The ICE Age
October 26th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
While attention has been focused on the inane border wall, immigration authorities have been weaving a much more insidious legal dragnet along the border. Bush’s Border Patrol announced today that it is expanding its “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented immigrants from Del Rio and Yuma, Arizona to the busy Laredo sector. In a nutshell, that means the agency will try to throw every single immigrant they catch into jail. Doing so will require yet more detention centers, jails, and prisons. Zero tolerance likely won’t stop in Laredo. Border Patrol assistant chief Ramon Rivera was quoted in the Houston Chronicle as saying, “We’re hoping it goes nationwide.”
The courts in Laredo are already swamped. Public defenders I talked to two years ago for a story said it was all they could do to provide a basic legal defense for their clients. The courts then were corral-like, with dozens of defendants coming before the magistrate on a daily basis. Laredo had to build a new 1,500-bed detention center to hold them all. That year the Southern District of Texas (Laredo’s district) led the nation in the number of immigration-related convictions - 17,307 in 2005 - even besting Texas Western (where Del Rio is located) at 3,054. How in the world will defenders, prosecutors, and judges handle the caseload once every single illegal entrant is booked, charged, prosecuted, and jailed?
If the Bush administration, with the backing of a pliant Congress, is really intent on expanding zero-tolerance to the whole border and perhaps even moving the program into the heartland, it will necessitate another huge expansion in detention centers, jails, and prisons. The Immigration and Customs Service (ICE), which runs immigrant detention centers, is asking Congress to fund 40,000 beds - 14,000 over the 26,000 beds the nation has right now. Increased prosecutions will also increase the need for more jail and prison beds. Much of that demand will be met by for-profit prison corporations.
This is all fine and dandy for some people, maybe even most people in this country. Some will say the law’s the law and, after all, THEY’RE ILLEGAL. This says something about our priorities. Because the reality is that resources are finite. Prosecutors must make decisions on what crimes they prosecute, administrations have to set budgets for law enforcement, and societies have to decide collectively what behavior to reward and punish. Just consider this: Immigration is now the number-one federally prosecuted crime - not drugs, weapons, white collar crime, or even terrorism. And the most prosecuted immigration crime is illegal entry, the simple offense of an economic immigrant, one that is committed hundreds of thousands of times every year.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Forest Wilder:
Yes, It is Fine and Dandy!
Enforcing our immigration laws has to
start sooner or later or the invasion
of illegal aliens will continue to explode
and produce illegal alien states not just
Balkanized Sanctuary/Outlaw Cities where
the U.S. Rule of Law does not apply like
Los Angeles and others. Wake Up! Its an Invasion!
October 27th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
You seem to fail to understand it is Terrorism that is being waged against the US and defended against by ICE. We should be enforcing our southern borders as rigidly as Mexico defends its southern borders. Illegal is illegal. Period. If taxes go up and the cost of lettuce goes up because we’ve eliminated illegal entry, so be it. I’m sure I’ll see my taxes also go down as the need to support 10-20 million illegal folks in emergency rooms, schools, food stamp offices, prisons, etc. declines dramatically.
I don’t care if you loosen the numbers of immigrants allowed in…just document them and process them at the border…including fingerprints and an explanation of expectation to them that if they cannot support themselves and need welfare-type assistance in the first 5 years of their immigration, they will be deported as they are not contributing to the country. Those that do contribute (and there are many), will stay unimpeded and welcomed with open arms. The criminals and leaches will not be. ICE serves to help separate the two groups!
October 27th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
Why can’t they unreel a temporary floating fence on the Rio Grande. They can circumvent land owner permission that way because it would be in U.S. waters if placed in the U.S. side of the river. Just unreel a steel cable from a boat not unlike a highway crash barrier cable fence. Float it with buoys and tether it occasionally with pilings. Then barbed-wire it, electrify it, sensor it, mine it, or whatever else you wanted to do to make it difficult to go over or under. A good Alaskan long-liner fishing boat and crew could fence the entire river in a couple of months at less than 1 percent of the cost of a regular fence. It would pay for itself in a few months at most in the form of reduced enforcement costs, reduced crime cost, reduced everything cost. A long lining crew can drop eight miles or more of fishing line in a few hours. This would work about the same way only with reels of cable instead of magazines of fishing line (synthetic braided rope fitted with leaders). There’s way too much BS with this fence. Just put it up now. By the time the regular fence gets finished, illegals will be overtaking the North Pole.
October 28th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Three Comments.
First of all, it is good to see that some Hysterical-Americans are reading this blog; it will eventually do them some good.
Secondly, why did Laredo have to foot the cost of a concentration camp for people arrested by the Federal Government? Is that what you intended to say, or did the feds build the camp?
Thirdly, you are right, there is no logic in arresting all these people, putting them through the criminal justice system, and jailing them, at huge cost to the local and national tax payers. The costs to people like Mr. Buckaroo Banzai may well be higher than the taxes he claims he pays to support illegals. So why do it, if the logic is not there? Well, pandering to the Republican Base, Mr. Banzai, for instance, is one explanation. The other is that such a program gives the neo-fascist, authoritatian, retro-monarchists of the Republican Party a colorable excuse to build more jails, which they hope to use at some time in the future as holding pens for plain old Americans. A program of building concentration camps for Americans would get nowhere, while a program for building detention facilities for illegal immigrants will get wide support. But, one size fits all; they are multiple use facilities.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Wow this is great news and thanks for reporting it!!!
I hope we get one of these facilities in every major urban area, and that is is very profitable for the private operators. This will insure that the scourge from the illegals is stopped and jailed.
I’m also delighted to hear that the courts are over capacity! Wow this is great. So as these vermin rot in jail each week they will call their parasitic relatives to whine and complain this will mean few and fewer border crossings.
Ultimately this will mean lower taxes and fewer crimes committed by illegals. Today 7 of 10 people on the FBI most wanted are illegal aliens. If we jail and deport illegals then all crimes across the board will lessen.
The ICE age is one of the biggest wins in law enforcement history.
Asta La Vista La Raza!!!
October 28th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Hello Mr. SPQR_US. Take some advice: If you are going to try to float an outright lie about something, pick a subject area that is not so readily available for research.
“Today,” you wrote, “7 of 10 people on the FBI most wanted are illegal aliens.” You are familiar with google, are you not? If you google the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List, you will find that six of the perps on the List today were born in the United States, one in Mexico, one in Columbia, one in Honduras, and one — Usama Ben Laden — in Saudi Arabia. I have to wonder if your lie is one you made up, or if you are just parroting a lie you read somewhere else.
Grow up. Learn to make your racism/fear something you own, so you can deal with it and overcome it.
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm
I recommend doing some research into why so many immigrants are entering the U.S. illegally. One major reason is NAFTA, which we are paying for with our tax dollars. Ever since NAFTA was passed in 1994:
1. Poverty increased in Mexico, and so did immigration to the U.S.
2. Real wages have gone down in both the U.S. and Mexico.
3. Transnational corporations have received huge tax breaks to move well-paid U.S. jobs to Mexico and transform them into abusive sweatshop jobs.
4. Mexican farmers have lost their source of sustenance because they can’t compete with the cheap U.S. agribusiness corn that is being exported to Mexico and that is also subsidized with our tax dollars.
So basically we are subsidizing transnational corporations and their free trade laws that create these conditions. Americans are losing their jobs, and Mexicans are losing their jobs. Transnational corporations benefit and pay off the politicians who pass these laws both in Mexico and the U.S.
Be angry at the U.S. government. Demand that NAFTA be repealed. Stop subsidizing huge agribusiness, and start subsidizing family farms and local businesses. If we had fair international trade laws, we wouldn’t have such a huge crisis to begin with.
November 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 pm
JT is exactly correct. If you want to see how much the federal government is subsidizing Texas agriculture, go to http://www.ewg.org/, scroll down to “Farming”, click on “Farm Subsidies,” and follow your nose. You won’t have much trouble, because it really stinks.