“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Those were the indelible comments Trump made when he announced his candidacy for president at Trump Tower June 16, 2015. That statement was truer than he could even imagine, yet three years into the presidency, thanks to capitulation on every single budget battle and legislative point of leverage, ICE doesn’t even have the funding to swiftly remove all of the worst foreign criminals.

The local NBC affiliate in Charleston, South Carolina, reported on Friday, “A Charleston County man has been arrested and charged after he allegedly sexually assaulted a girl who was in fourth grade.” Except this is no Charleston man; this is an illegal alien from Mexico, according to the booking in the county jail.

The charging affidavit alleges that between February and June 2019, Carlos Bartolo Rios, 29, sexually assaulted the girl and forced her to watch sex videos. He was arrested Thursday night by the U.S. Marshals and is charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a minor under 11 years old. He is being held at the Charleston County Jail, where there is an ICE hold on him because of his immigration status.

Ever wonder how many of these sexual assaults every year are committed by illegal aliens because we refuse to actually enforce the laws on the books?

Thankfully, South Carolina cooperates with ICE, but because the biggest illegal alien jurisdictions do not, we will never know the true number. However, ICE recently reported that just for fiscal year 2019, there were a total of 14,500 sex crime charges among those who were subject to ICE detainers.

Moreover, it’s likely that ICE is missing many of these people thanks to sanctuary jurisdictions releasing sex offenders, including child sex offenders. The number of apprehensions in sanctuary states has plummeted. For example, South Carolina is under the auspices of ICE’s Atlanta field office, which made 13,247 arrests last year. Contrast that to the Los Angeles field office, which made just 6,657 arrests. That is simply astounding given how many more illegal aliens live in California and tells us that, given that 90 percent of those targeted by ICE are criminal aliens, there are endless dangerous criminals like Rios who are not caught and removed if they commit their crimes in places like California.

This is the case the Republicans have failed to make for three years. ICE has just between five and six thousand deportation officers to deal with a population of several million criminal aliens who have criminal records, not to mention any other enforcement priorities. Most illegal aliens, and even criminal aliens in sanctuary cities, are escaping enforcement. As late as 2014, ICE was making over 16,000 arrests from the L.A. field office and 14,000 in 2016. Sanctuaries are winning, and immigration enforcement is plummeting under Trump because the administration is failing to harness the bully pulpit and the leverage of veto power in the budget to force a fight. Thus, as Trump understood when he launched his campaign, there will now be many child rapists remaining in this country.

As I’ve reported before, child sex abuse is a particular problem among many illegal aliens from certain Latin American countries because child marriages are quite normal in some of their home areas. This is particularly prevalent among those living in rural Central America, which is where the most recent migrants are from. According to GirlsNotBrides, “Child marriage tends to happen more in rural areas than in urban areas,” and in Guatemala, “over half of rural girls (mostly from Mayan indigenous populations) are married before 18.” They also note that “poverty can also drive child marriage in the region,” and therefore, “indigenous girls living in impoverished areas can be especially vulnerable to the practice.”

According to a Senate Homeland Security Committee report published in January, a loophole in our spousal visa policies has allowed roughly 8,700 child brides, including 14-year-old girls, to be brought into the country on fiancé or marriage visas for the purpose of marrying older men.

Overall, in 2018, 27 percent of all rape suspects in America were Hispanic, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (table 43A). Although the reports don’t break down offenses by legal status, it’s hard to imagine that illegal immigration is not a major driver of that number.

The bottom line is that until we enforce our interior laws and actually treat illegal aliens as criminals, not as a protected class, they will continue to come. And no, 70 miles of border wall is not enough border security to counteract the interior magnet of sanctuary cities and the lack of enforcement of many of our laws in all 50 states. Last week, the AP posted a report based on interviews with Sinaloa Cartel members on how their human smuggling business is still thriving, despite the crackdown on bogus asylum claims, because illegal alien networks control so many stash houses along the border. So long as our government refuses to deploy the military in a meaningful way at the border and treat illegal aliens in the interior as the fugitives and criminals they are, they will still have the incentive and ability to come here.

Trump kicked off his presidential campaign spawning a national dialogue over the degree of illegal alien criminality. Yet, as president, he has failed to promote a sustained national discussion on that issue. In July, I published a blueprint for Trump to keep Congress in session all August and focus on criminal aliens and protecting the American citizen in preparation for a budget fight in September. That fight never happened. While we were all distracted, the Left won without firing a shot. And now, after last week’s capitulation, Trump is left without a single legislative vehicle to have such a fight for the remainder of this term. (For more from the author of “Illegal Alien Charged With Sexually Assaulting 4th-Grade Girl” please click HERE)

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