Burning Atlanta

There is NOTHING that pisses me off worse than reading story after story of an American citizen getting killed or seriously injured by an illegal alien that had been arrested previously, but nobody checked his status and had him/her deported. There is NO excuse.

I've heard all the BS excuses a million times. "Oh, it's a federal matter, we don't want to get involved." We don't have the manpower and can't afford the additional cost. But immigrants will be afraid to report crimes..." Go to hell. These slime do not care how many people get killed as long as they can avoid a political hot potato or pass the potato to somebody else.

EVERY jail. No excuses.

Even as the Golden State reels under a massive budget crisis fueled in part by a burgeoning prison population, there are tens of thousands of criminal aliens serving time on California’s dime.

Exactly how many are there? No one knows for sure.

Gordon Hinkle, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the department does not know how many illegal immigrants are housed in the state’s prisons. They don’t ask inmates whether they are undocumented.

They do ask new prisoners what country they were born in, Hinkle said, but they don’t concern themselves specifically with the immigration status of convicts.

The situation is similar at the local level.

“We have no idea how many of our inmates are undocumented,” said Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, which operates the county’s jail facilities.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, often referred to as ICE, was established in March 2003 as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security.

“The priority for us ... are state prisons,” said Erik Bonnar, the assistant field office director for removal efforts in Kern County.

“We screen everyone who goes through” the state prison system, he said.

But Bonnar also supervises two full-time employees who screen inmates in Kern County’s local jail system. The work in coordination with the sheriff’s department.

“They’re doing about 10 interviews a day,” Bonnar said. “We’re not getting 100 percent of aliens that pass through Kern County jails, but we’re getting the worst of the worst.” GET THEM ALL.

When a Lamont man with three prior drunken driving convictions was sentenced in April to 19 years to life in prison for climbing behind the wheel of a mini-van while drunk and slamming head-on into a car driven by a mother of two, the attorney who helped convict him said he didn’t know whether or not the defendant, Esteban Demecio Hernandez, was legal or not.

Hernandez’s probation report shows he is a citizen of Mexico and that he has had a Border Patrol hold placed on him at some time.

But nowhere in the report does it define his immigration status.

When immigrants become criminals

Nationwide, ICE charged more than 164,000 convicted criminals with immigration violations last year.

Of those, approximately 95,000 immigrants with criminal histories were deported.

But that’s only a fraction of the total. The agency estimates that 300,000 to 450,000 convicted criminal aliens who are deportable are detained each year at federal, state and local prisons and jails.

ICE doesn’t break out statistics specific to Kern County, but in fiscal year 2007, the agency took action against more than 18,000 criminal aliens in Northern California, including Kern County.

This fiscal year, those numbers are on track to significantly surpass last year’s, said ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement