By John F. Di Leo -
The news of the day concerns a repeat offender, so we will begin with the news, then move on to the analysis:
Sergio Jose Martinez, age 31, having been deported twenty times previously, was arrested in Portland, Oregon on July 24, having broken into the home of a 65-year-old woman, where he raped and beat her, then stole her car, a 2011 Toyota Prius.
Now held on two million dollars bond, the police and prosecutors are gathering evidence for trial. Mr. Martinez’ long criminal record includes both felony and misdemeanor convictions over the years, such as repeated border-jumping, burglary, and battery. He is, incidentally, a daily user of methamphetamine.
One might ask why and how he was on the street at all, having been convicted of such crimes in recent years… and been deported, so many, many times.
When Portland had him in jail for a prior crime, last November, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informed the city of Portland that they were ordered to notify ICE before letting him go, so that ICE could deport him a 21st time. Portland neglected to do so; they just set him free, releasing him back into the community to assault and terrorize this one more innocent victim (and probably others). Being a Sanctuary City, Portland makes it an official practice to refuse to comply with ICE orders.
Constitutional Rights
Among our primary errors in dealing with the rampant crime we see across the country today is that we treat non-citizens as if they have all the same Constitutional rights as citizens do. In fact, they most certainly do not.
We have seen the defense bar grow in power over the past half century or more, as they have mastered such tools as the technicality acquittal and the jury selection process to set guilty criminals free. These are largely due to Constitutional interpretations that cannot be alleviated unless and until a wiser Supreme Court corrects past errors and swings the pendulum back from the criminal toward the victim.
But we don’t have to apply such defendant-coddling approaches to non-citizens. By definition, Constitutional rights are protections granted to American citizens. We only extend these rights to others at our discretion. People here with permission, such as green-card holders and foreigners with tourist and work visas should receive largely similar treatment as US citizens, with the withdrawal of such visas being among the potential penalties available if guilt is determined.
And for people who aren’t here with our permission… there is no need to extend our Constitutional rights to them at all. If they aren’t here with our permission, we have every right to deport them immediately upon apprehension. We may not choose to, because border-jumping is so easy in the modern world, but we have every right to do so. Without our permission to be here, they can be ejected.
But our problem isn’t just when a foreigner is here without permission. Many illegals are decent, law-abiding people whose parents brought them here illegally, as children, through no fault of their own, for example. Our problem is the risk and cost to our society of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, whom we call “criminal illegals.” These are the drunk or high drivers who kill people in car crashes, the muggers and rapists who assault victims in alleys or their own apartments, the terrorists who come to infect our towns with sharia-held enclaves, the drug dealers and gang members who terrorize our big cities.
As illegal aliens, there is no reason to give them the soft hand of a republican court system; we can and should give them the firm hand of an authoritarian government instead.
If we normally give a convicted citizen mugger a year in jail, give the illegal alien mugger ten. If we normally give a convicted citizen rapist five years in jail, give the illegal alien rapist thirty. If we normally give a drug dealer and gangland killer twenty years, give the illegal alien killer the death penalty.
And there is no reason for them to have the gentle, criminal-coddling court procedures either. We have, for example, a Code of Military Justice in the Armed Services; there is plenty of precedent for different types of courtroom rules for different classes already. We may not be able to do anything about the technicality acquittal when the thug is a citizen, but it’s time to stop allowing border-jumping rapists to use the same tools.
It is high time we set a separate code for all criminal prosecutions of illegal aliens. Be certain of guilt, of course… that goes without saying… but we can and must put an end to the technicality acquittals, endless appeals, ridiculously short sentences, and revolving door jurisprudence in general… at least as far as illegal aliens are concerned.
The Sanctuary City
In ancient and medieval times, there was an honorable concept in place: the idea that a person who feared the powers that be – a person certain of being killed in pursuit so that he would never have a fair trial – could rush to the altar of the nearest church and claim Sanctuary. If he could make it to that altar, and grip the corners with both hands, he would be protected by the church and be guaranteed fair procedures.
Does this need apply today?
We already have a solid criminal justice system. We arrest people and let them go, we prosecute them and let them go, we even convict them and let them go. The porous nature of our criminal justice system is a well-known fact around the world. With the very rare exception of a “dirty cop” – and yes, in a population as large as the police officers, sheriffs and deputies of American law enforcement, there probably are some – criminals have no reason to fear our criminal justice system.
The time-honored concept of Sanctuary would indeed be useful in many countries, but this isn’t one of them.
By contrast, the modern American Left has twisted the concept of Sanctuary into a new and different meaning, utterly foreign to the original intent of the word. They now use it as a tool to oppose our national immigration and invasion laws.
So we have cities like Portland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas… and so many more… that have formally declared themselves Sanctuary Cities, under the modern definition: a city in which the police force has been directed by the mayor and city council to obstruct federal immigration enforcement efforts… to release known illegal aliens… to go so far as to publicly invite illegals into their city limits, where they will be “protected.”
How on earth does such a position help the constituents of such mayors and aldermen?
- A Sanctuary City designation draws unskilled laborers to compete with the local working class population for scant employment opportunities…
- It draws costly welfare recipients to deplete their already stretched coffers…
- it draws gang members and other criminals to terrorize their local communities…
- it fills their courts with robbers and rapists and dealers and killers…
- and it fills their public hospitals with the victims of their muggings, their knifings, their rapes, their overdoses, and their shootings.
Why then would any sane politician support it? Why on earth do these Democratic Party strongholds insist on such a dangerous and costly process, so clearly destructive to their constituents?
Because they vote.
It’s illegal, of course, but these are cities of vote fraud, cities in which everyone gets to vote, once, twice, five times, ten, as long as they vote the way that’s expected. And so they do.
Those of us who live in Cook County, Illinois, are watching all our taxes go up this summer: a one-third increase in the state income tax, continued annual skyrocketing of our property taxes, even a new beverage tax… each one another few hundred dollars a year or more. Many lower middle class Illinoisans and up will see their tax bite rise by over a thousand dollars this year… for many of them, it will be many thousands.
The multitude of illegal aliens in Chicagoland – and the massive costs that their presence brings – is among the primary drivers of these crippling problems.
The Immigrant Population and the Porous Borders of the Modern World
We are told that all immigrants are the same, that people are people, and we should welcome them all into our communities, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Immigrants who come legally, waiting their turn to obtain visas, then living in the light of day, are often wonderful people, hard workers, decent people who seek the opportunities promised by America’s Founding Fathers. Legal immigrants tend to be honest folks dedicated to the rule of law, people who fled nations of poverty and corruption to be a part of a nation in which hard work can bring prosperity and honor.
But immigrants who come illegally are a much more diverse bunch. They include the less literate, the sicker or weaker, those often with drug history, tuberculosis, or other illnesses or chronic weaknesses of the worst of the third world. Not that we shouldn’t feel sorry for them – of course we should – but immigration law should not be based on charity at the expense of American citizens.
The illegal immigrant population often includes people who have already been deported, once, twice, five times, ten times. It includes gang members, gang recruiters, gang leaders, ready to further the infestation of our cities so they become ever more like the home countries they left. MS-13 is the group in the news today, but there are so many mafias like it, from countries on almost every continent. Our visa process may not catch them all, but it catches many. A porous border, of course, renders such efforts useless.
This is not to say that all legal immigrants are great, or that all illegal immigrants are criminals. Like any large group, they are a mix…
But we can safely assume that the vast majority of legal immigrants, having entered the right way, will match the existing population of the Americans with whom they hope to assimilate.
And we can make no such assumption about the illegals.
All we can do is look at the cities, and study the statistics, and recognize the unbelievable cost of our porous border. Cities in flames, ravaged by foreign drugs and gangland control. Cities in poverty, as businesses flee the crime to safer suburbs or even safer states. Cities in bankruptcy, as the cost of a safety net becomes unbearable as endless patients are imported to fill the public hospitals, as endless occupants are imported to fill public housing, as endless indigents are imported to fill the soup kitchens, as endless killers are imported to keep on filling the city morgues.
And what of our great idea, this marvelous concept that America is a wonderful melting pot, in which the diversity of our people will help to conquer natural bigotry and help bring groups together?
Every time another Sergio Jose Martinez makes the news, our nation is driven farther apart.
It is time to stand up for the honest immigrants, the honest citizens, the honest tourists, the honest workers.
It is time to stand up for Americans – both those born here and those who arrived legally – and make the streets safe for them all, once again.
It is time to enforce the law, and prosecute the outlaws – the border-jumpers, the drug dealers, the robbers and rapists and killers.
And what about the mayors and city councils, the aldermen and trustees, who invite such criminals in, to terrorize, endanger, and impoverish their own communities, just for the political benefit of a certain voting block?
They are the most guilty of them all.
Copyright 2017 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance lecturer, writer, and actor. As a Chicago Italian, he knows something about the prejudices sometimes held against a known criminal immigrant element and its broader ethnic group… and he knows that fighting crime is more important than worrying about feelings. You don’t give the Camorra and the Ndrangheta a break just because you don’t want to hurt the feelings of southern Italians; hopefully, society understands the difference between honest immigrants and criminal ones, and treats each as they deserve.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included.
