What do you mean you would
have hoped the ‘Dream Act’, passed to make your jobs easier to
address clearly mapped and posted nation’s borders?
If your unsure of who’s borders and citizens you are protecting then why have DHS or ICE?
From
the border perspective, passing something like this would in fact
have a positive effect on our ability to address our nation’s
borders,” said Customs and Border Patrol Deputy Commissioner David
Aguilar. “It would support our efforts to focus on safety threats,
smugglers and human traffickers.”
called the DREAM Act “a great
force enhancer,” and said that contrary to DREAM Act opponents’
criticisms, the border was more secure than it had ever been.
“From
our perspective the DREAM Act and its passage by the Senate is
entirely consistent with this [enforcement policy] focusing limited
resources of government on public safety, border security and the
integrity of the system,” said John Morton, head of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.
Morton said that ICE’s priority was to focus
on “the removal of criminal offenders” and last year his agency had
deported nearly a record 392,000 people, and an unprecedented
number—195,000—who’d been convicted of criminal offenses. Yet the
majority people who were deported had never been convicted of any
crime before, and
the majority of those who did have a
criminal record had been convicted of minor infractions like traffic
violations, or nonviolent drug offenses.
Criminal
street gangs—mostly comprised of illegal immigrants—are responsible
for the majority of violent crimes in the United States and are the
primary distributors of most illicit drugs. The alarming, but not
surprising, information is revealed in a
new report
published by the Justice Department’s
National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC),
an FBI task force created in 2005 to curb the growing threat of
violent gangs in the U.S. The NGIC teams up with state and local law
enforcement agencies throughout the nation to enforce, study and
intercept gangs and has published several reports documenting their
activities.
Before the agency’s publication was made public a
national newspaper revealed
some of its findings. It says that up to 80% of crime in the U.S. is
committed by gangs and that gang membership in this country has grown
to 1 million, an increase of 200,000 in the last few years.
Additionally,
gangs are the “primary retail-level distributors of most illicit
drugs” in the U.S. and several are sophisticated enough to compete
with major Mexican drug-trafficking cartels. Most of the country’s
state and local enforcement agencies have reported gang activity in
their jurisdiction and the problem will only get worse, according to
the FBI.
CRS Report For Congress Mexico’s Drug Cartels
In
fact, a high-ranking FBI director said gangs have followed the
migration paths of illegal alien laborers to avoid big-city police
departments that have cracked down on their activities. An example is
the notoriously violent Salvadoran gang known as
Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, which has spread throughout the U.S.—to at least 42 states—and continues expanding.
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“Were
the DREAM Act not to pass we would handle the situation as we do
now,” Morton said, “which is: enforce the law, focusing on our
priorities and act on individual cases on a case by case basis.”
The
DREAM Act would allow undocumented youth who have lived in the
country for at least five years to get on a path to citizenship if they
have a clean criminal record and commit two years to higher education
or the military, and clear a host of other hurdles and checks. The
House passed the DREAM Act last week, and it is scheduled for a vote in
the Senate on Saturday morning. The DHS officials’ comments offer a
final endorsement for the narrow immigration bill, which by White House
estimates would benefit 65,000 undocumented youth.
Those who oppose the DREAM Act today are anti-immigrant groups like NumbersUSA and
ALIPAC, who say the bill “rewards” undocumented immigrants. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions called the DREAM Act
“amnesty”
and said that the DREAM Act would encourage more people to immigrate
to the U.S., even though the DREAM Act only benefits those who’ve
already lived in the country for five years, and demands that eligible
youth get on a decade-long probationary waiting period before they
can qualify even for a green card.
Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has said she
opposes
the DREAM Act because it would allow young people to sponsor their
family members for naturalization, and thus benefit many more people
than she’s comfortable with.
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