Guest Post by Onan Coca (Cross Posted From Eagle Rising)
This is another example of the march of injustice in Obama’s America today.
In January 19-year old Edwin Mejia killed 21-year old Sarah Root in a drunk driving accident.Root had graduated from college just hours before the fatal accident. Mejia was arrested and appeared before a judge, where he was identified as an illegal alien.
The Immigration and Custom Enforcement agency (ICE) admits that the Douglas County Police Department asked them numerous times about placing a detainer (keeping him in jail) on Mejia, who had skipped a court hearing another time on charges of drunk driving and had a warrant for his arrest. But ICE rejected the requests.
As in all such cases, immigration authorities had the option of having Mejia held because of his illegal status but chose not to because they believed he “did not meet Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s (ICE) enforcement priorities” as laid out by the Obama administration. So, instead, Mejia agreed to a court mandated twice-a-day appointment to submit to a breathalyzer test and was released on his own recognizance. He hasn’t been seen since and is now on ICE’s “Most Wanted List.”
In the aftermath of his disappearance the question becomes, how did the adminstration allow this to happen? Mejia had been charged with killing a person. How does this vehicular or any other type of homicide not meet the Obama administration’s standard for criminal enforcement of an illegal?
While it is nice to see that ICE now seems to be taking this matter seriously, there focus comes too little too late. Senator [score]Ben Sasse[/score] (R-NE) recently expressed his exasperation with the administration’s response in a series of letters to the Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and ICE Director Sarah Saldana. “This important development underscores the seriousness of the situation, something ICE should have recognized immediately. Mr. Mejia should not need to be on this list — he should be in jail.
ICE originally said that Mr. Mejia was not an ‘enforcement priority’ but this morning he was placed on their Most Wanted list. The public still does not have a complete account of what went wrong. It is well past time for ICE to make all the facts known so this never happens again.
If this man is not a threat to public safety, then who is?”
Senator called the response he received from the ICE chief, “bureaucratic nonsense” .
This case underscores the major issues with Obama’s schizophrenic policies on illegal immigration. The Obama administration agrees that our illegal immigration laws are valid and should be enforced, but they disagree about what “enforced” actually means. While most Americans believe “enforce” means to make sure that our laws are followed or consequences are paid, the Obama team seems to believe that enforced simply means “pay lip service to and pretend to care about.”
All Americans need to demand the Obama administration enforce the laws, as passed by Congress, and not as they imagine those laws to be. The hypocrisy of the liberal arguments over enforcing gay marriage rules, while they blatantly ignore our immigration laws must be answered. If they’ll not follow laws that they disagree with, we should wholeheartedly and raucously ignore the laws we believe to be unjust.