The full impact of the Bush administration’s failure to secure our southern border will not be known for some time. But one thing is already clear: Despite belated attempts to enforce federal immigration laws, border security has become little more than a numbers and public relations game for the Bush administration. No amount of grandstanding, like last December’s much-publicized roundups of illegals working at six Swift meat-packing plants in Colorado, can conceal the fact the administration is not serious about controlling the southern border. And the national security implications of this failure are truly disturbing.
It’s also disturbing that to a great extent this is a problem of our own making, as is vividly demonstrated by revelations that the Justice Department as a matter of policy declines to prosecute illegal immigrants until they have been arrested a sixth time. American citizens don’t get five “Get Out of Jail Free” cards when they break the law. But federal prosecutors have in effect been handing them out routinely to illegal immigrants by declining to press charges unless they’ve been arrested at least six times. The Houston Chronicle revealed this fact after discovering it in a 2005 Department of Justice memo released in the controversy surrounding the administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys.
In an e-mail sent to the Justice Department last August, soon-to-be-fired San Diego prosecutor Carol Lam inadvertently described what was really happening while the public was being reassured that violent criminals were not among those being caught and released: “Essentially I must make a choice — prosecute the coyotes who are smuggling but not endangering anyone, or the rapists and murderers who are coming back to rape and murder again.”
Even the rusty fence along San Diego’s 66-mile border, made from recycled military landing mats welded to 12-foot poles, is a joke. Anybody can walk right through it. Last year, Border Patrol agents arrested 142,204 illegal immigrants in San Diego County alone, many of them repeat offenders. Then the whole process of catch-convict-detain-deport starts all over again.
Despite the addition of 7,500 beds in six border states, the federal government is now struggling to find room for some 28,000 detainees, including those arrested in stepped-up workplace immigration raids. Border Patrol officials try to send illegal border crossers, most from Mexico, back home within 24 hours, where most try again another day.
Of course, all of this catch-up effort would be unnecessary if the administration had taken its responsibility seriously and kept all unwelcome visitors from entering the U.S. in the first place.
