Las Cruces Sun-News 5:48 a.m. MT June 25, 2017
In this June 22, 2016, photo, Border Patrol agent Eduardo Olmos walks near the secondary fence separating Tijuana, Mexico, background, and San Diego in San Diego. U.S. immigration authorities caught barely half the people who illegally entered the country from Mexico last year, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security report that offers one of the most detailed assessments of U.S. border security ever compiled. The report found far fewer people are attempting to get into the U.S. than a decade ago and that 54 percent of those who tried were caught in the year ending Sept. 30, 2015. (Photo: Gregory Bull/The Associated Press
I am responding to Sunday's article “Immigrant dad speaks out” by Carlos Andres Lopez.
For context, 1,050,031 foreign nationals entered the United States legally for permanent residence in 2015 (latest numbers). Another 180,000,000 entered legally as non-immigrant visitors for pleasure, business, students, government workers and a host of other designations.
We welcome legal immigration.
According to the article, Mr. Taborda, Francia Elena Benitez-Castano, along with a 4-year-old son, Jefferson, came to the United States in 1998 on some sort of visas. We can assume they were not visas for permanent residence or we wouldn't be talking about them now. They then applied for asylum and were denied. After four years of legal process they were ordered to return to their home country. They likely had outstanding warrants of deportation from which there is no relief. Taborda and Benitez-Castano made a conscious decision to ignore the order and chose instead to stay in violation of law, living here illegally ever since.
The notion that because you have no other criminal record somehow insulates you from deportation is false. This idea was created by President Barack Obama when he arbitrarily decided to exercise unprecedented “prosecutorial discretion” through edict instead of Congress. It is true that criminal aliens are the first priority, mainly due to limited detention space and manpower. If an ICE agent in the field encounters and ignores a final order of deportation, that act would be a dereliction of duty.
In the 1980s, the federal government implemented a policy not to conduct immigration enforcement operations in schools, hospitals or places of worship except in exigent circumstances. The fact that Mr. Taborda has been utilizing the church as a safe haven from the law is hardly admirable and certainly not a legal solution. If you or I harbor an illegal alien, we can be charged with a felony under 8 USC 1324.
The reporter says Taborda left a hospital for a reason not explained with the younger son when he was confronted by the ICE agents doing their jobs as investigators. Supposedly they told him that if he followed them to El Paso (where the detention center is located) they would release the mother to care for the youngest son in Las Cruces and, presumably, keep him, Mr Taborda, in custody. This would make some sense from the standpoint of not separating the youngest child from his mother until other arrangements could be made. For example, the younger child could return to Colombia with his mother. The agents did not go in the school or take an enforcement action in the school which would have been a violation of policy but, rather, waited outside.
Afterward, Mr. Taborda, instead of driving to El Paso under escort as he agreed to, fled from the agents and ran to the sanctuary of a church. The reason the agents “followed aggressively” is that they had just been made fools of by trusting Mr. Taborda to do what he agreed to do and was now attempting to escape federal custody! I bet they had fun explaining that to their boss.
Vicki Gaubeca is a paid activist who sensationalized the events. The agents did not “blatantly” violate any internal policies. From reading the article, you know that the agents neither harassed Taborda in the hospital nor in the school (they stayed outside), and that Taborda was escaping from custody when he went to the church. The agents showed admirable restraint by not using exigent circumstance to arrest him in the church parking lot.
There is nothing “sinister” about enforcing immigration law unless, I guess, you are a lawyer for the ACLU.
Paul F. Wells is a retired US Border Patrol field operations supervisor.