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Why isn't this headlining the news?
Actually, though, the story isn't exactly a secret, having been reported by CBS and USA Today, among others, and has approximately zero connection to President Obama, and it's maybe a little less shocking than it thinks, too. It's the report of a report by the [jump]
Commonwealth of Independent States—sorry, make that Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which found that some 36,000 possibly deportable immigrants with criminal convictions were released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in 2013:
I kept looking at that list and thinking, gosh, that doesn't add up to anywhere near 36,000, let alone 88,000. That's because it's a selective list and missing some numbers, of which the big one is 17,228 non-DUI traffic offenses.Among them, the 36,007 had nearly 88,000 convictions, including:
- 193 homicide convictions (including one willful killing of a public official with gun)
- 426 sexual assault convictions
- 303 kidnapping convictions
- 1,075 aggravated assault convictions
- 1,160 stolen vehicle convictions
- 9,187 dangerous drug convictions
- 16,070 drunk or drugged driving convictions
- 303 flight escape convictions
It thus seems likely that an overwhelming majority of the released detainees were guilty of being bad drivers, with or without alcohol, and/or people who were busted for using "dangerous drugs", like marijuana as opposed to alcohol. We aren't told how the 2.4 convictions per person were distributed, but it's my guess that if there were a five-digit number of violent felons they would have told us that rather than hiding the information in these number-of-convictions figures, which are plainly meant to deceive and terrify. I'm guessing there were no more than a few hundred individuals with felony convictions of any kind, with five or ten convictions each, as suggested by USA Today's headline:
Government released hundreds of immigrant felons
Moreover, they had already paid their debt to society and had to be released in most cases whether ICE wanted to release them or not, and in many cases weren't deportable at all:
ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said the report misses the fact that many of the releases were carried out under orders from U.S. courts. For example, she said 75% of the people released who had murder convictions were "mandatory releases." Even when they're released, Gonzalez said, the undocumented immigrants were placed under restrictions such as GPS monitoring, telephone monitoring and in-person checks....
Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council, a group that supports efforts to grant legal status to the nation's undocumented immigrants, said many of the people listed in the ICE report were green card holders and all had served their court-ordered terms in prison.So they released the detainees because they had no legal grounds for holding on to them, and in the vast majority of cases no reason for holding on to them period. Needless to say it had nothing to do with the White House. Are you really going to have a problem with this?
Or are you maybe going to have a problem with CIS, a nativist organization with some fairly scary racist connections in its history and in its funding, as detailed by the Southern Poverty Law Center? And which deliberately distorts this information for obviously political purposes? More useful information on the current report can be found at the New York State Immigration Action Fund; give it a look.
Oh, and here's from comments at the Heritage Facebook, speaking of racism:
I'll wager that Odessa Graham who thinks it's the Senate's job to impeach the president also thinks she's an authority on the Constitution and refers to people like the rest of us as "low-information voters".
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