Listen, push comes to shove and illegal immigration is probably not among my Top 10 things that I lose sleep at night over. It is certainly not among the most pressing threats to our quality and way of life. Were I king, I’d fix it, but it would take me a week or three to get around to it.
With that as background, I am absolutely stunned by the Uptown paper’s reporting on this topic which has willfully misrepresented the way the program functions. In short, it was never intended to just “target” “dangerous” folks for deportation as the paper has tirelessly reported. The program merely affords local law enforcement a way to do what the feds did not want to do — namely check the immigration status of everyone booked into local jails. That’s it. That’s all it does.
And guess what, you get booked into jail for rolling through a stop sign, driving without a license, insurance, or registration, and are discovered to be in the country illegally no one deports you. You are released and told to report before an immigration judge to make your case against deportation. That little step, that little formality has not been part of the Uptown paper’s reporting.
But let’s flip it around. If these “minor” offenders are not to be put in the deportation cue, what are we to do with them? Evidently the plan is to just release them — over and over and over again. Because that is what we doing before the 287(g) program. In other words, the default position is that local law enforcement should never, ever help enforce the nation’s immigration laws.
And that, gentle subjects, is precisely what Latino activists want: No more enforcement of immigration laws.
