On Tuesday in Atlanta, kidnappers shot a family dog and took 14 year-old Ayvani Hope Perez captive, demanding $10,000 for her release. 150 law enforcement officers fanned out over the Atlanta area to find Ayvani and bring the perpetrators to justice.
When they found Ayvani 36 hours later and arrested the kidnappers, it turned out one of the kidnappers should never have had the chance to kidnap Ayvani. In fact, he shouldn’t have been in the U.S. at all.
Read more here.
Seventy House Republicans are planning a politically risky showdown with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to try to force additional debate on an immigration bill they say will mean amnesty for illegal immigrants and have dire consequences for the country.
The 70 members are petitioning for a special Republican conference meeting on the bill, a “highly unusual” move to go head-to-head with the speaker, according to Reps. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Steve King (Iowa) and Louie Gohmert (Texas), who are serving as spokespersons for the group.
Bachmann, King and Gohmert told TheBlaze the group is invoking the Hastert Rule: requiring support from a majority of the majority to bring a bill forward.
The petition is expected to go to the House leadership on Friday, but it’s possible some signatories might remove their names due to political risk, or that Boehner could head off the challenge by striking a deal. Going against leadership in such a way could have harsh political consequences for the signatories, including retaliation such as permanently getting passed over for chairmanship positions.
A Boehner spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment.
Read more here.
With the national debate focused on civilian gun control, is perhaps the biggest armed threat within the U.S. being minimized?
According to the FBI, criminal street gangs – mostly comprised of illegal aliens – are acquiring high-powered, military-style weapons to potentially engage in lethal encounters with law enforcement members and citizens alike.
Criminal street gangs are responsible for the majority of violent crimes within the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs, according to a 2009 report by the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, or NDIC.
The NDIC was a task force established in 1993 to coordinate law enforcement actions to stop drug trafficking and to curb the growing threat of violent gangs in the U.S. The agency was closed by the Obama administration in June 2011.
Prior to the shutdown of the NDIC, the agency released statistics on street gangs that some found unusual.
In 2010, the agency’s National Drug Threat Assessment stated that drugs were being sold on behalf of the cartels in “more than 2,500 cities.”
Then, in the 2011 official assessment, that number was reduced to “a thousand U.S. cities” – meaning that in one year, criminal drug gangs were cleaned out of 1,500 cities resulting in a 60-percent reduction.
Dave Gibson, a columnist for Examiner.com, asked, “Where were the press releases? Why isn’t the Obama campaign talking about this rather astounding feat every day?”
The NDIC’s reports were entirely removed from the Justice Department’s website.
An attempt to access the report brings users to a page that reads, “This website is no longer maintained and may contain dated information.”
Read more here.
A professor from the City University of New York warned last week that white people may launch a “race war” against Latinos as a result of President Barack Obama’s re-election.
Linda Martín Alcoff, a philosophy professor, made the remark during a guest lecture at Columbia University. She was invited to speak by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia.
Demographic factors are causing white people to lose their political power to the rising Latino population, Alcoff argued.
Read more here.
In its final report on Customs and Border Protection’s strategy to address illicit cross-border tunnels issued Sept. 26, 2012, the Office of Inspector General for the Department of Homeland Security said there has been an 80 percent increase in the “tunnel activity” since 2008.
“Since 1990, law enforcement officials have discovered more than 140 tunnels that have breached the U.S. border, with an 80 percent increase in tunnel activity occurring since 2008,” the report stated in its executive summary.
“Illicit cross-border tunnels along the southwest border of the United States represent a significant and growing threat to border security,” the summary stated. “Criminals primarily use the tunnels to transport illegal narcotics into the United States.
The report was done “to determine whether U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has developed an operational strategy to detect and remediate cross-border tunnels, and has acquired tunnel detection technology,” which is “part of its overall border security and law enforcement missions.”
The summary pointed out, however, “the program has not matured to a point where it demonstrates how it will consider the needs of Homeland Security Investigations” with the development and acquisition of tunnel-detecting technology.
Read more here.
Two law professors, including one who served in the Bush Justice Department, have published a paper charging that President Obama violated the Constitution with his directive to law enforcement not to deport illegal aliens.
In the paper entitled, “The Obama Administration, the Dream Act and the Take Care Clause,” authors Robert Delahunty of the University of St. Thomas [Minnesota] and John Yoo, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general, blast Obama’s moratorium on deporting certain illegal immigrants. The professors dismissed the idea that the decision on whether to deport illegal immigrants who are arrested for minor infractions is a matter of prosecutorial discretion.
“If there’s one case and it’s left to the prosecutor well that’s fine, but what Obama did was take a million cases and leave it up to prosecutorial discretion, “John Yoo said to FoxNews.com. “The only reason it’s under [Department of Homeland Security Secretary] Janet Napolitano’s discretion is because Obama had made his decision. If she’s doing it under her own, she would have to be fired.”
Read more here.
While President Barack Obama has been receiving plenty of praise for his immigration policies at the Democratic National Convention, a petition launched to protest his policy of “prosecutorial discretion” in immigration cases is quickly gaining steam.
The petition, which was launched August 15 by National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council president Chris Crane, has surpassed 75,000 signers despite a noticeable dearth of media attention. According to a release on the AFL-CIO and AFGE-backed ICE agents’ union website, the petition demands that ICE chief John Morton allow agents to pursue immigration cases without fear of suspension.
“This Administration’s ever-expanding policy of ‘prosecutorial discretion’ that allows certain illegal aliens to avoid deportation and even get work permits gives ICE agents the discretion to determine which illegal aliens meet the criteria originally outlined in your August 2011 memo. However, it appears that your policy of ‘prosecutorial discretion’ does not allow for any discretion whatsoever,” reads the petition.
“By threatening your law enforcement officers with suspension for exercising their discretion, you are sending the message that, rather than having discretion to determine who is eligible for amnesty, ICE officers are required to turn a blind eye anytime they encounter any illegal alien who has not been convicted of a specific violent crime, regardless of how dangerous that alien may be.”
Crane says that since the Obama administration decided to allow ICE agents to be able to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to pursue action against an illegal alien, the only choice they’ve really been allowed to make is to release the illegal aliens back into the United States population.
Read more here.
A group of immigration agents filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration Thursday, saying they are sick of being told not to do their jobs, a feeling intensified by the president’s new non-deportation policy and a previous memo directing them not to arrest certain illegal immigrants.
A total of 10 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and deportation officers filed the lawsuit in federal court to try to do away with both initiatives, The Washington Times reports.
Since taking office, President Obama has taken drastic measures to loosen the nation’s immigration laws. In addition to the president’s new executive order that protects younger illegal aliens from deportation, the Obama administration has shut down numerous Border Patrol stations, ended a crucial ICE program that allowed local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law and actually instructed Border Patrol agents not to make arrests.
The 10 U.S. ICE agents and deportation officers said Obama’s policies have put them between a rock and a hard place. They can either enforce the law and be reprimanded by their superiors, or fail to enforce the law and violate their own oaths of service. In fact, a 1996 law requires the agents to demand proof of legal status from individuals they suspect are in the country illegally.
High-profile attorney Kris W. Kobach, who is also secretary of state in Kansas and a staunch promoter of Arizona’s immigration law and other immigration crackdowns, is representing the agents.
Read more here.
Two weeks ago, I appeared, as I do occasionally, on a regional PBS show called “Kansas City Week in Review.” As one of four panelists from the local media, and the only conservative, I so altered the discussion on “immigration” that even our quick-witted host was left without words.
At the 2:05 mark of this video, I introduced an unexpected variation on the illegal-immigration theme. “The biggest mass killing this past weekend did not take place in Aurora, Colorado,” I told them. “It took place in Goliad, Texas.”
The other panelists looked at me as if I were crazy, which at least a few of them think I am. For that matter, I imagine most readers of this article don’t know what I am talking about.
Here is what happened. On July 22, less than 48 hours after the Colorado shooting, a Mexican coyote lost control of his Ford F-250 pick-up truck at high speed on Highway 59 outside of Goliad and killed 14 of the 22 Central Americans on board. Most had been laid out on the truck bed like sardines.
The driver, 22-year-old Ricardo Mendoza-Pineda, died in the crash as well. As the responders discovered the hard way, he was the only person on the truck with ID, in his case a driver’s license from the Mexican state of Tamaulipas.
“This is coming as news to many of your viewers,” I told the show’s host. “This was a criminal act that resulted in 15 deaths. And no one wants to talk about it because it has no useful political value for the people who determine what’s news and what’s not.”
“People go to the movie theater every single day,” retorted Kansas City Star reporter Mary Sanchez, who was at least aware of the Texas horror. “That resonates with people.”
To a degree, Sanchez was right. The movie theater shooting has more implicit news value, but I think we can agree that if a tea-party activist murdered 14 Central American day laborers in front of a Home Depot on July 22, it would still be headline news today.
Read more here.
A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is.
It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels.
The explosive allegations are being made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator.” He was extradited to the Chicago last year to face federal drug charges.
Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 as long as the intel kept coming.
Read more here.
U.S. Constitutional Free Press 