All's quiet about Barry's warmongering on the Liberal Front.

Some time ago I read a whistleblower notice on a VA Clinic wall. Said anyone reporting bad behavior, patient abuse or neglect would remain anonymous.

Looks like that was a sad joke on anyone reporting.

Tell me I can't predict the future.

Not only the known infected dude, the hospital staff who originally checked him in, the medics who worked on him, anyone he may have sneezed on can be spreading it to their families. Their kids bring it to school. School kids and teachers taking it home.

Too late, y'all. Start praying ya's don't start getting lucky and win this lottery.

A receipt will hold up in court. A mans word against a womans accusation and DNA from sperm means the man goes to prison.

Condoms help spread the liberal disease.

Yes, I do.
Apparently, I can't say likewise.

Get a receipt. Condoms make for fewer liberal idiots.

A big 10-4.

Make sure ya get that signed by a Notary Pubic.

If I ever hook up in Cali again, I'll make sure to get a receipt.

I be thankin,Unca Jes n Al shed be chimin in.

Raps is fo da mans in dis woild. Womens gots no bidness steppin up in dey face, feelin me yet?

Lookin like BS has found it's way to Alberta.

Shoudn't these misguided, oppressed youts be given a pass?

They were seriously dissed by the lower caste, no?

Thank ya, young drlin'.
Asi es la vida.

I'm used to rejection and game playing.

In my younger years, I, like many other men, have played the women.

Didn't the oBamanation tell ya's ta learn Spanish?

Actually, I was primed to cut off a piece and the broad decides she wants mo money.

I pulled up mah draws n went home

Ah don't feeds wut ah don't breeds.

Feel me?

How long would ya stick around after the well runs dry?

Yo, mi pienso, es por el armor. Por ella, esta enteresada por el dinero.

Pobresito de yo.

What do y'all think of women who want you fer yer money?

End Notes

1 See, for example, Rosemary Reynolds, “Judge Dismisses Immigration Case for Drive that Killed Two Girls”, FM News 101 KXL, August 19, 2014.

2 Randy Capps, Marc R. Rosenblum, James D. Bachmeier, “Executive Action for Unauthorized Immigrants: Estimates of the Populations that Could Receive Relief”, Migration Policy Institute, 2014.

3 The slide show presentation, of the same title as the MPI issue brief, can be found here. See, particularly, slides 10 and 11.

4 These data consist of detailed information relating to alien removals from the United States for a 10-year period, segregated by federal fiscal years from 2004 through 2013, including criminal offense data originally produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a New York Times journalist.

5 Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook, FBI, 2004.

6 See, for instance, the Judicial Watch “Corruption Chronicles” blog of September 3, 2014, “Liberal Dem Blasts Obama Amnesty ‘Illegal Immigration is Not a Victimless Crime’”. See also Jessica Vaughan’s January 6, 2012, CIS blog, “Cook County Pressured to Reverse Sanctuary Policy”, and Dan Cadman’s March 24, 2014, CIS blog, “Public Advocacy, Victims, and Skewed Moral Compasses: U.S. government refuses to give U.S. citizen maimed by illegal alien information requested under FOIA”.

7 Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Fact Sheet on Drunk Driving in America, quoted in testimony of Jessica M. Vaughan before the House Judiciary Committee, hearing on “The Scott Gardner Act: Detention of Illegal Aliens Arrested for Drunk Driving”, March 7, 2012.

Conclusion

We believe that in the area of immigration policy, executive action under this presidency has reached the tipping point of unconstitutionality. However, even considered in the context put forward by advocates of such action, a very basic examination of the traffic-related crimes of deported aliens shows their severity. Many of the apparently insignificant offenses mask more serious offenses because they either are the result of charging (or plea bargaining) for lesser offenses, or simply don’t reflect the underlying reality that injuries or death were associated with the incident captured in a single data field of a massive government spreadsheet. This gets to the heart of the flaw in arguing that traffic offenders merit executive action because their crimes are minor.

We conclude that there are profound policy and community safety reasons, in addition to constitutional constraints and rule-of-law arguments, not to undertake an executive action that spares “traffic offenders” from deportation.

A Majority of Traffic Offenders Are Also Prior Deportees

We also examined aliens who had been removed who had traffic-related criminal convictions in the context of their prior adverse immigration histories. We believe that this is important and relevant, particularly in light of the assertion in the MPI brief that such offenders could be accommodated as recipients for executive action simply by “[r]e-focusing and strictly adhering to enforcement priorities”. This, of course, raised the question of whether or not federal agents were focusing on or adhering to enforcement priorities within the scope of this segment of the illegal alien population.

Specifically, we looked at whether or not these individuals had been deported from the United States at least once prior to the traffic charges on which they were identified and taken into custody by immigration agents. Re-entry after deportation is a serious offense (a felony), and those who return illegally after deportation are a legitimate and important priority for enforcement.



Prior Removals for All Categories of Traffic-Related Crimes. As is immediately evident from Table 2, the number and percentage of traffic crime violators who were, in fact, previous deportees was high. In other words, in a majority of cases, the traffic offenders that were selected for deportation had other aggravating circumstances that weighed on their cases.

As can readily be seen, within the entire dataset of 10 years of removed aliens that we examined, 143,207 (55 percent) of the 258,689 individuals convicted of traffic-related offenses had been previously deported at least once, some several times. Under these circumstances, and contrary to what MPI suggests, it would be difficult to assert that federal immigration agents are not adhering to an important enforcement priority in tracking down and removing recidivist reentrants when they focus on aliens convicted of traffic-related crimes.

Prior Removals for a Subset of Traffic-Related Crimes. In addition to examining the entire database of removed aliens who had been convicted for traffic-related crimes to find out who had been deported previously, we also examined a subset of such aliens based on what others might term “lesser offenses” (a term we dispute, but nonetheless believed was useful to examine for illustrative purposes in our analysis).

This subset consisted only of removed aliens who had been convicted for the following categories of traffic-related crimes, which were described earlier in this Backgrounder:

DUI (both drug- and alcohol-related offenses)

Licensing violations

Liquor transportation

Traffic offenses

Unauthorized use of a vehicle/joyriding



Even focusing on so-called lesser offenses, we found that a significant number of these violators had been deported at least once prior to the removal the database captured.

The percentage of “lesser offense” violators who had been deported previously was higher than for the universe of removed aliens included in the entire set of traffic-related crimes (60 percent vs. 55 percent).

What We Found

We found that a majority of traffic-related crimes tend to be committed by adult male aliens (from late teens to mid 30s in age) who entered the country without inspection and therefore were almost certainly driving without a license and uninsured. This poses a huge risk to other drivers on America’s roadways.

We also know anecdotally from several cases that a number of those aliens whose most serious offense is listed as “driving under the influence” in fact injured or killed pedestrians or other drivers, but were for a variety of reasons not charged by police or prosecutors with the more serious offenses. In some egregious instances, the most serious charge levied was driving without a license, even when death or permanent maiming ensued. 6

A Snapshot by Crime Categories

Carjacking. Carjackings constituted an extremely small percentage (.01 percent) of the total of 204,036 removed aliens who were convicted of traffic-related offenses in the years 2004-2013. But while the overall number of carjackings is small, they are extremely violent crimes and can sometimes endanger not only the driver, but also passengers, including small children who sometimes are in the vehicle during high-speed getaways, thus risking injury or death.

Driving Under the Influence. The DUI-drugs and DUI-alcohol categories combined represent a staggering 57 percent of all traffic-related crimes over the 10-year period. Collectively, the DUI data should be a cause for alarm, given the high percentage of vehicle accidents in America today (especially those involving injury or death) that are drug or alcohol related. According to the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, drunk driving is the most frequently committed violent crime in America, killing 10,839 people last year, and costing the public billions of dollars annually. 7

It would be easy, but erroneous, to assume from the data that when the information indicates an alien’s most serious criminal conviction is for DUI, it represents a single offense. For example, an alien might be picked up repeatedly in the metropolitan Chicago area for DUI offenses, but never brought to the attention of federal authorities because the Cook County Jail has a policy of non-cooperation with ICE agents. Thus, it would not be until the alien was stopped for DUI in another jurisdiction that ICE might be notified of his arrest.

What is more, a DUI conviction in the dataset can be misleading in that, as discussed earlier, it may mask the fact that injuries, maiming, or death attended the accident that the drunk or drugged alien driver caused.

Hit-and-Run. Hit-and-run convictions represent almost 5 percent of traffic-related convictions among aliens removed during the years 2004-2013. Like DUI, hit-and-run crimes are amorphous: there is no way to know from the dataset how many of those hit-and-run vehicular accidents involved injury or death to others. And, like carjacking, hit-and-run can be a heinous offense because victims are often left to languish or die along the roadway because the driver flees rather than stopping to give aid. Thus the severity of the crime belies its small statistical weight.

Vehicular Homicide/Manslaughter. These convictions constitute almost 1 percent of traffic-related convictions in the 10-year period analyzed, but of course each one of them represents at least one death, and some of them several. We also believe that this category is in fact an undercount. Some of the homicides and manslaughters shown in the dataset may have been on the highways, but unless they were specifically labeled as “vehicular” we excluded them from our tally.

Transporting Alcohol. This offense represents a statistically insignificant proportion of the number of traffic-related crimes, but was included for completeness. Depending on the UCR encoding by the arresting officer, transporting alcohol might in fact range anywhere from a simple open-container violation to the much more serious crime of moving moonshine or untaxed whiskeys on the nation’s highways. It is also well to remember, however, that when one is violating the open-container laws, there is a high likelihood that one is, or will become, inebriated while driving.

Stolen Vehicles/Vehicle Theft. This combined category represents 6.5 percent of the total of traffic-related crimes although, like homicide and manslaughter, there is a likely undercount because unless the theft was specifically described as vehicular it was excluded from our analysis. Note also that, although we included stealing and theft of vehicles as traffic-related crimes, we did not include robbery or larceny from vehicles in the dataset.

Unauthorized Use of Vehicle/Joyriding. This category represents a mere 1 percent of the overall total of traffic-related crimes. It is important to understand, however, that a conviction for unauthorized use of a vehicle is quite frequently the result of a plea bargain down from the more serious felony of stealing a vehicle.

Licensing. This category of crime consists primarily of offenses such as failure to register a vehicle, expired license plates, etc. Licensing-related traffic crimes constituted .46 percent of the total. There is also likely some overlap with the traffic offenses category, depending on how the arresting/citing police officer encoded the offense for UCR purposes in his report.

Traffic Offenses. Traffic offenses consist of moving offenses such as speeding or failure to yield, as well as driver’s license violations (no license, expired license, etc.) and failure to maintain insurance coverage, etc. Not unexpectedly, these violations made up 30 percent of the entire volume of traffic-related crimes. As indicated above, there is likely some overlap with licensing violations in this category of offense.