 Here’s an update on an illegal alien sob story: the subject is a Cambodian, Borey Ai, who killed a man during a liquor store robbery. I reported on the case in August: Refugee Criminals Are Sad about Facing Deportation.
Ai originally got a life sentence for second-degree murder — so the judge and jury took the crime seriously despite the perp being a teenager — but spent only 20 years in San Quentin, since this is California after all.
On Saturday, the San Jose Mercury News brought us the news of Ai’s worries in a sympathetic front-page article — as if Americans should disagree with deporting foreign killers.
Cambodian immigrants fear more ICE raids on the horizon, San Jose Mercury News, December 22, 2018
It’s only been a few days since an Omni Air flight carrying 36 deportees, rounded up and detained by ICE earlier this year, landed in Cambodia. But already, immigrant communities in the Bay Area and across California are bracing themselves for more.
[. . .]
Borey “Peejay” Ai was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Cambodian parents who fled genocide by the Khmer Rouge regime.
On the day he was freed from San Quentin — having served 20 years for the 1996 slaying of a Berryessa liquor store owner when he was 14 — ICE was waiting outside. Ai, who became one of the youngest people in California to be given a life sentence for murder, spent nearly two years in ICE detention. The state Supreme Court on Monday blocked Gov. Jerry Brown’s attempt to issue him a pardon, which could have kept him in the country. Ai’s case still sits in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. But deportation looms.
“I’m in limbo,” he said. “I’m not moving forward. I’m constantly thinking about my vulnerability to being deported.”
During his time in prison, Ai became a state certified counselor for domestic violence victims through a group called Guiding Rage into Power, which gave him a job after his release. He’s worked extensively with Kid CAT, a rehabilitative program at San Quentin praised for its focus on self improvement through education and counseling. Ai is also part of the Asian Prisoner Support Committee in Oakland, which works to rehabilitate former convicts as they re-enter society.
As he helps community members facing deportation, he deals with the reality that he, too, can be deported at any moment.
“I think about that everyday,” he said. “Everyday since I got out it’s been on my mind.”


No good deed goes unpunished as they say, and Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle has a front-page story that shows immigration enforcement remains a joke. As I reported in August 2017 (Oakland Sob Story Spectacle Comes to an End), a job-stealing Mexican nurse was deported to her legal home. But now Maria Mendoza-Sanchez is back, thanks to help in high places, according to the Chron.
California’s Senator Feinstein has been a powerful supporter of the Mexican, even visiting her home last year with news cameras handy. Funny, I don’t recall the senator ever going to bat for crime victims of illegal aliens, even though Kate Steinle was killed by an illegal Mexican just a 3 1/2 miles from Feinstein’s mansion in Pacific Heights. Senator Feinstein certainly has made her priorities clear.
Mendoza will return to her former job in the Highland Hospital cancer ward — good luck to the patients.
Deported Oakland nurse given approval to return to the US, By Bob Egelko San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2018
A nurse who was separated from her children and deported to Mexico last year after more than two decades in Oakland has won her improbable fight to return to the United States.
Maria Mendoza-Sanchez said she got a phone call Friday morning from the U.S. Consulate in Mexico City saying her visa had been approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. She’s been staying with her sister in a town three hours from the capital and couldn’t make the drive Friday because of air-pollution restrictions, but plans to pick up the paperwork Monday. And a week or two later, she’ll be flying back to the Bay Area.
“This is amazing. … I could barely believe it,” said Mendoza-Sanchez, 47, whose story has been covered extensively in The Chronicle and elsewhere and has drawn support from local and statewide political leaders. They include Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. Staffers at Oakland’s Highland Hospital, where Mendoza-Sanchez worked as an oncology nurse, held a rally to protest her deportation.
After hearing the news Friday, her first call was to her four children in Oakland. “I told them to wake up,” she said, “I asked them to gather in one room, and I told them, ‘Mommy’s coming home.’ They were very happy. I said, ‘Get ready for school.’”
The journey home required a winning ticket in a visa lottery this spring, then a series of approvals from agencies in a Trump administration that has taken an increasingly hard line on immigration from Latin America. The visa is an H-1B, reserved for skilled workers such as nurses in hospital cancer wards.
The timing of Friday’s call came as a surprise, because a consular official had told Mendoza-Sanchez this week that she would probably get a final decision in about a month.
“I think because of all of the pressure (from politicians and the public), they sped it up,” said her immigration lawyer, Camiel Becker.
Feinstein said Friday she had met with Mendoza-Sanchez and kept in close contact with her children over the past year. (Continues)
The New York Times normally doesn’t do sob story photos on its front page, given its reputation of being the staid and proper Grey Lady, but Monday was an exception. One can assume the point was to portray border chaos with President Trump as the meanie-in-chief who opposes open borders to the world (now 7.7 billion).
The photo shows a woman with two kids dodging tear gas in Tijuana as illegal alien Hondurans tried to storm the border. Presumably, the viewer is supposed to think that the cruel Trump is persecuting innocent kiddies. I see an irresponsible mother who has dragged her children more than 2000 miles to steal benefits and education from the American taxpayer. The United States is a national community of citizens, not welfare office to the world.
The accompanying Times story was reprinted in Telegraph India — good! Overpopulated India (now 1.4 billion) sends quite a few moocher pests to America. As reported here in August, Thousands of Illegal Alien Indians Show Up at the Border to Claim Asylum and Disappear, so they need to hear the news.
Tijuana migrants run into teargas on US border, By Maya Averbuch and Elisabeth Malkin/New York Times News Service, Telegraph India, November 26, 2018
Donald Trump has made preventing the migrants’ entry into the US a signature stance of his administration over the past few weeks
A peaceful march by Central American migrants waiting at the southwestern US border veered out of control on Sunday afternoon, as hundreds of people tried to evade a Mexican police blockade and run toward a giant border crossing that leads into San Diego.
In response, the US Customs and Border Protection agency shut down the border crossing in both directions and fired tear gas to push back migrants from the border fence. The border was reopened later on Sunday evening.
The episode comes at a time of growing tension on both sides of the border and promised to become the newest flash point in the story of a caravan that was the target of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rallying cry during the midterm elections.
Trump has made preventing their entry into the United States a signature stance of his administration over the past few weeks and has sent US soldiers to the border, although the US military was not involved in Sunday’s clash. The images of unrest on Sunday will likely provide him with additional ammunition as he tries to keep out the caravan members and other immigrants and refugees fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands. (Continues)
Standards have risen for non-citizens since President Trump was elected. In fact, enforcement has become so strict that even a convicted foreign murderer might be deported!
A recent front page of the San Jose Mercury-News featured the travails of young criminal refugees which included a photo of a killer who may soon get a free ride home. What’s more fascinating is the story about that person, who at age 14 shot dead a liquor store owner during a robbery and was sentenced to life in prison.
But since this is California, Thai refugee Boray Ai was released after serving 20 years in San Quentin. Why he was not immediately deported is somewhat unclear; nevertheless he is still here and hoping for a pardon from Gov Jerry Brown who is about to retire and won’t fear any voters blaming him for being soft on murderers.
Note to “journalists” — using a murderer as a subject in an immigrant sob story may not be the best choice to generate sympathy.
In Trump’s America, childhood crimes haunt Bay Area Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, San Jose Mercury-News, August 2, 2018
Had Phuoc Thang been born in the United States, the 38-year-old electrician would be quietly raising his young family in their comfy Berryessa home, having turned his life around nearly two decades after serving time in San Quentin for drug possession.
Had he been born in Central America or Mexico, he’d likely already have been deported.
But because he was born in a refugee camp in Indonesia to Vietnamese parents who fled communism, things are much more complicated. Thang is part of a unique group of hundreds of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees living in limbo after committing crimes long ago — some as teenagers — that cost them their green cards. [. . .]
Borey “Peejay” Ai was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to Cambodian parents who fled genocide by the Khmer Rouge regime. The family immigrated to the U.S. when Ai was 5. But growing up in a troubled family in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Stockton, Ai struggled to fit in. As a young boy, he witnessed his 7-year-old cousin get gunned down in the infamous Cleveland Elementary School massacre of 1989. Five children were shot to death.
Seven years later, he was the one pulling the trigger. At 14, Ai pled guilty to second-degree murder in the 1996 slaying of a Berryessa liquor store owner during a robbery, becoming one of the youngest people in California to be given a life sentence for murder.
He served 20 years in San Quentin and was granted parole in 2016. But on the day he was freed, ICE was waiting outside.
Ai spent nearly two years at the Rio Consumes detention facility in Elk Grove. He’s appealed his deportation order and has asked Gov. Jerry Brown to pardon his crime, which eventually could allow him to stay in the United States.
But even as Brown — who last year pardoned Cambodians Mony Neth and Rottanak Kong, convicted of possessing stolen guns and felony joyriding, respectively — weighs this decision and as Ai’s case sits in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, he could be deported at any minute.
“It’s devastating,” said Ai. “It hurts. There’s no way to describe it. I can’t get comfortable, I can’t do anything because I know that at some point it can be gone. It can be taken from me.” (Continues)
Is this a great country or what? Even a convicted foreign murderer expects all the rights and privileges of a law-abiding American citizen.
Unlawful foreigners are still fleeing from President Trump’s America, we learn from Saturday’s Washington Post. And the liberal scribblers think the situation hearkens back to slavery times, as shown by the headline, “A Modern Underground Railroad” referring to the path that once led slaves to freedom in Canada.
But American slaves of the 19th century were victims of a brutal system; today’s illegal aliens trying to reach Trudeau’s permissive Canada are thieves who illegally entered America to rip off jobs and benefits.
Worse, the person chosen to characterize the sob story of fleebag illegal aliens is Omer Malik, a “19-year-old native of Afghanistan.”
American soldiers are still dying in Afghanistan, but the young Afghan man profiled is motivated only to get a better deal on free stuff in the nation to the north. Why isn’t he defending his own country from the Taliban rather than angling for the best welfare system?
Unfortunately, mass illegal immigration has ruined normal patriotism and replaced it with overwhelming greed from Central America to Afghanistan. The most energetic thing young men in the Third World can manage these days is to flee to somewhere wealthy to steal First World jobs.
That’s not going to work: America cannot be the flophouse for millions of dissatisfied Third Worlders.
The sappy Washington Post article was reprinted in Stars and Stripes:
Undocumented immigrants are fleeing the US for Canada — and these Americans are helping, Stripes.com, By Tim Craig, Washington Post, August 3, 2018
CHAMPLAIN, N.Y. — Omer Malik knew he had to slip into Canada to avoid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
But the 19-year-old native of Afghanistan needed a friend to help guide him. He found that friend in a 66-year-old former French teacher, one of a number of people here in the Adirondack region who believe it’s their duty to comfort and support those fleeing Trump’s vision for America.
As Malik dragged his suitcase toward the Canadian border, Janet McFetridge gave him two bags of potato chips, a knit hat and — what she considers her most important gift — a hug. Then she yelled across the thicket of cattails and flowering grasses that separated them from Quebec.
“Hello,” she called, alerting a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer that Malik was about to illegally cross the border to claim asylum. “We got someone here.”
McFetridge is part of a loosely assembled network of progressive activists, faith leaders and taxi drivers who have mobilized to help undocumented immigrants cross the northern border. To some, they’re selfless do-gooders ushering people to better lives. To others, they’re perpetuating a problem that has debilitated Canada’s immigration system.
For centuries, residents note, towns in the Champlain Valley have been a path to security, serving as an escape route for people fleeing slavery, the Vietnam War draft and Central American wars. Now, when it comes to immigration, this GOP-friendly part of New York has become a hub of the resistance.
“We view this as our Underground Railroad,” said Carole Slatkin, an advocate who has helped immigrants traveling through Essex, New York, a town that was part of a major route for enslaved people. “While no one is being flogged, and no one is being sold, there is this sort of modern-day equivalent of feeling like people are in danger.”
Advocates say they try not to give direct advice to the immigrants, instead helping them find a place to rest or supplies to ease their journey. But the image of U.S. citizens supporting immigrants who make the trip is controversial in Canada, threatening long-standing, cross-border camaraderie.
“To me, it’s just being abusive,” said Paul Viau, mayor of the township of Hemmingford, a Canadian farming community along the border. “There are people who sympathize with [the immigrants] and people who have a harder time with it. But no one appreciates that someone would pack them up and bring them to the border at an illegal crossing.”
Last year, as the Trump administration began enacting stricter policies against undocumented immigrants, Canada processed more than 50,000 asylum claims. That is more than double the claims made in 2016, according to Canadian government statistics.
Many of those immigrants have been crossing at unauthorized locations, such as here on Roxham Road.
Although the flow of asylum seekers into many Canadian provinces has slowed this year, there has been no letup into Quebec. From January through June, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police apprehended 10,261 people crossing the border illegally there. Last year, the police apprehended 18,836 people.
The arrivals have sparked a backlash from segments of Canada’s political system. In late June, Toronto Mayor John Tory warned that the influx of asylum seekers had overwhelmed that city’s ability to care for them.
“We have a problem, and we need help,” Tory told Canadian reporters in a plea for more emergency housing.
In Quebec, the leader of its nationalist party, Jean-François Lisée, has suggested constructing a wall along the southern border of the province. (Continues)
Life is harder for unskilled refugees who are resettled by do-gooders with no sense about the cost of living. One telling example is the struggle of Afghan families who have been placed in California’s ultra expensive Bay Area. That situation was reflected in a front-page sob story in the San Jose Mercury News on Monday:
The subject family is not surviving financially. Khisrow Jan, the father and breadwinner, is working 12 hours a day as an Uber driver which doesn’t pay the rent of $1850 for a two-bedroom apartment in Antioch. He has a stay-at-home wife and four kids to support, so the expenses won’t be decreasing any time soon. The agency that placed the family in one of America’s most expensive areas did them no favors.
But the story does provide the dose of emotional diversity that many media outlets crave. It is a reprint from CalMatters.org, a liberal news site.
Fleeing war-torn homes for crippling rents—California housing costs creating harsh reality for refugees, CalMatters.org, July 19, 2018
Khisrow Jan has $800 in the bank. Rent is $1,850, and was due four days ago. He’s late with his payment—again.
While Jan gets ready for work—driving an Uber in San Francisco for the next 12 hours — his 4-year-old daughter Shukula barricades the front door of their two-bedroom apartment in Antioch, a far-flung Bay Area suburb east of Oakland.
“I need to work. Need to make some money,” Jan, 34, playfully tells his daughter.
“No, you cannot,” replies Shukula, an impish smile spreading across her face.
“Look buddy,” says Jan. “I got to go, get some money, and buy you a dress.”
That satisfies Shukula. She and the rest of Jan’s family—9-year-old Sameera, 5-year old Mirwais, and 9-month-old Wais, carried by his mother—follow Jan out to his car. He’ll be back at 2 or 3 a.m., long after his kids have fallen asleep.
When Jan and his family fled Afghanistan in 2015, he knew adjusting to a new life in California wasn’t going to be easy. His wife speaks very little English, and even after working as an interpreter with U.S. troops, his job prospects were limited.
But he never dreamed California was going to be this expensive.
The state’s skyrocketing housing costs have created a harsh new reality for refugees on the ground, many of whom are going to extraordinary lengths just to afford rent. The cost of living has increased so much in recent years that refugee resettlement agencies working in California are rethinking their strategies for relocating clients—and whether the state is a good fit for some refugees in the first place.
“I heard a lot about California out there in Afghanistan,” says Jan, who embedded with American soldiers from the Bay Area and other parts of the state. “They were saying California is nice. But trust me, I didn’t know anything about the rent and all these bills.”
California has long been a landing spot for refugees like Jan. Waves of Vietnamese, Iranian, Central American and other immigrants have resettled here over the past few decades, escaping persecution and turmoil in their home countries. More than 700,000 refugees have come to California since the mid 1970’s, including more than 30,000 in the last five years, according to state statistics.
(Continues)
When Judge Dana Sabraw demanded a couple weeks ago that the government reunify invader adults with their apparent children, it seemed an impossible task. But on Friday, the judge said the deed was accomplished to the degree possible.
Judge: Border family reunification ‘has been completed’, By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, July 28, 2018
The judge overseeing the chaos from President Trump’s zero-tolerance border policy gave the government good marks for its efforts to reunify families, saying that for the parents the government has control over “that process has been completed.” [. . .]
He praised the government for meeting his strict deadlines, set in June, that forced agencies to scramble to reunite young children with parents by July 10, and the rest of the juveniles by this week.
He said the government managed to reconnect 1,820 children.
“The government can only reunify families over which it has control. and it has control over the families, the parents and children, in its custody,” Judge Sabraw said. [. . .]
This news may come as a blow to newspaper designers who have used emotive photos of foreign family reunifications to spice up their front pages while bashing President Trump as a meanie for enforcing immigration laws.
Funny, I don’t recall ever seeing a photo of an America victim of illegal alien crime on a newspaper front page — no sympathetic picture of shooting victim Kate Steinle, the murdered Bologna family or high school student Jamiel Shaw.
Below are a couple examples of alien sob story porn from the last few days — there were many others. And keep in mind, American citizen, that if you dragged your kid along to a crime, the government would confine you separately also.
From the Washington Post front page on July 25:
This photo appeared on the July 26 Los Angeles Times front page
Sunday’s New York Times featured an illegal alien sob story, emphasizing the cost and danger of reaching the US.
Readers learn that the Times’ hero of the story, Salvadoran Christopher Cruz, apparently spent $12,500 to reach America’s welfare offices, though the exact sum is not clear. That’s a great deal of money for a poor unskilled Central American which he obviously believes he can somehow mooch back in the wealthy United States.
Additionally interesting were facts about the big picture of people smuggling, in particular that “migrants paid $500 million a year to groups fueling violence and instability in the region.” That’s a lot of money going to cartels — no wonder they are so powerful.
Imagine if all that money and human energy were repurposed to reform in the home countries. There used to be revolutions in Latin America, but now it’s just easier for young men, like the 22-year-old subject of the Times article, to break into the United States to steal jobs and benefits from citizen taxpayers. Illegal immigration is theft.
True, Central America is a third-world hellhole, but all its millions of unhappy people cannot come here and spread the poison of lawlessness in this country.
To be fair, the United States has been unduly generous to foreign lawbreakers who can manage to stay legally or illegally, a policy that constituted a human magnet.
Below, President Obama’s deluxe Karnes Detention Center for illegal aliens included flat-screen TVs, a hair salon and brand new clothes — at a cost to taxpayers of $140 per day per foreigner.
So President Trump is correct to apply severe negative reinforcement to counteract years of Obama’s pampering of lawbreakers. But the Republican-run Congress is not serious about immigration enforcement, otherwise it would have enacted universal E-Verify.
Back to the New York Times article (reprinted), note the communist-style entitlement felt by the Salvadoran who says, “They can send as many soldiers to the border as they want, but a people’s need and desire for a better life is stronger.”
What It Costs to Be Smuggled Across the U.S. Border, Examle.org, June 30, 2018
MATAMOROS, Mexico – Shortly before dawn one Sunday last August, a driver in an S.U.V. picked up Christopher Cruz at a stash house in this border city near the Gulf of Mexico. The 22-year-old from El Salvador was glad to leave the one-story building, where smugglers kept bundles of cocaine and marijuana alongside their human cargo, but he was anxious about what lay ahead.
The driver deposited Mr. Cruz at an illegal crossing point on the edge of the Rio Grande. A smuggler took a smartphone photograph to confirm his identity and sent it using WhatsApp to a driver waiting to pick him up on the other side of the frontier when – if – he made it across.
The nearly 2,000-mile trip had already cost Mr. Cruz’s family more than $6,000 and brought him within sight of Brownsville, Tex. The remaining 500 miles to Houston – terrain prowled by the United States Border Patrol as well as the state and local police – would set them back another $6,500.
It was an almost inconceivable amount of money for someone who earned just a few dollars a day picking coffee beans back home. But he wasn’t weighing the benefits of a higher-paying job. He was fleeing violence and what he said was near-certain death at the hands of local gangs.
“There’s no other option,” Mr. Cruz said. “The first thought I had was, ‘I just need to get out of here at whatever cost.’”
The stretch of southwest border where he intended to cross has become the epicenter of the raging battle over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. One clear consequence of the tightening American border and the growing perils getting there is that more and more desperate families are turning to increasingly sophisticated smuggling operations to get relatives into the United States.
Mr. Cruz’s story provides an unusually detailed anatomy of the price of the journey. The money paid for a network of drivers who concealed him in tractor-trailers and minibuses, a series of houses where he hid out, handlers tied to criminal organizations who arranged his passage, and bribes for Mexican police officers to look the other way as he passed.
Even with his family’s payment, he slept amid filth and vermin. He watched guides abandon some migrants who could not keep up, and guards prod others to become drug mules. Sometimes the smugglers identified him by a numeric code, other times by an assumed name. But as often as not, they simply called him “the package,” to be moved for profit like an illicit good.
For Mr. Cruz, it was worth it. “They can build as many walls as they want,” he said, referring to American officials. “They can send as many soldiers to the border as they want, but a people’s need and desire for a better life is stronger.”
President Trump and his supporters have called for greater vigilance along the border to keep out people like Mr. Cruz, a low-skilled worker who followed in the path of other family members who also arrived illegally, and who hopes those left behind will join him.
Pledging to halt illegal immigration, Mr. Trump has pushed for a 1,000-mile wall, ordered National Guard units to the border and encouraged workplace roundups of undocumented immigrants, which had largely been curtailed during the Obama years.
But as the number of Central Americans arriving at the southern border or sneaking across it has surged in recent months, the administration has embraced even tougher measures: “zero tolerance” for those arriving illegally, by requiring criminal prosecutions; family separation, a policy from which Mr. Trump was forced to retreat after images of children wailing for their parents provoked a public outcry; and eliminating domestic violence and gang violence as grounds for granting asylum to migrants who arrived at legal crossing points.
(Continues)
Here’s a new twist on the old sob story genre: instead of an illegal alien whining about America defending its sovereignty, the subject is immigration judge Robert Brack who gripes about separating families, as headlined on Saturday’s Los Angeles Times front page:
Wait, who’s separating families? What about the perps who choose to break US law with the purpose of stealing American jobs?
Even if illegals don’t directly rip off the employment of a US citizen, the presence of millions of foreigners drives down wages overall, as we know from the principle of supply and demand. As immigration George Borjas reported in “Immigration and the American Worker,” a 2013 CIS paper, “An increase in the number of workers leads to lower wages.”
Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime, and American workers are the ones who suffer. Any illegal who is working at a US job has committed theft, and should be locked up.
Brack complains long and loud about sentencing illegal aliens, but he soldiers on, perhaps because of receiving a generous paycheck of $201,100 a year as a federal judge from the taxpayers.
Below, the man whom the Christian Science Monitor called “America’s busiest judge.” in 2014.
The article was also printed in the San Diego paper:
Crackdown on immigrants takes a toll on federal judge: ‘I have presided over a process that destroys families’, San Diego Union-Tribune, May 24, 2018
Day in, day out, immigrants shuffle into Judge Robert Brack’s courtroom, shackled at the wrist and ankle, to be sentenced for the crime of crossing the border.
The judge hands down sentences with a heavy heart. Since he joined the federal bench in 2003, Brack has sentenced some 15,000 defendants, the vast majority of them immigrants with little or no criminal record.
“See, I have presided over a process that destroys families for a long time, and I am weary of it,” said Brack one day in his chambers in Las Cruces. “And I think we as a country are better than this.”
Brack’s court in rural southern New Mexico is swollen with immigration cases, the migrants brought to his courtroom by the dozen. They exchange guilty pleas for “time served” sentences, usually not more than two months on the first or second offense. They leave his court as felons.
For years, federal authorities in this area along the New Mexico border have taken a distinctively hard-line approach to enforcing immigration law, pursuing criminal charges rather than handling cases administratively. Essentially, authorities here have already been carrying out the “zero tolerance” policy Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions unveiled in April, when he announced that all immigrants who cross the border will be charged with a crime.
Together, the Border Patrol and U.S. attorney’s office in New Mexico bring charges against nearly every eligible adult migrant apprehended at the state’s border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That amounted to 4,190 prosecutions last fiscal year.
Vigorous enforcement in New Mexico is a result of ample bed space in the state’s border county jails and a “fast-track” system that prosecutes nonviolent migrants quickly. The state also doesn’t face the volume of illegal crossings that south Texas does, for example.
“It is an efficient process,” says U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico John Anderson. “That is one of the key features that allows us to implement 100% prosecutions.”
For Judge Brack, it’s a punishing routine. And it has been building for a long time. Back in 2010, the judge had been on the federal bench seven years, his docket overloaded with immigration cases, when “at some point I just snapped,” he said.
He sat down to compose a letter to President Obama to call for a more compassionate approach to immigration, one that would keep families together and acknowledge that the demands of the labor market drive immigration:
I write today because my experience of the immigration issue, in some 8,500 cases, is consistently at odds with what the media reports and, therefore, what many believe.
I have learned why people come, how and when they come, and what their expectations are. The people that I see are, for the most part, hardworking, gentle, uneducated and completely lacking in criminal history. Just simple people looking for work.
(Continues)
If there’s one thing America doesn’t need, it’s millions of additional uneducated foreigners. Judge Brack must believe in the idea of America as a flophouse that exists for the betterment of the Third World, rather than a nation that protects its law-abiding citizens. Importantly, the tech future of employment requires a well educated workforce, not Hondurans with a fifth-grade education.
Anyway, on a planet where the population is approaching eight billion persons, the dissatisfied of the world need to stay home and fix their own countries.
The Los Angeles Times fills a lot of its prime front page acreage with illegal alien sob stories — do the editors think non-English-speakers will like the pictures, or are the news honchos appealing to liberals and their open-borders values?
But Thursday’s sob story had a happy ending, where unhappy deportees are being hired by a Mexico City barbecue joint run by an American friendly to their situation. It seems some Mexicans loved the US so much that they broke into it — somehow missing the “nation of laws” idea — and now that they are deported back to Mexico, they miss US dollars and culture. But a few have found a comfy safe space.
Dan Defossey, the owner of the barbecue restaurant, thinks President Trump is a meanie for enforcing America’s immigration laws, and he hires deported Mexicans to fight back. Mexico is a good place for Defossey since he dislikes American law and sovereignty so much. And is he unaware that Mexico is a strong defender of its own southern border?
Illegal immigration is theft, where foreigners break into our national home to take things that don’t belong to them, like jobs, education and government benefits. Anyway, Mexico is rich (#16 in world GDP) and could be fixed up if its citizens cared enough to bother.
This Mexico City restaurant is rescuing deportees with jobs and Texas barbecue, Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2018
In the days after his deportation, Victor Cruz Ortega wandered the crowded streets of Mexico City in an escalating panic.
His kids, his job and every other fiber of life were back in Redondo Beach, the sun-soaked California community he called home for three decades. Now he was alone and penniless in a teeming Latin American metropolis he had not seen since leaving for the United States at age 11.
Cruz, 45, applied for every job that he saw advertised: cook, hotel worker, tour guide. At times, he broke down crying in public. He tried to give himself pep talks. He prayed. And then, finally, after months of looking, an unforeseen blessing arrived, and in a most unlikely form.
Cruz was rescued by Texas-style barbecue.
This month, he started working as prep cook at Pinche Gringo, a popular Mexico City barbecue joint whose American proprietor has made a special effort to hire deportees and other Mexicans who have returned after long stints north of the border. Owner Dan Defossey says it’s his answer to President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, which last year resulted in the deportation of more than 11,000 Mexicans each month.
“That’s our government. I feel responsible for it,” said Defossey, a native New Yorker who fell in love with barbecue — and the border — while teaching high school in South Texas.
“You ask yourself, ‘What can I do?'”
Seven of Defossey’s 50 employees were either deported to Mexico or came back for personal reasons. They are part of a growing influx of returning citizens who have struggled to reintegrate into Mexican society, a vulnerable population that Mexican officials have been slow to acknowledge and assist.
Set apart by their American accents and clothing style, and unaccustomed to the much lower wages, many returnees view Mexico as a kind of exile. Pinche Gringo, with its live country music, English-language comedy nights and icy bottles of Michelob and Budweiser, offers its workers a slice of Americana that many sorely miss.
(Continues)
Thursday’s San Jose Mercury News featured a front-page sob story, a genre that seems to be appearing more frequently for some odd reason.
There’s a drunk-driving, three-times-deported illegal alien father who has a citizen wife and three US kids: they’re deciding what to do now that daddy is facing a free ride back to Mexico via Uncle Sam. The hispanic mom Lourdes Barraza says, “There’s no way I could take my daughters to Mexico,” a country she “fears.” So why did she hook up with an illegal alien Mexican? Did she think Obama would be President For Life?
So Lourdes is considering lucky Canada as the family’s next squat. However, while illegal alien pests may imagine a snowy but warm welcome with lots of free stuff up north, the rescue impulse toward foreign moochers is wearing thin among the Canadian citizenry.
A Forbes article from March 20, 2017, Illegal Immigrants May Not Find Warm Welcome in Canada, cited a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 48 percent of Canadian respondents thought the recent border crossers should be sent back.
So perhaps Lourdes should reconsider Mexico. Not everywhere is a crime hotspot, and the kiddies can absorb lots of Mexican diversity which we have been told is superior to our American culture.
Fearing deportation, one San Jose family looks to Canada, San Jose Mercury News, March 28, 2018
SAN JOSE — If her husband is deported, Lourdes Barraza is set on moving the entire family — to Canada. She can’t bear the thought of moving their girls to his native Mexico, a place she fears.
With a judge’s decision imminent on her husband Fernando Carrillo’s immigration case, Barraza wonders if she and her three daughters, all U.S. citizens, will have to leave the only country they’ve known to be with him.
But would Canada accept them?
The family is part of a wave of people — concerned about an uncertain future in the U.S. under the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy — who are looking for refuge in other countries, especially Canada, flooding its border in staggering numbers with the hope of starting fresh.
But Canadian immigration officials — overwhelmed by the need for resources and an unprecedented backlog of asylum requests — are pumping the brakes and in recent months have warned people to think twice before rushing to cross the northern border.
“There’s no way I could take my daughters to Mexico,” said Barraza, 37, whose husband was arrested by immigration officers in October after dropping off one of their daughters at her San Jose daycare. “If it was just me and Fernando, we could go and start anywhere. But we’re talking about taking our kids out of the country that they were born in and that they’ve known. That’s my anxiety more than anything as a mother.”
So Barraza is prepared to leave San Jose and apply for permanent residency in Victoria, British Columbia, a place they only know through online searches as a safe, picturesque, affordable city with good schools on Canada’s Pacific coast.
In 2017, Canadian officials processed a total of 50,400 asylum claims, compared with 24,000 claims in 2016 and 16,100 in 2015, according to data from the Canadian government. By February of this year, officials had processed nearly 8,000 claims.
“It’s a massive increase of individuals seeking asylum in Canada since the start of Trump’s administration,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington, D.C.. “It’s a lot more about the rhetoric of the (Trump) administration than it is about its policy.”
Still, getting asylum in Canada is far from a guarantee, Pierce said.
People fleeing war and persecution in their home countries often look for safe haven in the U.S. and Canada and file for asylum. The Canadian government grants this protection to people who would be in significant danger — of torture or murder, for example — if they had to return home. But proving that is difficult, especially for Mexicans, who can’t always show they’re in grave danger if they return to Mexico.
Barraza said she doesn’t want her daughters exposed to corruption and violence in Mexico, which experienced a record high murder rate in 2017. But the family isn’t seeking asylum in Canada, just a chance to apply for permanent residency. In that case, potential immigrants must show they have certain professional skills that would make them assets to Canada’s economy, according to Rudolf Kischer, an immigration lawyer in Vancouver.
Carrillo — a cable TV installer with a drunken-driving conviction and prior deportations on his record — complicates things, he said, because Canada generally isn’t welcoming of people who were in the U.S. illegally.
Most U.S. expats who file asylum claims or who apply for residency in Canada face an uphill battle. “The unfortunate thing is I think a lot of those people are misinformed,” Kischer said.
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Illegal immigration sob stories remain a popular genre for the mainstream press — they are easy to write and have built-in pathos. The young DACA illegals bring appealing victim stories, as long as the scribbler chooses carefully and avoids any embarrassing criminals. (CIS reported in January that 500 DACA criminals and gang members were still at large — best they go unmentioned to create a sensitive sob story.)
But before you get too pulled in to the narrative, remember that the DACAs have mooched expensive American educations and, if working, they have stolen US jobs that belong to citizens by law. Illegal immigration is theft.
The San Jose Mercury put a DACA sniffler on its front page on March 9 — complete with cute pets!
Fernando Hernandez, the man pictured, is 28, so he’s not a kid as the media often portray DACAs. But for an adult, he does seem more anxious than necessary. For example, he wonders whether he can take his car with him if he is deported, even though he is still making payments on it.
Why doesn’t Hernandez call some leftist immigration organization and ask? La Raza et al have plenty of expert lawyers who know the ropes of how to manage the system and screw American sovereignty.
Stuck in limbo, DACA recipients are consumed with fear and anxiety, San Jose Mercury News, March 9, 2018
The anxiety keeps coming in waves.
And right now, for Fernando Hernandez and the hundreds of thousands of young DACA recipients whose fate lies in the hands of a polarized Congress and a mercurial president, the despair is crashing in.
“It’s been weighing down on me,” said Hernandez, 28, of Santa Clara, whose mother crossed the border illegally with him when he was 5 and who now works as a lab technician at an LED company. “It feels like I don’t have an identity anymore, like I’m somebody’s plaything, somebody’s bargaining chip.”
As the latest deadlines to salvage the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program passed with no action this month — and U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions announced the Trump Administration is suing California over its sanctuary laws — the chronic sense of foreboding among immigrants across the Bay Area is taking its emotional toll. DACA recipients — who must renew their applications every two years — are allowed to obtain work permits, social security cards and driver’s licenses without fear of deportation. But if Congress doesn’t act by the time their DACA permits expire, will these young people be deported to the countries they barely remember?
Mental health experts and advocates say the fears and uncertainties plaguing undocumented immigrants and their families are causing “toxic stress” that can have long-term health effects, including problems sleeping and eating, headaches, vomiting, depression and anxiety.
“What we’ve seen in the past six to eight months has ruined people’s lives because of the uncertainty,” said Mayra Alvarez, president of the Children’s Partnership, a nonprofit children’s advocacy organization based in Los Angeles. “It’s this constant struggle of not knowing what the future is going to hold and that daily stress that impacts your well being.”
For Hernandez, those fears manifest in questions big and small, from the trajectory of his future, to the fate of his two dogs, Ellie and Chewy, and to the 2013 black Honda Civic he bought and is still making payments on.
“I have no clue what they would do. Would I still have to pay this vehicle off even if I couldn’t use it? Could I take it with me? I don’t know. Would they come knocking on my door, putting me in detainment facilities, put me on a plane and have someone else take care of my stuff? Would they round everyone up?” Hernandez asked. “I would be afraid of losing everything, losing my friends, having to start over again in a place I barely know. I can still speak Spanish, but as far as living a life there, it wouldn’t be mine.”
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