Since Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has offered to work cooperatively with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials years ago, Newsday has been on a crusade trying to discredit the program, ICE officials, and Nassau leaders, while painting illegal immigrants as innocent victims who have been abused by the supposedly lawless government enforcers of the immigration statutes.
Their latest salvo in seeking to undermine immigration enforcement was their May 7 article entitled “ICE arrests in East Meadow jails,” with the subhead “Fewer than 5% of Nassau detainees violent criminals.”
The connotation of this headline is that, if a detainee is an illegal alien, but doesn’t have a subsequent criminal record after entering the nation illegally, he or she should not be handed over to the federal authorities.
That is utter nonsense.
When was the law changed saying that you can come here illegally, but be immune from deportation, so long as you don’t rape or murder someone?
Yes, it is true that President Trump has said that the feds will seek to prioritize those who have criminal records; there is nothing that says those who are arrested in immigration sweeps receive a get-out-of-jail-free card simply because they weren’t convicted of a separate crime after committing the crime of crossing the border illegally.
Adopting the type of program that Newsday seems to be endorsing — i.e., ignoring all those who have come here illegally, but haven’t committed subsequent crimes — would in essence create an open border.
The people around the world — all 8 billion of them — must know that they have to wait in line properly for the privilege of entering this amazing country. If they violate our laws and cut the line in front of the millions of people who are patiently waiting to enter, they should indeed be subject to deportation.
If we send a message to the rest of the world that you can cut the line, come here illegally and stay forever, just because you haven’t committed a subsequent crime, we will be opening the floodgates even beyond what Joe Biden did in his short tenure.
It is perfectly fine for a media outlet to report on the percentage of deportees that committed crimes in addition to their original crime of illegally crossing the border. (Though the percentages used by Newsday relate to those convicted, but makes no mention of how many have charges pending.)
But Newsday’s intent is clear from the troves of articles it publishes weekly depicting the feds as the bad guys and illegals as the victims. Case in point is the cover page article the next day extolling the need for illegal aliens to have taxpayer-funded assigned psychiatrists to help them cope with the fact that they were finally caught being here illegally.
In their articles, Newsday is quick to quote illegal immigration advocates from the many NGOs that have popped up over the decades, while also getting in good shots from biased liberal illegal immigration lawyers, but rarely is there a quote from a school district or the hospital emergency rooms that are bursting at the seams from these illegal immigration patterns.
How about the taxpayers who are now footing the bill for free healthcare for those who are not supposed to be here in the first place or the young college graduate who can’t afford rents on Long Island in part because so many illegal aliens are competing for the same limited housing stock?
If the liberals in government and the media want to stop deporting anyone other than a mass murderer or a rapist, then they should win enough elections so that they can change our immigration laws. In the meantime, the law that’s always been on the books still remains. You cannot come into this country illegally and expect not to be deported. That’s not the way it works.