Deporting illegal-alien criminals is like bailing out a boat with a hole in the bottom. They pour in as fast as Immigration and Customs Enforcement removes them.
But at least ICE hasn’t given up. Consider 37 of the latest deportations an early Christmas gift from the federal agency.
Last week, the agency removed 36 illegal Cambodians out of the more than 1,500 still in the country. Two were convicted murderers. ICE also removed a Mexican murderer.
But the data show that the agency has a lot of work to do to keep the country free of illegal-alien murderers.
Cambodians Collared and Kicked Out
The first removal operation was the more frightening. ICE offered few details about the removal of the 36 Cambodian nationals. None, for instance, was named.
But ICE did detail their criminal histories, which is worth rehearsing in detail. Thirty-four of the three dozen Khmer are hardened criminals:
Criminal convictions included two counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder, manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, accessory after the fact of a homicide, sexual assault, three counts of sexual offenses, child abuse, domestic violence, aggravated assault, aggravated assault with a weapon, aggravated robbery, two counts of assault, arson, auto theft, two counts of robbery, robbery with a gun, two weapons offenses, theft, larceny, stolen property, fraud, and five drug convictions.
As discouraging as that news is, it gets worse. Although deportations to Cambodia increased 279 percent from fiscal 2017 to 2018, ICE reported, almost 1,900 illegal-alien Cambodians who have been ordered out the country are still here. And about 1,400 of those are convicted criminals.
Mexican Murderer
The Mexican whom ICE removed proves, despite press releases from the immigration lobby, that not all the illegal aliens who cross the border are underpaid and overworked campesinos just trying to make a better life in the states.
Some, like the desperado ICE deported, have anything but hard work on their minds.
A 63-year-old named Betancourt for whom ICE did not provide a first name was wanted in Mexico for murder. ICE agents took him to Mexico on December 18 and turned him to over the Mexican police.
But he didn’t murder someone just in Mexico. He killed here, too.
“Betancourt entered the U.S. illegally near San Ysidro, California, in 1991,” ICE reported. “He was convicted of aggravated manslaughter in 1997 in New Jersey and sentenced to 25 years of incarceration.”
That should have meant imprisonment until 2022, but in any event, on October 12, prison authorities turned him over to Enforcement and Removal Operations in Newark, which then sent him to the Essex County Jail. Late last month, an immigration judge ordered him out.
ICE Data
Yet the Cambodians and Mexican are just an infinitesimal fraction of the number of illegal-alien criminals in the United States. The magnitude of the problem, the data from ICE show, is almost unfathomable.
It’s certainly out of control and probably beyond resolution without a dramatic enhancement in the power of immigration authorities to arrest and deport border jumpers.
ICE and Customs and Border Protection removed 256,085 criminal aliens in fiscal 2018. More than 1,600 of the illegals were convicted of some form of homicide, 1,294 were kidnappers, 8,715 were sex criminals, 14,257 were robbers and burglars and 8,094 were convicted of weapons offenses.
Federal authorities also issued 177,147 immigration detainers.
Beyond that, immigration courts faced a backlog of more than one million cases in fiscal 2018. Nearly 300,000 illegals received deportation orders, 4.4 percent of whom were for “alleged criminal activity.”
Photo: LKeskinen/iStock/Getty Images Plus
