This is a great editorial circulated in email by former INS agent Michael Cutler. The topic is a recent study released by the Pew Hispanic Center on Latino crime in the US.

From the Pew Hispanic Center study article is this intro:

A Rising Share: Hispanics and Federal Crime

Sharp growth in illegal immigration and increased enforcement of immigration laws have altered the ethnic composition of offenders sentenced in federal courts. In 2007, Latinos accounted for 40% of all sentenced federal offenders-more than triple their share (13%) of the total U.S. adult population. The share of all sentenced offenders who were Latino in 2007 was up from 24% in 1991, according to an analysis of data from the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. Moreover, by 2007, immigration offenses represented nearly one-quarter (24%) of all federal convictions, up from just 7% in 1991. Among those sentenced for immigration offenses in 2007, 80% were Hispanic.

Now we have the New York Times editorial taking this study and twisting it for their own purposes which is apparently to *support* continued illegal immigration:

New York Times Article

February 22, 2009

Editorial
Enforcement Gone Bad

The failures of the immigration system are many and severe, but the main problem is not that the country is catching too few undocumented immigrants. It is catching too many. Since the early 1990s, you could write the federal government's immigration strategy on a cardboard sign: Deport Them All.

A report last week from the Pew Hispanic Center laid bare some striking results of that campaign. It found that Latinos now make up 40 percent of those sentenced in federal courts, even though they are only about 13 percent of the adult population. They accounted for one-third of federal prison inmates in 2007.

The numbers might suggest we are besieged by immigrant criminals. But of all the noncitizen Latinos sentenced last year, the vast majority - 81 percent - were convicted for unlawfully entering or remaining in the country, neither of which is a criminal offense.

The country is filling the federal courts and prisons with nonviolent offenders. It is diverting immense law-enforcement resources from pursuing serious criminals - violent thugs, financial scammers - to an immense, self-defeating campaign to hunt down ... workers.

The Pew report follows news this month that even as a federal program to hunt immigrant fugitives saw its budget soar - to $218 million last year from $9 million in 2003 - its mission went astray. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, of the 72,000 people arrested through last February, 73 percent had no criminal record. Border Patrol agents in California and Maryland, meanwhile, tell of pressure to arrest workers at day-labor corners and convenience stores to meet quotas.

The country needs to control its borders. It needs to rebuild an effective immigration system and thwart employers who cheat it. It needs to bring the undocumented forward and make citizen taxpayers of them.

For all the billions spent on fences, raids, patrols and prisons, the number of illegal immigrants has steadily grown to about 12 million last year from four million in 1992. So has the need to overhaul the many parts of a festering, broken system: to clear out backlogs in legal immigration, to rescue families from limbo, to throw sunlight on the shadow economy, to deter unlawful hiring, to replace chaos with lawfulness and order. All those priorities have languished in the deportation era.

 

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Here is an excellent rebuttal to the above New York Times editorial from Michael Cutler, with his permission:

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Hi Gang:

I have attached an editorial that recently appeared in the New York Times and want to provide my perspectives because the position taken by the editors of the New York Times is absolutely skewed.

This editorial causes me, once again, to suggest that the motto of the New York Times should be changed from "All the news that's fit to print" to "You'll have a fit from what we print!"

The editorial makes some claims that do not hold a drop of water!

The issue being addressed is the fact that some 40% of the inmate population are identified as being comprised of Latino alien inmates even though, the article claims, Latinos only account for only 13% of the of the U.S. population.

Let us do a bit of "number crunching."

It has been estimated that there between 12 million and 20 million illegal aliens in the United States. Not all illegal aliens are Latino. I have seen estimates that some 20 percent of the illegal alien population are not Latinos.

This means that, depending on what the true number of illegal aliens are present in the United States that illegal aliens account for anywhere from 4% to 7% of the population of our country. Clearly the estimate of 13% of the population of the United States being Latino includes aliens who are lawfully present and may even include United States citizens.

What the statistics do show is that illegal aliens are far more likely to be involved in the commission of serious crimes than are United States citizens!

This is one of the problems of using the term "Immigrant" to describe illegal aliens. To provide a bit of clarity, as I have noted on many occasions, the difference between and immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a houseguest and a burglar!

Now we come to the assertion that the aliens who are being prosecuted didn't commit a crime!

Here is the actual quote from the editorial:

"The numbers might suggest we are besieged by immigrant criminals. But of all the noncitizen Latinos sentenced last year, the vast majority - 81 percent - were convicted for unlawfully entering or remaining in the country, neither of which is a criminal offense. "
That statement takes my breath away!
How can you be convicted for a non-criminal offense?

I will provide you with some insight about how prosecutions are conducted. Where the issue of the prosecution of aliens is concerned, I have a bit of a personal insight that is unique.

The law that addresses the issue of previously convicted aliens who are deported from the United States and then reenter the United States without the requisite authorization from our government is one I am proud of. Let me explain why.

I had gone to Senator D'Amato in 1982 or 1983 to convince him about three necessary changes for the enforcement of the INA. My colleagues at the former INS were frustrated with the lack of attention being given to the effective enforcement of the immigration laws.

During an initial meeting with a staffer who worked for then Senator D'Amato, the Senator stopped in and told me that if I could provide him with other agents who would substantiate what I had to say, he would support efforts to get the system to work better.

I wondered what I would have to do to get some of my colleagues to come forward. Long story short: I managed to cajole, prod and embarrass more than 30 INS agents and other employees of the INS to meet with Al's staff to establish my credibility. They didn't all go at one time. Some insisted on going alone, others wanted to be part of a big group. I felt like a "tour guide!" These meetings took place over a period of about 6 months.

Finally the Senator agreed to a formal meeting with me and 4 other INS employees. Here were the three suggestions that we provided him:

1- Prioritize the arrest and removal of criminal aliens (of course back then we weren't concerned about "sleeper cells" as we are now.

2- Change the penalty for illegal reentry after deportation to take criminal histories into account. (He conferred with then U.S. Attorney for the SDNY Rudy Giuliani on a speaker phone conversation during the meeting.) I had recommended that the 2 year max for illegal aliens who had no felony arrests was the right punishment. On the other hand, I strongly recommended that previously deported felons should be facing 20 years for unauthorized reentry. That became the Aggravated Felony statute.

3- Change the way that criminal aliens were processed for deportation. Back then the INS would not begin to initiate deportation proceedings until after a criminal alien completed his jail sentence. My recommendations included holding deportation hearings inside prisons so that a convicted alien would have years to appeal any order of deportation while he (she) was still serving his jail sentence. In theory aliens who were convicted felons would go right from prison to an airplane and be removed from the United States. This program was implemented and is known as the IHP (Institutional Hearing Program.)

Before the laws concerning penalties for reentry after deportation were changed, it was almost impossible to get the office of the US Attorney to prosecute reentry cases because the jail sentences were of almost no consequence. With the enhanced penalties for criminal aliens who illegally reenter the United States after deportation those prosecutions are readily accepted an now account for a large percentage of the caseload that is prosecuted.

The point is that prosecutors have the ability to accept or decline prosecuting a person who is accused of committing a crime. This is known as prosecutorial discretion.

Generally when an agent wants to have a case accepted for prosecution he presents his evidence to an assistant United States attorney in the district in which the crime was committed (venue).

It is up to the assistant U.S. attorney to decide on whether or not to accept the prosecution. Guidelines are established in each district depending on workload and other factors.

It was my experience and the experience of my colleagues in offices around the United States that until the "Aggravated Felony" statutes were enacted concerning criminal aliens who were deported and then unlawfully reentered the United States, it was nearly impossible to get the prosecutors to agree to prosecute those cases.

Often we had to demonstrate that the illegal alien had been arrested and deported numerous times and that he posed a risk to the community. The reluctance was that with so much work to do and so few prosecutors to do it, it made no sense to go through the whole process and then watch a criminal alien get sentenced to serve several months in custody and then be deported again, and again, and again, ad nauseam!

When the law was changed, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Senator Al D'Amato, the maximum penalty for the crime of reentry after deportation jumped to 20 years in jail. The minimum sentence for such individuals approached 5 years in jail. This sort of sentence, in the case of criminal aliens made it worthwhile for prosecutors to proceed with these cases.

The great majority of aliens who are prosecuted for immigration law violations are "aggravated felons."

Among these pillars of the community are narcotics traffickers, child molesters, members of violent gangs and other miscreants who have used Americas criminal and administrative laws as a doormat!

I recall that I had the pleasure of arresting an illegal alien from, as I recall, the Dominican Republic, under the aegis of the "new and improved" reentry law. This guy was a convicted drug dealer who had been serving time in a prison in upstate New York. I had gone before a grand jury days earlier to provide testimony as to his unlawful reentry and criminal history. Having gotten him indicted, I was issued a criminal arrest warrant for this guy's arrest and my partner and I proceeded to the jail on the day he was to be released after serving his prison sentence for his drug offenses.

This drug dealer spoke fairly good English and he joked with me and my partner and thanked us for the "cab ride" to the airport!

We explained to him that he was no where's near ready to be sent home but that we were just going to give him new accommodations in the federal prison. He laughed at us and called us liars. He continued laughing until he realized that we were serious.

Ultimately he pleaded guilty to unlawful reentry and was sentenced to nearly 5 years in jail! I was at his sentencing. I assure you he was no longer laughing!

Here is the point and a point that seems to have escaped the editor of the New York Times.

Federal prosecutors in just about every jurisdiction are overworked and understaffed. They have to make tough decisions as to which cases they will prosecute and which cases they don't have the luxury of prosecuting. They are forced to perform a sort of prosecutorial triage in which they have to assess how to most effectively make use of those limited resources. The aggravated felony statute concerning the reentry of criminal aliens is often prosecuted because our nation's failures to secure its borders have enabled a human tidal wave of assorted criminals from the four corners of our planet to enter our country to ply their respective trades here.

The editorial below then resorted to an interesting ploy. Not only did they mix illegal aliens together with lawful immigrants, they confused the issue of administrative arrests vs criminal arrests. Here is the paragraph where they attempted to pull this off:

The Pew report follows news this month that even as a federal program to hunt immigrant fugitives saw its budget soar - to $218 million last year from $9 million in 2003 - its mission went astray. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, of the 72,000 people arrested through last February, 73 percent had no criminal record. Border Patrol agents in California and Maryland, meanwhile, tell of pressure to arrest workers at day-labor corners and convenience stores to meet quotas.

The Migration Policy Institute may well be "nonpartisan" but that does not mean that they a without an agenda. They favor amnesty for illegal aliens. Furthermore, the 72,000 arrests cited in the editorial were administrative arrests and not criminal arrests.

Immigration law enforcement has two sets of laws. There are the criminal laws such as the law I discussed above, that deals with aliens who unlawfully reenter the United States after being deported. There are many other criminal statutes involving the immigration laws. Some of these laws can even be used to prosecute United States citizens who are involved in smuggling, harboring, hiring illegal aliens or entering into a fraud conspiracy to enable those aliens to circumvent the immigration laws. The ultimate goal of such prosecutions is not unlike the goal of any prosecution, to find the defendant guilty and have him (her) sentenced to serve jail time and/or pay a fine.

The other laws that immigration deals with are the administrative laws. These laws do not involve the criminal prosecution of aliens who violate the immigration laws but rather seek their removal (deportation) from the United States.

These removal hearings are conducted in a separate court system and do not tie up resources at the offices of the U.S. attorney around the country. These cases are heard by immigration judges who have sole responsibility for hearing immigration cases.

In considering the ultimate goal of these arrests is to seek the removal of aliens who have violated our nation's immigration laws is obviously something that the editor of the New York Times does not want to see happen. Rather than deal with this issue he has resorted to the same tactic used by the open borders / pro-amnesty advocates have been doing for decades, spew lots of smoke and spread all sorts of rumors and lies and hope to get away with it!

They should read the childhood take of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf!"

If the folks at the New York Times wonder why their sales have fallen, they should consider that journalists are supposed to deal with the unvarnished truth- warts and all!

To twist reality as though it were a pretzel causes people to no longer be willing to read what is being published.

If I was given the opportunity to confront the author of the nonsense I have attached below, this is what I would ask him:

"If you need to distort the facts and the truth in order to persuade people to agree with you, then you have to have come to the conclusion that the facts do not support your claims. If that is the case, and it would appear it is, then what in blazes are you doing and why are you doing it?"

I have participated in many, many debates on various issues relating to immigration. I have engaged in these debates in all sorts of places and under a variety of circumstances. I have appeared before Congressional committee hearings. I have appeared at hearings convened by state and city legislatures. I have appeared on television and radio broadcasts, on college campuses and town hall meetings.

I have always come armed with the laws and the truth. All to often my opponents made assertions I was easily able to show were filled with lies. They resorted to name-calling while I simply stated my views.

It would seem that the open borders / pro-amnesty advocates know that the laws, the facts and commonsense are not on their side. In essence they brought not a knife, but bare knuckles, to a gun fight!

Here is the real challenge: The author of the editorial and others like him need to either find facts and commonsense arguments that really substantial their case or they need to admit defeat!

The large scale apathy demonstrated by citizens of this nation has emboldened elected representatives to all but ignore the needs of the average American citizen in a quest for massive campaign funds and the promises of votes to be ostensibly delivered by special interest groups. There is much that we cannot do but there is one thing that We the People absolutely must do- we must stop sitting on the sidelines!

The collective failure of We the People to get involved in make our concerns known to our politicians have nearly made the concerns of the great majority of the citizens of this nation all but irrelevant to the politicians.

I implore you to get involved!

We live in a perilous world and in a perilous era. The survival of our nation and the lives of our citizens hang in the balance

This is neither a Conservative issue, nor is it a Liberal issue- simply stated, this is most certainly an AMERICAN issue!

You are either part of the solution or you are a part of the problem!

Democracy is not a spectator sport!

Lead, follow or get out of the way!

-michael cutler-

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