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Obamatolawenforcement:It’s“notsmart”to

Obama to law enforcement: It’s “not smart” to go after nonviolent illegals

posted at 2:31 pm on May 14, 2014 by Allahpundit

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Via CNS, if you want to be charitable, you can spin this as O simply saying that immigration enforcement is a matter for ICE, not local cops who have higher priorities. But you can’t be charitable because, as we well know, ICE isn’t doing much enforcement against nonviolent illegals either. That was the upshot of Jeff Sessions’s analysis of ICE data back in March — essentially, if you’re an illegal without a criminal record and you make it to the interior of the U.S., ICE won’t (or can’t, due to lack of resources) touch you. Most of their job nowadays has to do with catching people at the border, which is why Obama’s “deportation” stats are so ridiculously inflated. All Obama’s doing here is restating his unofficial policy. If you make it past the border and you’ve committed no crimes, you’re home free.

And even if you have committed some crimes, including homicide, kidnapping, and sexual assault, you might catch a break then too. Oddly enough, Obama doesn’t mention that here. But it’s clear he has a political problem when even Grahamnesty feels obliged to work up some canned outrage:

One of the leading Republicans pushing for amnesty in the Senate said leaked documents revealing the Obama administration has released thousand of immigrants with serious rap sheets from detention has set back efforts to pass a major immigration bill.

“This sets everything back. I don’t think many Americans want an illegal immigrant who has been convicted of a felony to stay in the country and sure as hell not released from jail,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told Breitbart News…

“It’s a terrible way to handle immigration,” he said. “You don’t let people out of jail who have been convicted of crimes — and these are crimes apart from violations of immigration law.”

Here’s where I start wondering again whether O’s purposely trying to tank an immigration deal. He’s held off on issuing his order to “relax” U.S. deportation policy so far, presumably because he knows it’ll give Republicans in Congress a reason to walk away from reform, but then he turns around and says something like this — on camera, at a White House function, knowing that it’ll make the rounds within conservative media and that Boehner’s caucus will notice. If you’re eager to show the other party that you’ll faithfully execute the new security measures they pass, pretty much the last thing you should do is … publicly encourage a bunch of cops to not enforce the law. And yet here we are. What now?

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Tags: amnesty, border security, illegals, immigrants, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, law enforcement, obama

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ICEdata:36,000illegalswithcriminalconvictions,including

ICE data: 36,000 illegals with criminal convictions, including homicide, were released during deportation proceedings

posted at 4:01 pm on May 12, 2014 by Allahpundit

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A preemptive strike on DHS from the Center for Immigration Studies, designed to make Obama’s upcoming “relaxation” of U.S. deportation procedures as politically painful as possible. He’s desperate to pander to his base, which is impatient after waiting more than five years for amnesty and has now convinced itself based on cooked numbers that he’s some sort of crazed border hawk. That’s where the “relaxation” comes in — and that’s the beauty of CIS’s otherwise grim data, which shows just how relaxed the system already is. Maybe O will consider it a blessing in disguise, though. What true amnesty fan wouldn’t be happy to learn that illegals with a total of 15,000+ DUI convictions between them were free last year to get back behind the wheel on American roads?

Note that these 36,000 offenders are separate from the 68,000 illegals with criminal records who were also released last year and whom CIS reported on back in March. The latter group consists of people whom ICE “encountered” (often in jails) but didn’t seek to remove; the former group is composed of people they did try to remove with formal deportation proceedings but who were released on bond or via some other mechanism while the proceedings played out. How many of them didn’t show up to their next hearing? Good question. We don’t know because ICE hasn’t said.

The document reveals that the 36,007 convicted criminal aliens freed from ICE custody in many instances had multiple convictions. Among them, the 36,007 had nearly 88,000 convictions, including:

193 homicide convictions (including one willful killing of a public official with gun)

426 sexual assault convictions

303 kidnapping convictions

1,075 aggravated assault convictions

1,160 stolen vehicle convictions

9,187 dangerous drug convictions

16,070 drunk or drugged driving convictions

303 flight escape convictions…

Separate information obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies reveals that the vast majority of these releases were discretionary, or even contrary to the requirements of various provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Only a small share of these criminal aliens (fewer than 3,000) were released in accordance with a 2001 Supreme Court decision, Zadvydas v. Davis, which prevents ICE from indefinitely detaining certain aliens whose countries will not accept them back. (See “Reining in Zadvydas v. Davis”.) Another small number may have been offered parole or legal status, either in exchange for their cooperation with ICE or another law enforcement agency in connection with a criminal prosecution, or because of another compelling public interest.

The combined number of convictions for “domestic violence” and “sex offenses” was north of 2,000. And CIS notes that Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty for DREAMers may have enabled some of it, since it’s known that some illegals have claimed they qualify for relief under it and were released before their claim was even checked out. How many? That’s another number that ICE won’t give us.

If you want a taste of just how perilous the big deportation “relaxation” is for the White House, read this BuzzFeed piece from last week about Chuck Schumer — yes, that Chuck Schumer — encouraging the White House to take its time in issuing the order. That’s not because Schumer cares particularly that illegals with more than 220 convictions for kidnappings between them were released during deportation proceedings last year; it’s because he’s afraid that softening up deportation even further right now might be the final straw politically for the House GOP and cause them to abandon amnesty for the rest of the year. Schumer wants the White House to lie low and give Boehner until August (i.e. after the GOP primaries are over) to try to make something happen. If the House is still deadlocked then, Obama can go ahead and issue his order on deportations. Can’t wait to see what numbers CIS is planning to publish that month.

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Tags: cis, criminal, deport, deportation, homicide, illegal, immigrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement

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Source from: hotair

LATimes:IllegalsinsidetheU.S.areless

LA Times: Illegals inside the U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama took office

posted at 4:01 pm on April 2, 2014 by Allahpundit

You already knew this thanks to Jeff Sessions’s office, but data from a Republican senator circulating among conservatives can be safely ghettoized by lefties. Not so a splashy report in LA’s biggest paper. Someone in the media is very far off-message at a moment when amnesty fans and their partners in the Democratic leadership are hard at work trying to convince the public that, if anything, Obama’s been too strict in deporting illegals. That’s why he needs to shift to a more forgiving, “humane” policy.

Sixty-eight thousand illegals with criminal records were released last year. What’s the target number this year?

Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since [Obama's] first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009…

Until recent years, most people caught illegally crossing the southern border were simply bused back into Mexico in what officials called “voluntary returns,” but which critics derisively termed “catch and release.” Those removals, which during the 1990s reached more 1 million a year, were not counted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation statistics.

Now, the vast majority of border crossers who are apprehended get fingerprinted and formally deported. The change began during the George W. Bush administration and accelerated under Obama. The policy stemmed in part from a desire to ensure that people who had crossed into the country illegally would have formal charges on their records.

In the Obama years, all of the increase in deportations has involved people picked up within 100 miles of the border, most of whom have just recently crossed over. In 2013, almost two-thirds of deportations were in that category.

In other words, “deportations” today covers a much broader segment of illegals than it used to. That’s for a good cause: By formally deporting someone who’s just been caught trying to cross the border, the removal goes on his record and can trigger a criminal prosecution if he tries to enter the United States again. (It’s not a crime to cross the border without authorization once. Only if you’re deported and then cross again is criminal law implicated.) So DHS, by treating border apprehensions and removals as formal “deportations,” is marginally increasing the deterrent to illegal entry next time. But that means Obama’s “deportation” numbers can’t be meaningfully compared to his predecessors’; his numbers subsume all removals whereas Clinton’s and Bush’s numbers distinguished between people removed after being caught at the border versus people caught inside the U.S. If you lump those categories together, then the “deporter-in-chief” is actually more slack about removals than Dubya was. And why is that important? Because: The whole reason the left is upset about the allegedly large number of deportations under Obama is that it means more illegals are being cruelly uprooted from their homes in the U.S. after spending years here — in theory. In reality, most of the illegals who are being “deported” have only spent a few hours or days in America. They’re caught by the Border Patrol on the way in, processed, and then “deported.” Meanwhile, those who actually do make it to the inner United States are almost uniformly safe from deportation later. In the words of the former acting director of ICE, quoted by the Times, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero — it’s just highly unlikely to happen.” So much for cruelty.

Let me throw you a curveball now. What if the truth about Obama’s deportations was leaked to the Times by … the White House itself? Remember, the politics of these numbers are tricky for them. On the one hand, they want to reassure amnesty opponents that the law’s being enforced so that Republicans will have more freedom to join with O on comprehensive immigration reform. On the other hand, they want amnesty supporters to know that Obama’s on their side. The more they reassure border hawks by touting artificially beefy numbers about deportation, the angrier immigration activists get at the “deporter-in-chief.” Maybe the heat from the latter group is now so intense, with so much political damage to Democrats being done by it — see this eye-opening NYT piece about disgruntled Latino voters staying home on election day — that Obama feels he needs to do something to get them to back off. Result: Tipping an LA paper, which serves a large population of Mexican-American readers, to the fact that his ugly deportation numbers aren’t so ugly after all. Hmmmmm.

Tags: amnesty, deport, deportation, illegal, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Los Angeles Times

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ICEreleased68,000illegalimmigrantswithcriminalrecords

ICE released 68,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records last year

posted at 11:21 am on March 31, 2014 by Allahpundit

This isn’t exclusively an “Obama problem” — the boss emeritus has been scorching ICE for its catch-and-release policies for ages, starting long before O took office — but it’s important counterprogramming to the left’s narrative that Obama is some sort of fanatic about deporting illegals. Jeff Sessions put one hole in that balloon last week when his office ran the numbers and found that that if you’re here illegally and don’t have a criminal record, you’re already basically exempt from deportation. ICE won’t touch you, whether because you qualify for some sort of statutory exclusion or because Obama’s definition of “prosecutorial discretion” means that he can refuse to enforce the law in hundreds of thousands of cases.

Now here comes Mark Krikorian’s Center for Immigration Studies to add another puncture: Even among illegals who do have criminal records (not including traffic violations), tens of thousands are being released back into their communities by ICE after apprehension. That’s fully 35 percent of “criminal aliens” whom they encountered.

These figures suggest that despite claims of a focus on public safety, the administration’s prosecutorial discretion criteria are allowing factors such as family relationships, political considerations, or attention from advocacy groups to trump criminal convictions as a factor leading to deportation.

For example, the prosecutorial discretion directives issued by ICE headquarters instruct officers to release illegal aliens if the alien is a parent or caregiver, if the alien claims to be in school, if the alien has been here a long time, or if the alien claims to be eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, among other factors.8 If an alien is found to have applied for legal status, protocol requires the deportation charges be put on hold, and the benefits application may be expedited, presumably to spare the alien the consequences a criminal conviction might have on the alien’s eligibility for the legal status. In addition, ICE agents and officers have been instructed to ignore convictions for state crimes if the conviction occurred under a state law that the administration opposes or thinks is too harsh. Finally, many criminal aliens have been released from ICE custody, received case continuances, and sometimes even case dismissals as a result of petitions, protests, and vigils staged by illegal alien advocacy groups.

One locality that has been specifically targeted by ICE for politically motivated prosecutorial discretion is Maricopa County, Ariz. ICE attorneys in the Arizona field office reportedly are required to terminate deportation cases in which illegal aliens have been convicted of felony identity theft, which is a “crime involving moral turpitude” that requires mandatory detention and should cause the alien to be removed.

According to a House Judiciary report on ICE’s 2012 numbers flagged by CIS, 26,000 “criminal illegals” were released last year and then went on to commit more than 4,000 major felonies, including 59 murders. My assumption is that most of the criminals they’re releasing have been convicted of nonviolent offenses, like identity theft (mentioned above) or drug use; the administration has, in theory, a powerful political incentive to send violent criminals home before they do something ghastly here that gins up a round of bad press that’s unhelpful to the cause of amnesty. The House Judiciary numbers confound that assumption, though. INS is guaranteeing that thousands of otherwise preventable crimes, some violent, will be committed by going easy on a population of criminal illegals that approaches 70,000.

Why would CIS showcase this data now, though? Because, as you hopefully remember, Obama’s in the process of caving to amnesty fans by ordering DHS to review its deportation procedures to make them “more humane.” Immigration activists have been in his face for months demanding that he at least lighten up on deportations if he’s not prepared to impose a formal moratorium for all illegals. But he already has lightened up on non-criminal illegals, as noted above; to find any extra leniency, ICE will have to go even easier on the criminal class. A report like this won’t stop Obama from doing that in the name of pandering to the left with leniency generally — lefty media won’t carry it, after all, and even if they did, what liberal’s mind will change because of it? — but it might make Republican fencesitters in the House a bit more jittery about a new amnesty push. Who wants to confront an angry voter at a townhall with this information at his or her fingertips?

The grand irony here, courtesy of the Times, is that the left’s narrative about Obama being a deportation hard-ass has worked so well among Latino voters that … it risks suppressing their turnout for Democrats in the midterms and beyond. The White House itself has occasionally pushed that message to parry the GOP’s claim that O is some kind of unprecedented softie on immigration, and now it’s at risk of blowing up in their faces. Imagine if the big Republican rethink on immigration after 2012, with reform once again stalled in the Republican-controlled House, actually ends up with a backlash against Democrats because President Overreach declined to unilaterally amnestize 11 million people himself. Too funny.

Tags: aliens, cis, criminal, deportation, illegal, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, krikorian, records

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AnalysisofICEdata:Amnestyisalreadyin

Analysis of ICE data: Amnesty is already in effect for nearly all illegals who are already here

posted at 11:21 am on March 26, 2014 by Allahpundit

A three-page analysis from Jeff Sessions’s office. The good news is, at least ICE is prioritizing correctly. Illegals who’ve committed serious criminal offenses are the first out the door, followed by people caught at the border trying to sneak in and those caught inside the U.S. after having been deported before. The other 99.92 percent who are already here are, however, apparently here to stay, unless/until a Republican president sends down the order to restart deportations among that group. And given the GOP leadership’s icy panic about further alienating Latino voters, the odds of that are near zero.

Remember this the next time amnesty shills like Luis Gutierrez screech that Obama is the “deporter-in-chief.”

Since two-thirds of [the 368,000] removals [last year] were not interior deportations but border apprehensions, let’s focus on the 133,000 removals that are more commonly understood as deportations. Of the 133,000 interior removals in FY13, ICE reports 82%, or 110,000, were convicted criminals (see breakdown here). ICE further reports that 80,000 of the 110,000 were convicted of a felony (including 53,000 convicted of one or more aggravated felonies). The remaining 30,000 were convicted of a crime less than a felony but in most cases, according to ICE, had also either absconded or re-entered the country illegally after being deported (a felony). Altogether, 60% of all convicted criminals removed by ICE had either been previously deported and returned to this country whereupon they committed a crime, or had been released after being apprehended by immigration authorities and fled, becoming a fugitive.

So, we are left with roughly 23,000 interior removals which, according to ICE, don’t have a known criminal conviction in the U.S. on their record. Of those 23,000, ICE reports that 13,000 are either fugitives or habitual offenders/previous deportees. That leaves only 10,000 removals out of 368,000 removals — or just 2% —who were seemingly removed/returned for immigration crimes without additional serious offenses such as being felons or fugitives. However, according to the National ICE Council, many of these were security red flags for other reasons (for instance, they had been in and out of jail for serious offenses without a conviction) and the field office was able to overcome “prosecutorial discretion” to secure a removal.

As previously established, of the 12 million current illegal immigrants and visa overstays, approximately 0.2% were removed who did not have a criminal conviction and approximately 0.08% were removed who were not habitual offenders/previous deportees or convicted criminals.

Less than two weeks ago, under heavy pressure from immigration activists, Obama ordered a review of ICE’s deportation policies to make them more “humane.” Maybe, as Sessions suspects, that means dropping even those cases involving immigration fugitives and people who’d been deported previously, which would reduce the number of deportations of non-criminal illegals to near zero. Or maybe O will go the whole nine yards and follow the Chuck Schumer plan, which would spare illegals from deportation if they would qualify for legal status under the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill. We may yet reach the point of executive power grabs, in other words, where not only isn’t Obama enforcing laws that Congress has passed, he’s enforcing laws that haven’t passed. And if you’re trying to find comfort in the fact that O has said repeatedly that he doesn’t have the authority to stretch immigration laws any further towards formal amnesty, remember: When it comes to executive overreach, he says a lot of things he doesn’t mean.

By the way, House Democrats are bringing a discharge petition to the floor today to try to force a vote on immigration reform. Remind me again why Republicans are opposed to it. If a de facto amnesty is already in effect and it’s certain that a Republican president won’t undo Obama’s actions for fear of a political backlash, what exactly is the reason to keep fighting formal legalization? The fix is in.

Tags: amnesty, border, enforcement, illegal, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, obama, sessions

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Finally:“Frozen,”thehonesttrailer postedat

Finally: “Frozen,” the honest trailer

posted at 8:01 pm on March 11, 2014 by Allahpundit

An evening palate cleanser for all the parents of young children in the HA readership, who now spend their days having to listen to the soundtrack again and again. And again.

There’s no way out. Just laugh at the pain.

)

Tags: Disney, frozen, honest trailers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, let it go, snow, video

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Finally:“Frozen,”thehonesttrailer postedat

Finally: “Frozen,” the honest trailer

posted at 8:01 pm on March 11, 2014 by Allahpundit

An evening palate cleanser for all the parents of young children in the HA readership, who now spend their days having to listen to the soundtrack again and again. And again.

There’s no way out. Just laugh at the pain.

)

Tags: Disney, frozen, honest trailers, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, let it go, snow, video

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Source from: hotair