Onyango Obama is the second of the President’s ubiquitous African kinsmen to have entered the country illegally and gotten away with it.
The one good thing in the story about the President’s uncle is that he didn’t kill anyone, unlike many other illegal aliens, as the The New American has amply documented.
"Sufficient Evidence"
Onyango Obama, the President’s father’s half-brother, admitted in Framingham (Mass.) Circuit Court that prosecutors had “sufficient evidence” to convict him. But such an admission is not a guilty plea. It merely means the defendant knows he won’t win the case if he attempts to fight the charges in front of judge, jury, or both.
Despite the elder Obama’s disregard for American immigration law and run-ins with the police, the judge was lenient.
According to the Associated Press, the “judge continued the case for one year without a finding, meaning that if he does not get arrested during that time, the charge will be dismissed. A judge also ordered him to attend a driver alcohol education program.”
On Tuesday, the judge ordered him to give up his driver’s license for 45 days. But his lawyer said he will apply for a hardship license to allow him to drive to and from his job as the manager of a liquor store in Framingham. Two other traffic violations were dismissed.
“He felt it was in his best interest to put this behind him,” said his attorney, P. Scott Bratton. “He wants to return to his normal, quiet existence in society.”
Part of that “quiet existence,” of course, has been evading a deportation order for two decades, something the authorities don’t care much about.
Drunken Motorist
Police arrested Onyango in late August last year. According to the Boston Globe, officers “said the car he was driving darted in front of a police cruiser, nearly causing the officer to hit his car.” Before that, the Globe reported, he had lived a “quiet life” in the Bay State.
Uncle Onyango’s blood alcohol level at his arrest was 0.14, nearly twice the legal limit in Massachusetts. A man of Obama’s size, 175 pounds, needs to consume a half-dozen drinks in an hour to get that inebriated.
Yet “quiet” life is a relative term. He somehow obtained a Social Security card in 1992, which in turn paved the way for him to procure a driver’s licence, the Metro West Daily reported at the time.
In 1994, thugs beat and robbed him. As well, he sold alcohol to minors, the newspaper reported.
[In 2010], police conducted a sting by sending an underage man into the store to buy liquor. Obama sold the 19-year-old man alcohol without asking for an ID, police said. The store lost its license for three days.
In 2006, Obama also sold alcohol to two underage men using fake IDs, police said.
After the latest arrest, Obama said, “I think I’d like to call the White House.” Presumably, he thought his nephew at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. would pull some strings.
No Deportation
Apparently, handling the Obama case left immigration authorities confused. After last year’s arrest, they locked him up at a federal detention facility. But as the Globe reported, they “refused to say whether the 67-year-old Framingham resident posted bond, whether they are keeping track of his whereabouts, or even whether they are still seeking his deportation, raising questions about public accountability in the case.”
He has not, of course, been deported.
Another relative of the President, his Aunt Zeituni, also simply ignored the law. She was revealed in a television interview as having lived for years in the country illegally, costing the Massachusetts taxpayers thousands of dollars for her public housing and disability checks, even after having been asked twice to leave the country. She instead hired a lawyer who persuaded a judge to grant her “political asylum.”
Obama’s Amnesty
It wouldn’t much matter, it turns out, whether these two Kenyan illegal immigrants are the President’s relatives or not. That’s because their nephew unilaterally declared an amnesty for illegals when he stopped the deportation of 300,000 illegals last year.
That move came after John Morton, the Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, issued a memorandum giving ICE personnel “prosecutorial discretion” in deportation cases. Morton published a long list of criteria the agents can use to determine if an illegal alien can stay in the country.
Morton’s lengthy list includes the illegal’s length of residency here, the age at which he crossed the border illegally, his educational achievements, whether he or any relatives serve in the military, whether he is sick or crazy or cares for a sick relative. Pregnancy is another escape from deportation.
The person’s ties to the community can be considered, as can their ties, or lack thereof, to their home country. The memo says grave concern must be expressed for elderly or youthful illegals. And agents might also consider whether immigration authorities will permit the person stay.
In effect, Morton’s list expanded and codified the list of criteria leftist legislators put in the DREAM Act, the proposed amnesty that failed in the U.S. Senate in December 2010. Although the measure failed, Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has repeatedly said the administration has, for all intents and purposes, declared the failed measure a law simply by refusing to deport illegals and applying DREAM criteria to do so.
Napolitano claims that her deputies at ICE want to focus on “criminal” illegals.
Obama made that usurpation of legislative authority official when he ordered a halt to the 300,000 deportation cases.
Police Lucky
The upshot is that the President’s aunt and uncle fit nearly all the criteria in the DREAM Act, as well as Morton’s elongated list. ICE would not have deported them even if they hadn’t been related to the President.
That said, given the record of illegal aliens, alcohol, and driving, the police that Onyango Obama nearly hit were lucky.
Just four days before his arrest, police in Milford, Massachusetts, collared Nicolas Guaman, an illegal Ecuadorian. As The New American reported at the time, officers charged Guaman with vehicular homicide for killing 23-year-old motorcyclist Matthew Denice. In October, a grand jury indicted him for second-degree murder. Guaman pleaded not guilty.
Citing police, the Milford Daily News reported that Guaman dragged Denice a quarter-mile before Denice’s body “was dislodged from under Guaman’s truck when he ran off the road,” after which “Guaman backed up over Denice and drove off.”
Guaman is another illegal who, like Obama, repeatedly crossed paths with the police, and not peacefully. Officers knew him as a violent thug convicted of assaulting a policeman and firefighter. Yet he too was never deported. That is why Matthew Denice is dead.
As with their apparent insouciance concerning the President’s uncle, immigration authorities didn’t much care about the Guaman case. A key witness in the case, an illegal Ecuadorian in the car with Guaman when Denice was killed, fled the country after immigration officials fitted him with a global positioning device and released him. Police did not learn of his escape until he failed to show up to testify at a grand jury hearing about Guaman. Milford law enforcement officers were dumbfounded.
Federal immigration authorities flatly stated they didn’t much care whether a witness to the vehicular murder of an American citizen disappears.
Photo of Onyango Obama: AP Images
