If Durbin believes the remarks he made during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and Border Security on his renewed DREAM Act, the massive amnesty bill for illegal-alien children, then the requirement is no longer necessary.
A story by Terence P. Jeffrey of CNSNews.com tells the tale. The story’s accompanying video shows Durbin telling the assembled illegal aliens, whom he and other leftists consider “DREAMers,” that one of them might become the President.
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This Is Our Future
Durbin, a member of the Judiciary Committee and sponsor of the latest version of the amnesty, asked the gathering of illegals to stand and be recognized. The room was packed with the border-jumping miscreants. Durbin thanked them profusely for the great sacrifice they made to attend the hearing.
Then he became Emma Lazarus on steroids.
When I look around this room, I see America’s future. Our doctors, our teachers, our nurses, our engineers, our scientists, our soldiers, our congressman, our senators and maybe our president. I ask my colleagues to consider the plight of these young people who find themselves in a legal twilight zone through no fault of their own.
They are willing to serve the country they love. All they’re asking for is a chance. Opponents of this bill say they sympathize with Dream Act students, but they criticize the bill and offer no alternative.
Do they want these young people to leave to go back to countries where they may never have lives or don’t remember, or to continue living in the shadows and in doubt about their future? These DREAMers would happily go back to the back of any line and wait their turn for citizenship, but there is no line for them go get into.
I urge my colleagues to support the DREAM Act. It is, I think, one of the most compelling human rights issues of our time in America.
At his website, Durbin tells the hard-luck tale of Korean girl, brought here as a child, who would be forced to return to Korea “through no fault of her own.”
The DREAM Act’s real name is Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. It would, for all intents and purposes, grant amnesty to illegal-alien children if “the alien has been continuously physically present” here for five years before the Act becomes law, if the alien was 15 or younger when he stole into the country and if the alien “has been a person of good moral character since the alien initially entered the United States.”
That would cover every illegal alien child in the country. Beyond that, the bill’s “good moral character” clause permits “DREAMers” of questionable moral character to stay in the country because it excludes certain crimes from affecting an illegal’s amnesty application. In other words, Durbin’s DREAM Act is also an amnesty for illegal-alien criminals.
Illegal-alien Anarchy
As a practical matter, the DREAM Act is unnecessary because the Obama administration has enacted it without legislative approval via executive order.
John Morton, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has published a memorandum containing a list of criteria, which reflects and expands upon that contained in the DREAM Act, to give ICE agents and prosecutors discretion in deciding whom to deport.
Along with the criteria contained in the DREAM Act, Morton added a plethora of excuses that permit an ICE officer to duck his duty to deport illegals. They include whether the illegal is old or young, whether he has a relative who is an American, whether he is the “primary caretaker of a person with a mental or physical disability, minor, or seriously ill relative,” whether she is pregnant or nursing and whether he or his spouse “suffers from severe mental or physical illness.”
That covers just about every problem an illegal alien could have.
The union representing ICE employees is not happy. “Any American concerned about immigration needs to brace themselves for what’s coming,” ICE union president Chris Crane warned. He explained,
This is just one of many new ICE policies in queue aimed at stopping the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in the United States. Unable to pass its immigration agenda through legislation, the Administration is now implementing it through agency policy.
ICE agents believe “the policy is a ‘law enforcement nightmare’ developed by the Administration to win votes at the expense of sound and responsible law enforcement policy,” a union press release said.
Crane explained, "The result is a means for every person here illegally to avoid arrest or detention, as officers … will never know who we can or cannot arrest.” Crane also claims that ICE officers are “under orders not to make arrests or even talk to foreign nationals in most cases unless another agency has already arrested them; you won’t find that written in any public ICE policy.”
And agents, Crane avers, won’t get the prosecutorial discretion Morton claims:
Tell any ICE agent he or she will have the final say on making an arrest or holding someone in custody and they’ll tell you you’re crazy. Officers will be ordered not to make arrests and failure to comply will result in the end of the agent or officer’s career[;] that’s business as usual at ICE. It’s unfortunate but the Administration protects foreign nationals illegally in the U.S. but does nothing for our employees.
Weeks before Morton issued his memorandum, he and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said the DREAM Act is now law because ICE will not deport illegals who do not commit heinous crimes. Thing is, ICE often won’t deport illegal aliens who do commit heinous crimes.
Speaking at a confabulation of leftists earlier this year, Napolitano said that if illegals “truly meet [DREAM Act criteria], they’re not the priority." Said Morton, “If you take a look at the record, people that fit within the confines of the Dream Act, there are in fact very, very few deportations of those kinds of individuals.” Napolitano and Morton, acting under authority from President Barack Obama, are merely continuing long established federal immigration policy.
As for Senator Durbin, while he thanked the illegals for the great “sacrifice” they made to be there, he did not thank American taxpayers for the sacrifice they have made educating, doctoring, and jailing the many illegals who did not attend the hearing.
The hearing on Durbin’s renewed amnesty bill proves the DREAM Act is unnecessary. A room in the Hart Senate Office Building was packed with illegals. Top officials of the U.S. government, including elected officials who swore on a Bible to uphold the Constitution and the nation’s law, witnessed them breaking the law.
Yet the law-enforcement authorities in the room — the Capitol police who bill themselves as “protecting democracy’s greatest symbol” — did not arrest one illegal alien for deportation.
Photo of Dick Durbin: AP Images
