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There’s nothing like a tearful sob story to get attention, even at the highest echelons of power. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) swung into action after recently reading in the press that some Mexicans were being deported from her state:
Feinstein criticizes Trump over deportation that splits Oakland family, San Francisco Chronicle, August 10, 2017
Sen. Dianne Feinstein called Thursday for the federal government to reverse the deportation of an Oakland nurse and her husband, saying their removal after more than two decades in the country revealed the “cruel and arbitrary nature” of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Responding to a front-page Chronicle story about Maria Mendoza-Sanchez and Eusebio Sanchez — who plan to depart for Mexico on Tuesday with their 12-year-old son to start a new life, while leaving behind three older daughters who have legal status — Feinstein went to the family’s home for an afternoon meeting to discuss their plight. . .
Senator Feinstein visited the family and discussed the case with the press.
The California senator even had a supportive kiss for Maria Sanchez, the Mexican illegal alien!
Funny, I don’t recall seeing Senator Feinstein reach out to families of crime victims of illegal aliens, like Kate Steinle’s heartbroken parents or the remaining members of the Bologna family after three were murdered by a Mexican gangster. And all four of these victims of illegal aliens were killed in Feinstein’s home city of San Francisco where she was once mayor.
When speaking to the press at the Sanchez house, Feinstein remarked, “This is a mistake, this shouldn’t happen. I mean, go after the gang bangers, go after the criminals: leave the law-abiding good people who are adding to our economy, whose children are productive, they’re all going to school, they’re all going to give back to society.”
Does Feinstein not understand that illegal immigration is against the law and harms citizens whose jobs the aliens steal? She plans to introduce a private bill in the Senate to lift the deportation order.
Here’s a news report from ABC in San Francisco:
Feinstein even issued a press release to illustrate her concern. When was the last time she went to bat to protect an American??
Washington—Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the following statement on the case of the Sanchez family as detailed in the San Francisco Chronicle:
“The cruel and arbitrary nature of President Trump’s immigration enforcement policies is captured in the heartbreaking story of the Sanchez family.
“Maria and Eusebio Sanchez have lived in this country for more than 20 years. They are hardworking parents raising four children, three citizens and one protected by DACA. They have no criminal records. They pay taxes, own their home and contribute to this country. These are the kind of people we should welcome into the United States with open arms.
“Instead, the family has been notified that they must leave the country by Tuesday.
“Tearing this family apart doesn’t make anyone safer, it only places incredible hardship on their three children who will remain behind, forced to navigate their lives without their parents.
“This case exemplifies that it’s nearly impossible for undocumented immigrants to get right with the law when they want to do so. The Sanchez family has tried for two decades to obtain legal status.
“The deportation of Maria and Eusebio would be a loss for the Oakland community. The equities of their case should be given full consideration so that this family has an opportunity to stay together.”
The latest illegal alien horror is one of a series of preventable crimes in sanctuary cities that liberal communities allow to happen because they would rather protect law-breaking foreigners than innocent American citizens. Such is the twisted virtue of liberals.
Jesse Watters gave a brief rundown of the crime details from Portland:
JESSE WATTERS: The vicious consequences of illegal immigration — that is the subject of tonight’s Watters’ Word. Viewer warning: what I’m about to tell you is highly disturbing and will make you angry. Thirty-one-year-old Mexican national Sergio Jose Martinez has been on a path of destruction in Portland, Oregon, a notorious sanctuary city.
Martinez has been arrested 13 times since 2008 in Oregon alone. His rap sheet includes car theft, hit-and-run, criminal trespassing, meth possession, reckless endangerment, burglary and shoplifting. He has criminal convictions in California too, including burglary, battery, theft and obstructing a police officer. The man is described as a transient with a daily meth habit. He has been deported — you ready? — 20 times with at least five probation violations from re-entering.
Despite a rap sheet this troubling, Martinez was still waltzing around Northeast Portland on July 24th. This is when his latest crime spree began. Here are the sickening allegations: Martinez, armed with a knife, entered a woman’s home through an open window, used scarves and socks to blindfold her, gag her and tie her up before sexually assaulting her, punching her and slamming her head into the wood floor.
Martinez then stole her car in search of a new victim. Then he waited in a dark corner of a parking garage as a woman approached. He threatened to kill her and forced her into her car at knifepoint. The woman tried to escape, but he tackled her and slammed her head into the ground. Once she screamed, Martinez ran, and was caught by police, carrying a knife and stolen items from both victims.
Martinez was high on meth at the time of the attacks he’s been charged with 13 felonies including burglary, sodomy, sexual abuse, robbery and unlawful use of a motor vehicle. He remains in jail with bail set at more than two million dollars.
An ICE spokesman says that he is quote looking into Martinez’s cases, which tells me that Portland police haven’t even been talking to ICE. The Multnomah County Sheriff says the county is “. . .not responsible for enforcing federal immigration policy…. The Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office does not hold persons in jail based upon their immigration status.”
So apparently authorities in Portland Oregon and Multnomah county have no problem protecting monsters like this. The sheriff and the Portland mayor should explain to the victims faces why Martinez was roaming the streets. This is exactly why sanctuary city should be defunded and Kate’s Law should be the law of the land.
Even living on a pleasant, tree-lined street is no guarantee of safety in sanctuary city Portland, where serial foreign criminals are allowed to run free.
Finally, here’s the accused Mexican, Sergio Jose Martinez — can we get a real prosecutor for this case in Portland??
The Trump administration’s crackdown against the extremely violent MS-13 Salvadoran gang has been going well, with some important recent arrests. So it made sense for the president to visit Long Island on Friday, to give a speech to a largely law enforcement audience and send them well deserved accolades, as well as tout his own success.
Martha McCallum of Fox News interviewed the parents of Kayla Cuevas after the Long Island speech to talk about the murder of their daughter by MS-13 gangsters. Kayla and her friend were brutally beaten and slashed to death after Kayla got into a disagreement on social media with some gangsters who attended high school with them.
One important cause of the worsened crime was the open borders policy of President Obama, who was not mentioned by name in the Trump speech, but was noted indirectly:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: The previous administration enacted an open-door policy to illegal migrants from Central America. “Welcome in. Come in, please, please.”
As a result, MS-13 surged into the country and scoured, and just absolutely destroyed, so much in front of it. New arrivals came in and they were all made recruits of each other, and they fought with each other, and then they fought outside of each other. And it got worse and worse, and we’ve turned that back.
In the three years before I took office, more than 150,000 unaccompanied alien minors arrived at the border and were released all throughout our country into United States’ communities — at a tremendous monetary cost to local taxpayers and also a great cost to life and safety.
Nearly 4,000 from this wave were released into Suffolk County — congratulations — including seven who are now indicted for murder. You know about that.
In Washington, D.C. region, at least 42 alien minors from the border surge have been recently implicated in MS-13-related violence, including 19 charged in killings or attempted killings.
In fact, Obama knowingly admitted MS-13 gangsters among the “unaccompanied minors” who were admitted in the tens of thousands who at best only overwhelmed schools and social services, using resources that should have gone to needy citizens. But many foreign criminals knew an opportunity when they saw one, and therefore flooded in.
Not only does President Trump have to reconstruct the economy that the previous administration battered into submission, he also has to restore the rule of law so parents needn’t fear their kids getting murdered at school by criminal gangsters.
One of those present was Mary Ann Mendoza, who lost her son, Mesa Arizona Police Sergeant Brandon Mendoza (pictured below) when he was killed in a head-on collision by an illegal alien driving the wrong way on a freeway. The killer, Raul Silva-Corona, had a blood-alcohol level of .24 percent and had not been deported after earlier crimes of burglary and assault. Mary Ann Mendoza’s anger at the preventable death prompted her to write a letter to President Obama in 2014.
Tucker Carlson, a long-time friend of immigration enforcement particularly against violent criminals, invited Mendoza for a discussion on Thursday about the government’s history of passivity toward illegal alien criminals who have been killing and otherwise harming American citizens for years.
TUCKER CARLSON: The House of Representatives today voted to pass Kate’s Law, a bill that if enacted would stiffen penalties for deported illegal aliens who reenter the United States as so many do. The house also passed a bill that would cut off federal grants to sanctuary cities. Mary Ann Mendoza is the mother of Sergeant Brandon Mendoza who was a police officer killed by a previously deported illegal alien: she joins us tonight. Mary Ann, thanks for coming on. Does this bill do what you want it to do?
MARY ANN MENDOZA: It’s a beginning, and absolutely more more light needs to be shed on this problem in our country, and I think more Americans need to be educated of what’s really happening behind the scenes: politicians lie, mainstream media does not give the correct statistics of what’s happening to American citizens in our country. Continue reading this article
It’s a pleasant surprise to see the New York Times publish a decent story about the crime victims of illegal aliens on Monday’s front page. True, there’s no photo of a murdered American or the bereaved family on page 1, but it does include a fine quote from Jamiel Shaw whose son was killed by an undeported illegal alien gangster. In response to candidate Trump’s characterizing Mexicans immigrants as rapists and criminals, Shaw wanted the media to know, “I would have said they were murderers.”
During Trump’s Republican Convention, several crime victim parents spoke about their loss. Sabine Durden is pictured speaking below.
On Monday, we heard from three parents whose children were killed by illegal immigrants Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw. They are just three brave representatives of many thousands. Of all my travels in this country, nothing has affected me more deeply than the time I have spent with the mothers and fathers who have lost their children to violence spilling across our border.
These families have no special interests to represent them. There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain. Instead, my opponent wants Sanctuary Cities. But where was sanctuary for Kate Steinle? Where was Sanctuary for the children of Mary Ann, Sabine and Jamiel? Where was sanctuary for all the other Americans who have been so brutally murdered, and who have suffered so horribly?
The whole point of having legal immigration is the screening to weed out criminals, psychokillers and enemies of America. Open borders crazies prefer to ignore the deadly blowback of their obsession.
The families could reel off all the times they had called the media and written to Washington, but after all that trying, they had never heard anyone who mattered say anything like it: Most Mexican immigrants, Donald J. Trump declared in his first campaign speech, were “rapists” who were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” across the border.
Now he had come to meet them, the families of people killed by undocumented immigrants, and they wanted to tell him he was right.
One son had been struck by a truck, another shot just around the corner from home. Different causes of death, but the driver, the gunman, all the perpetrators were the same, the parents said: people who never should have been in the country in the first place.
Sitting alone with them at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in July 2015, the candidate distributed hugs as the families wept. When the campaign had called, most of them had been told only that they were going to meet with Mr. Trump. But then the group was ushered into the next room, where the campaign had invited reporters to a news conference.
It was a surprise, but no one seemed to mind. Several stepped up to endorse Mr. Trump. “He’s speaking for the dead,” said Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose teenage son was shot to death by a gang member in Los Angeles in 2008. “He’s speaking for my son.”
Mr. Shaw wanted the news media to know that Mr. Trump could have gone further when he called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals.
The bad news is that increased enforcement has not eliminated returnees. Breitbart noted (6/22), Deported MS-13 Gangsters Keep Sneaking Back Across U.S. Border. Apparently we need to build jails that are less comfy than the accommodations back in their El Salvador homeland.
The topic of today’s hearing involves the MS-13 crisis that’s growing and spreading in communities across our nation.
The atrocities of these criminals are not new. This group has existed since the 1980s, and has made a reputation for itself as a perpetrator of extreme—and often gruesome—violence. This organization has been dubbed the world’s “most dangerous gang,” and some say it could be a terrorist organization. But, you wouldn’t expect anything less from a group whose motto is “kill, rape, and control.”
Unfortunately, over the past two years, this terrifying motto has become a vicious reality for many communities across our nation. So far this year, the gang has been publicly linked to dozens of high-profile killings, rapes, and assaults across the country, from the Washington D.C. metro area to Houston, Texas. Undoubtedly, there are many more that simply haven’t been reported.
Let me give the Committee just a few examples of this group’s absolute brutality and inhumanity.
• MS-13 has been responsible for nearly 20 murders on Long Island since 2010, with victims including high-school age children as young as 16. The group is also considered responsible for an additional 32 violent acts, including 8 attempted murders.
• In January, two gang members, both of whom are unauthorized immigrants, lured a 22 year old man from New Jersey to Maryland with the promise of sex, where they butchered him and left him in the woods near Gaithersburg, MD to rot.
• In March, two MS-13 members were charged with kidnapping and sexually assaulting three teenage girls for several weeks, and eventually murdering one of them in what has been described as a “satanic ritual.”
• In March and April, a string of MS-13 murders occurred across southern Virginia, with perhaps the most graphic being the murder of 17-year-old Raymond Wood. According to reports. Wood’s body was found face down in the road, and the MS-13 suspects had cut his hands and throat before stabbing him over 16 times.
While these examples are horrifying, they are far from isolated. According to the Department of Justice, MS-13 regularly conducts gang activity in at least forty states and the District of Columbia, and their violence touches nearly every major community in America. Continue reading this article
Illegal alien crimes followed by repeated deportations and re-entries are infuriating to knowledgeable Americans who care about sovereignty and public safety. A recent case of that sort occurred last month near San Diego, where a 15-times-deported Mexican drove drunk into an American family’s car and critically injured a little boy.
A drunken driving suspect in a hit-and-run crash that severely injured a 6-year-old boy in San Ysidro over the weekend had been deported from the U.S. at least 15 times, authorities said Tuesday.
Constantino Banda-Acosta, 38, was last deported Jan. 18, with at least 14 prior cases since 2002, federal authorities said. . . .
Below, six-year-old Lennox Lake was seriously injured when a drunk illegal alien Mexican smashed his truck into the Lake car.
WILLIAM LA JEUNESSE: This guy’s record reflects policy in the last decade. It wasn’t a mistake and it explains why the new Attorney General supports Kate’s Law to impose a mandatory five-year minimum for illegal immigrants who are caught re-entering the US after being deported. So here is Constantino Banda-Acosta after a night of heavy drinking and nearly killing a family near San Diego.
So why wasn’t he in jail? Well remember with the Obama policy of prosecutorial discretion? That directed US Attorneys to only file charges against most serious criminal aliens that allowed many to stay in the US but also gave Mexicans who were deported a free pass to go home without a criminal record, and that’s what happened here. Numerous times Acosta was caught entering illegally using fake documents or sneaking over the border, and the US Attorney gave him a free pass; even after arrest for DUI domestic violence, prosecutors using their discretion refused to prosecute. That is why the new administration bill opposes sanctuary-lite policies that allow misdemeanor criminal aliens to stay in the US indefinitely.
BILL HEMMER: So what does Senator Grassley want and how would Kate’s Law prevent similar incidents, if at all, William?
ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: People who re-enter having been convicted of a crime, they get deported and they come right back. So you can’t just deport them again: they have to be punished, and that sends a message more and more that you shouldn’t come back. And if we build a wall and deport them, they’re not coming back.
LA JEUNESSE: So Democrats blocked Kate’s Law in 2015 and 16 but the same language of Kate’s Law is now resurfacing the border security bill the GOP hopes to pass this year.
Here’s some background on the illegal alien enforcement legislation now in the Congress:
Republicans are going on the offensive with “Kate’s Law,” seeking to fulfill one of President Trump’s most high-profile promises while putting Democrats on defense over illegal immigration.
During the presidential campaign, Trump highlighted the murder of 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle, who was shot by a Mexican immigrant who had unlawfully re-entered the country after being convicted of a separate crime and deported.
Now, Republicans are working on legislation to impose a mandatory five-year minimum prison sentence for immigrants who have twice been charged with illegally re-entering the country or have prior aggravated felony convictions.
Language for Kate’s Law is tucked into a border security bill that Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) are working on, according to a draft copy reviewed by The Hill.
The bill, which Senate Democrats successfully blocked in 2015 and 2016, is a priority for Trump.
A May 2 tweet from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach shows him and White House strategist Stephen Bannon standing in front of a whiteboard with Bannon’s to-do list. The words “pass ‘Kate’s law’” are visible under the header “Pledges on Immigration.” Continue reading this article
Anybody who was paying attention to Obama’s “unaccompanied minor” project to import thousands of future Democrats from Central America could see the major downside of who might be get in. Clearly the run on the open border invited gangsters to try to slip through as the Border Patrol was overwhelmed by the deluge.
It was known at the time that the minors were mostly teenaged males, not children of both genders. A Maryland sheriff testified to a House committee in 2016, “The criminal alien gang numbers are growing across the nation, and the serious crimes are increasing. There is also a direct nexus between the action on unaccompanied minors of two years ago and the increases we are seeing in gang crimes.”
The Obama administration knowingly let in at least 16 admitted MS-13 gang members who arrived at the U.S. as illegal immigrant teenagers in 2014, a top senator said Wednesday, citing internal documents that showed the teens were shipped to juvenile homes throughout the country.
Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said a whistleblower turned over Customs and Border Protection documents from 2014 detailing the 16 persons who were caught crossing the border.
“CBP apprehended them, knew they were MS-13 gang members, and they processed and disbursed them into our communities,” Mr. Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, said.
The gang members were part of the surge of UAC, or “unaccompanied alien children,” as the government labels them, who overwhelmed the Obama administration in 2014, leaving Homeland Security struggling to staunch the flow from Central America.
Officials at the time said the children should be treated as refugees fleeing horrific conditions back home — though security analysts said the children were prime recruiting territory for gangs already in the U.S.
Mr. Johnson said the image of UAC as little children is misleading. Out of nearly 200,000 UAC apprehended between from 2012 to 2016, 68 percent were ages 15, 16 or 17 — meaning older teens. The majority were also male, making them targets for gang recruiting. Continue reading this article
It’s good news from Washington that President Trump has prevailed upon some of our irresponsible world neighbors to take back their criminal citizens. The problem of deportable thugs being freed onto American streets because their homelands won’t take them has been under-reported.
In 2012 Ted Poe appeared on the House floor and discussed the murder of Lois Decker while displaying her photo, plus analyzing other crimes resulting from criminal aliens being released into American neighborhoods.
The Washington Times article below is reasonably thorough; however it could have included more details about Thong Vang, an illegal alien criminal mentioned. He had rape convictions and shot two guards according to the article, but there’s more, much more.
As I reported in Fresno Gunman Was a Violent Convicted Felon Laos Would Not Receive in Deportation, Vang and more than a dozen of his Hmong gangster pals kidnapped, forcibly confined and gang-raped three young girls, aged 12 to 14. Plus Vang was sentenced to only 19 years in prison and served 16 despite the violence of the crime, which is rather shocking in itself. He shot the two police officers last September when he reported to the Fresno County Jail as required by his parole and was behaving strangely. When an officer asked him to sit down, he pulled a gun in the crowded room and wounded the two.
Six months after the shooting, the two correctional officers were still recovering from the gunshots. They are lucky to be alive, given America’s weakness toward illegal alien criminals in recent years.
Between cajoling, threats and actual punishments, Homeland Security has managed to drastically cut the number of countries that habitually refuse to take back immigrants whom the U.S. is trying to deport, officials said Tuesday, notching an early immigration success for President Trump.
The number of recalcitrant countries has dropped from 20 to 12 over the months since the presidential election, and some longtime offenders — including Iraq and Somalia — have earned their way off the naughty list. The list of countries is the shortest this decade.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials couldn’t immediately say how many people have been deported because of the changes, but Somalia has taken back 259 just seven months into the fiscal year. That is far more than the 198 it took back in all of 2016 and the 17 it took in 2015.
Marlen Pineiro, assistant director for removal operations at ICE, said the efforts began under the Obama administration but that Mr. Trump has created a determined focus at the Homeland Security and State departments, which are both involved in speeding up deportations.
“The wind being at our wings is really driving us forward,” she said.
In many cases, that means criminals who otherwise would have been released onto the streets are now being sent to their home countries.
Recalcitrant countries have long been among the serious issues that didn’t get much attention, though the consequences can be extreme.
In one notorious case, Haiti refused to take back an illegal immigrant who had served time for attempted murder, and U.S. officials were forced to release him. He killed a young woman in Connecticut just months after his release.
Another illegal immigrant, Thong Vang, was released from prison in 2014 after serving time for rape convictions, and his home country of Laos refused to take him back. He was sent to a California prison last year and shot two guards, police said.
Armed with those kinds of cases, Mr. Trump made recalcitrant countries a part of his presidential campaign. He vowed to begin putting pressure on countries to take back their deportees.
One of his first executive orders instructed Homeland Security to take steps to pressure other countries, including potentially stopping the issuance of visas to governments that refuse to cooperate. Continue reading this article
It’s a sad end to a terrible murder: Washington DC intern Chandra Levy was murdered in 2001, and now the case seems finished. An illegal alien, MS-13 gangster Ingmar Guandique was tried and convicted in the death, but later his conviction was overturned, and today it was reported that the Salvadoran felon (who was found guilty of other violent crimes) was deported on Friday.
It was a highly publicized case, largely because 24-year-old Chandra Levy was having an affair with married Congressman Gary Condit when she disappeared, and he was the top suspect for a while. The scandal was catnip for the press since it included sex, murder, a Washington figure and a young woman. The story disappeared from the media only when it was replaced on the front pages by the 9/11 terror attacks. Condit lost his re-election because of the scandal.
Below, murder victim Chandra Levy, with Ingmar Guandique in the inset.
Illegal alien Ingmar Guandique had a previous record of violent crime, including attacking women in the park where Chandra’s body was found. He should have been deported, but wasn’t.
Chandra’s mother Susan can’t be happy with the lack of justice the family has gotten: either the real killer is on the loose somewhere or has been sent back to El Salvador to live free of prison.
Chandra Levy’s mother isn’t rock-solid sure who killed the vivacious intern from Modesto 16 years ago in Washington, D.C. But Susan Levy is satisfied that Salvadoran native Ingmar Guandique, whose murder conviction was overturned a couple of years ago, has been deported.
“Yes, he should go back,” said Susan Levy while preparing for a three-week art show opening next week in Modesto that was inspired by her daughter’s death. “I’m glad he’s not walking the streets of America attempting to hurt other women.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said that Guandique, 35, was flown Friday to El Salvador and transferred to authorities there. He was already in prison for attacks on other women in Rock Creek Park in the nation’s capital when he was charged in 2009 for the murder of Chandra Levy, whose remains were found in the same park.
Her 2001 disappearance became a national obsession when she was romantically linked to former congressman Gary Condit, whose political career ended soon after. Police in Washington at one point considered Condit a suspect, but later said they had cleared him. He broke 15 years of silence in October with a book that accuses Guandique while blaming Condit’s stunning fall from grace on bumbling investigators and a media frenzy.
A jury convicted Guandique of the slaying in 2010, but his conviction was overturned after a jailhouse informant’s testimony came under scrutiny. Continue reading this article
Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times helpfully spotlighted the terrible threat under which Mexican journalists operate. In fact, reporters who cover the organized crime beat too diligently are in serious danger of being killed by the powerful drug cartels.
America’s southern neighbor is one of the most perilous nations on earth for journalists, ranking in the top five worst, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day. The other most dangerous spots named are Turkey, North Korea, Red China and Eritrea — quite a rogue’s gallery of a club that no self-respecting nation would want to join.
The free press is under direct attack in Mexico which means any remaining shred of representative government is not exactly safe either. Mexican officials doesn’t seem very concerned about the mayhem — they have been laying low (or colluding with the bad guys) for years.
America is unlucky in geography that our 1900-mile southern border abuts such a corrupt third world hellhole. That location has resulted in Mexicans long being the most numerous of the illegal alien tribes residing in the US, peaking at 6.9 million in 2007 according to Pew.
Since 2000, 124 journalists have been killed in Mexico. Only Syria and Afghanistan surpassed Mexico in the number of journalists killed in 2016.
Isai Lara Bermudez had just started lunch at a Tijuana barbecue joint when a stranger approached his table.
“Watch out,” she warned him. “He’s after you.”
Lara, an investigative reporter, had written a series of stories in February showing evidence that the police chief of a neighboring city had tortured detainees. Now it appeared he was paying the price.
For weeks, Lara didn’t leave the house without a private bodyguard. He worried about his young daughter’s safety, and whether the cars pulling up alongside him in traffic carried gunmen out to kill him.
This is what it’s like practicing journalism in Mexico.
Journalists bold enough to report on the misdeeds of drug cartels or the government often face threats and retaliation — and increasingly pay for their work with their lives. Mexico has become the third-deadliest country in the world for journalists, leading many publications across the nation to avoid controversial topics, or to shut down entirely.
But Lara keeps reporting, along with the rest of the small, tight-knit staff at Zeta, one of Mexico’s most respected newspapers. Zeta is also one of the country’s most frequently targeted publications: Over the last three decades, as the Tijuana weekly documented government corruption and Mexico’s exploding drug war, two of its editors were killed and a third gravely wounded because of the stories they produced. Continue reading this article
For the Sob Story File: a Mexican woman illegally residing in the US fears reporting her husband’s abuse because she might get deported. Cristina had begun the process of applying for a “special visa for victims of abuse” — the U visa — but stopped because of her mistrust of the American legal system.
Just how sorry are we citizens supposed to feel for a woman who won’t avail herself of remedies offering by the US government for her situation?
The New York Times articles does mention the U visa specifically — a subject which I investigated in a 2007 Vdare.com article: Victim Visas—How America Stupidly Rewards Misfortune and Fraud. It still seems like a dumb idea for the government to offer legal visas to people whose only qualification for eventual American citizenship is being a crime victim, but that opportunity is indeed enshrined in law. If illegal aliens don’t use it, then tough.
Findlaw has a description of the goodies available for non-citizen crime victims:
If you’re the victim of domestic violence and you’re not a United States citizen or permanent resident, you may be eligible to file your own application for what is commonly called a “domestic violence green card.” Typically, green cards (permanent resident status documents) are obtained when a family member or an employer sponsors an immigrant’s application to reside in the United States on a permanent or long-term basis.
However, if you’re residing in the U.S. and suffering as a victim of domestic violence, you are able to self-petition for a green card under a provision of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). If you’re not currently residing in the U.S. but your abuser is an employee of the U.S. government or a member of the uniformed services, you can still file for your own green card if you were abused by a U.S. citizen or permanent resident while present in the United States. Finally, if you’re an illegal immigrant suffering domestic violence, you aren’t immediately eligible for the “domestic violence green card” but you can still receive protection from the government if you qualify for a special non-immigrant visa called a U visa.
Below, immigrants become naturalized American citizens, a much-desired status for illegal aliens.
A 2011 article in the Daily Mail (UK), titled The ‘crime visa’: How 18,000 illegal immigrants got legal status by being the victim of a crime, reported that at that time 14,000 of their relatives were also covered by the U visa which had an acceptance rate of 77 percent. The piece further observed, “While many immigrants may still be unaware of the U visa, word is spreading fast in some communities.”
So the U visa for non-citizen crime victims is an accepted practice, not some oddball offshoot of immigration law that doesn’t work. So why does the New York Times drone on at length about illegal aliens freaking out that they might get a free ride home to their country of citizenship? It is simply an excuse to impugn the new president as the architect of Fear among suffering foreigners. It seeks to conflate a single instance of a women being arrested by ICE “moments after she received a protective order” into a whole trend.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands have been protected by U visas. If that visa category is really so ineffective, then perhaps the government should end it as also being a bad policy from the start because it rewards foreign crime victims but there are no comparable advantages given to US citizens who have also experienced violent crime.
LOS ANGELES — Cristina’s husband had hit and threatened her repeatedly for years, she said, but it wasn’t until last year that she began to fear for the safety of her young children, too. Reluctantly, she reported him and filed a police report.
Cristina, an immigrant from Mexico who arrived in the United States as a teenager in the 1980s, began to apply for a special visa for victims of abuse that would set her on a path to citizenship and her own freedom. Then last month, she told her lawyer that she no longer wanted to apply. She was too fearful, she said, not of her husband, but of the government.
“I am scared they will find me,” Cristina, who lives in a suburb of Los Angeles, said in an interview, asking that her last name not be used.
Domestic violence has always been a notoriously difficult crime to prosecute. It often takes victims years to seek help, and they frequently have to be persuaded to testify against their assailants. And for many undocumented victims, taking that step has become exceedingly difficult because of fears that the government will detain and deport them if they press charges, according to law enforcement officials, lawyers and advocates from across the country.
Since the presidential election, there has been a sharp downturn in reports of sexual assault and domestic violence among Latinos throughout the country, and many experts attribute the decline to fears of deportation. Law enforcement officials in several large cities, including Los Angeles, Houston and Denver, say the most dangerous fallout of changes in policy and of harsh statements on immigration is that fewer immigrants are willing to go to the police.
The number of Latinos reporting rapes in Houston has fallen by more than 40 percent this year from the same period last year, Art Acevedo, chief of the Houston Police Department, said this month. The drop, he added, “looks like the beginnings of people not reporting crime.”
In Los Angeles this year, reports of domestic violence among Latinos have dropped by 10 percent and reports of sexual assault by 25 percent from a year ago, declines that Charlie Beck, the chief of the Police Department, said were likely due to fear of the federal government. Dozens of service providers and lawyers interviewed said immigrant women were deciding not to report abuse or press charges. Continue reading this article
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