been deported five times

{ 'There were no words exchanged between the suspect and the victim,' said Sgt. Michael Andraychak. 'The victim said something to her family members to the extent that she didn't feel well, that she just realized something had taken place and she fell to the ground.'

'There was a pop, and Kate went down,' 68-year-old Jim Steinle tearfully recalled on Thursday. 'She just kept saying, 'Dad, help me, help me.''

The slaying was particularly shocking because it happened in broad daylight in a place where tourists gather to take in the views, joggers exercise, and families push strollers at all hours. }

San Fransisco is a sanctuary city. The murderer, Fransisco Sanchez, is a 7-time felon across across multiple states. He was transferred to San Fransisco four months ago on a drug related warrant. After the case, instead of notifying the ICE so he could be picked up and taken back into custody (to be deported for a 6th time), San Fransisco enacted its sanctuary policy to ignore the ICE's detainer and release him into the general population once again. There's a clause in the policy that says San Fransisco will not offer sanctuary to illegal immigrants with "special circumstances", but 7 felonies were apparently not special enough circumstances to warrant his detainment.

He was able to give a 45 minutes jailhouse interview to ABC after his arrest for the murder of Kate Steinle, where he admits he shot her and tells the reporter that he specifically chose to come to San Fransisco because he knew he'd be offered sanctuary.

Now, some questions in addition to the few at the bottom of my OP:

• Do you agree with the sanctuary city policy of ignoring federal immigration law to make life easier for illegal immigrants who are constantly being deported?

• Trump took the opportunity to again call for a secured Southern border and a wall. Did you agree or disagree with his comments when he originally made them, and has your opinion changed at all as stats like the records in my OP are being force-released to the public via investigative journalism lawsuits/FOIA requests?

• Why are California/other sanctuary states allowed to ignore federal immigration law and offer sanctuary to felons, but Texas/et al are immediately condemned for ignoring new federal gay marriage laws?

idk why we're all ignoring what is rapidly becoming a national shitstorm.

Another liberal scandal, another issue that KYM will adamantly ignore and insist is not happening.

{ Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is criticizing the Obama administration for "releasing criminals back onto the streets."

"The policy regarding detainers, which is the law of the United States, was enforced by the Bush administration as being mandatory. The Obama administration has converted that into something voluntary. And in doing so, they have eliminated a program that was working called Secure Communities, where individuals like this would be detained and would be turned over to the immigration service.

He also refuted the Obama administration's claim that deportations of criminals are way up:

"They are not deporting people in the numbers that have been deported in the past and they're counting people that they apprehend at the border and turn back around.
The Bush administration did not count those as deportations. They simply apprehended them at the border, sent them back into Mexico. That didn't count as deportation.

"The Obama administration has started counting those, and that has driven those numbers up. But the actual deportations from the interior of the country are way down. This administration is not enforcing our immigration laws and, quite frankly, I don't think they care. }

What do you do when the leader of your country refuses to obey federal law?
What do you do when the media is so controlled that these incredibly serious decisions with dangerous and real consequences don't get reported to the voters?
What do you do when the reports that do make it to the public eye are swept under the rug by people who feel the issue is a bit too unPC to really talk about?

¯\(ツ)/¯