We are told everything illegal aliens want to do in our country is completely legal and they are entitled to all citizen rights, including citizenship for children. On the other hand, everything our law enforcement wants to do to enforce the law against them is somehow held illegal.
We are having a national debate over the effectiveness of a border wall, but we should first have a debate over whether we have a border at all. Judges are creating new constitutional rights for illegal immigrants to invade at breakneck speed, rendering our constitutional protections essentially binding on the entire globe. Nothing should surprise us any more, but the latest story of an El Salvadoran illegal immigrant from Frederick, Maryland, should jolt us all out of our slumber.
Roxana Orellana Santos is an illegal alien from El Salvador who had no right to come to this country in 2005 and no right to remain in this country against the will of the people as expressed through long-standing statute. Pursuant to our laws, Santos was detained by Border Patrol when she broke into our country in Texas and then failed to appear for an immigration hearing. In 2007, an immigration judge issued an order to deport her.
A year into her fugitive life, Frederick cops informally questioned her outside a restaurant on October 7, 2008, after they thought she was running away from them. Upon receiving information from ICE through dispatch that she was here illegally, and then acting on an outstanding immigration warrant from ICE, Frederick sheriff’s deputies arrested Santos as part of their lawful cooperation with the federal government to help apprehend illegal aliens through the 287(g) program, under 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g). It’s part of a law that passed the Senate unanimously in 1996. Frederick is one of the few jurisdictions in Maryland that participates in this program. It has experienced a growth of MS-13 and other criminal activity in this once-serene small city in picturesque western Maryland.
In a sane country, this would have been the end of the story. Santos should have been deported, pursuant to every statute on the books. But Santos, backed by an army of lawyers from the organization CASA de Maryland, sued the Frederick sheriff for what she felt was an illegal search and seizure and the county commissioners for agreeing to operate under 287(g). After endless motions while remained in the country, the district court rebuffed her claim in 2012, but the arch-liberal Fourth Circuit sided with her a year later. The court created a new right for illegals not to be apprehended by local law enforcement because of their immigration status. Last September, District Judge Catherine Blake ruled that Sheriff Jenkins could be held liable in a civil suit for the acts of his deputies. This allows Santos to proceed with a suit for civil damages. Her attorneys are seeking to milk this small county for $1 million in damages! None of us can sue her for sucking up our resources.
It’s bad enough that illegal immigrants get to break into our country, steal American citizenship from us for their kids (Santos has three American-born kids, erroneously regarded as Americans), and sue law enforcement for following our sovereignty laws. But at least she can now be deported, right?
Well, ICE did apprehend her, but Judge Catherine Blake issued a temporary restraining order against her deportation. The rationale? Santos is now entitled to finish out her lawsuit against our own sheriff’s deputies, thereby blocking her deportation.
As a Maryland resident, I must say it’s an outrage that someone can break into my state, sue those who protect us for following all the immigration and criminal justice statutes, and then use that lawsuit to nullify the most foundational federal immigration law to remain here illegally!
Santos has been allowed to remain in the country for a decade of endless litigation, and now there is no doubt the courts will delay the deportation indefinitely with other lawsuits. It’s bad enough that, in our litigious culture, American criminals get away with crime because of the broken legal profession. Are we really going to extend this legal circus to illegal aliens?
As Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, who has studied 287(g) arrests for years, lamented, “This woman originally was arrested more than a decade ago after she fled from sheriff’s deputies, knowing that she was a fugitive from immigration authorities and knowing that she had flagrantly broken our immigration laws and shown contempt for the generous due process she was given.”
Yet she is now able to use the lawsuit game to buy herself even more time.
As Justice Thomas said in Arizona v. U.S. (2010), “States, as sovereigns, have inherent authority to conduct arrests for violations of federal law, unless and until Congress removes that authority.” There is nothing in federal statute that prohibits local law enforcement from inquiring about immigration status. Indeed, it is preposterous for anyone to assert that local law enforcement can’t arrest someone who must be deported by federal law. Quite the contrary: 8 U. S. C. §1644 unambiguously says that “no State or local government entity may be prohibited, or in any way restricted, from sending to or receiving from” federal immigration officials “information regarding the immigration status” of a foreign national. And of course, §1373(c) says that ICE “shall respond to an inquiry by a Federal, State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency.”
That is exactly what both Frederick officials and ICE did here. Yet, 10 years later, the law has been flipped upside-down and inside-out. States can’t enforce the law, feds can’t enforce the law, and judges can nullify any law.
“Even if her original arrest was unlawful (it wasn’t), she is still deportable because she has absolutely no basis to remain in the United States,” noted Vaughan. “Because the extra time here that she bought herself with the earlier lawsuit is now up, Roxana and her legal team are now suing the good sheriff’s office and ICE just to buy more time. If she ever wants to be a legal immigrant, what she ought to do is return home and wait her turn to try to qualify as a parent of a U.S. citizen born here during the long stay we allowed her. Predatory lawsuits like this damage our system by rewarding improper behavior and they inevitably lead to more baseless lawsuits.”
And who are these people agitating lawsuits and rallies? Groups like CASA de Maryland, which get Maryland taxpayer funding. Their advocacy for illegal aliens has crossed over into aiding and abetting, inducing illegal immigration, and transporting illegal aliens, all violations of various subsections of §1324. But it is we and our police officers who are violating the law, according to these fake judges.
If your blood is not already boiling, the final disgrace to ponder here is the fact that the more illegal aliens are illegally given standing to sue our governments and illegally remain in the country, the more time they have to have babies and further allow “crime to pay.” This woman now has several U.S.-born children. Not only is the Constitution clear, contrary to administrative fiat, that one must be here with permission of the government to enjoy citizenship, our laws are clear that she should have been deported 10 years ago. Now, her husband came here illegally and is, of course, seeking asylum.
We the people have no say in who comes here, contrary to our laws. It is the ultimate violation of the foundational principle of governance by the consent of the governed, as established in the Declaration of Independence.
As we continue to debate the wall, let’s not forget that no wall can save us from this national suicide of judicial lawfare. Our laws aren’t broken. They are written properly. The case law for over 100 years was abundantly clear. Our contemporary judges and politicians are broken. The politicians are allowing unelected judges and lawless groups that abet fugitives to accomplish a degree of judicial amnesty that liberals have failed to accomplish in the legislature for two generations.
Sadly, there is no way to better construct laws that will be clearer than they already are if we are going to allow judges to destroy us from within the confines of our border – wall around it or not. And if the judicial amnesty doesn’t stop, with the intensifying flow of people coming to take advantage of us, we will not have a country left. (For more from the author of “Judge Creates Right for Illegal Alien to Block Deportation… So She Can Sue Law Enforcement” please click HERE)
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