By Steve Levy
A jury just awarded illegal immigrants over $100 million in awards from county taxpayers because they were detained for 48 hours by the county in preparation for federal authorities to deport them.
What is our country coming to?
It was perfectly reasonable that then-Suffolk County Sheriff Vincent DeMarco would work with the federal government to detain illegal aliens they encountered for a short, reasonable time until federal authorities could pick them up to deport them.
If we don’t have such a procedure, it would be almost impossible to deport the vast majority of those here illegally. We would, in essence, be declaring ourselves an open border society.
The case that prompted this lawsuit revolved around an illegal alien who was driving drunk and caused a crash. He was a repeat offender and the Suffolk Sheriff notified ICE. The feds were not able to get there immediately, so the county had a policy of detaining them for just up to 48 hours until they could arrive.
Remarkably, a judge ruled this to be unconstitutional. So, what are federal authorities supposed to do? Are they to let these offenders out and then ask them to kindly return on their own volition? Good luck with that.
When we keep sending messages that we’re not serious about enforcing our immigration laws, we, in essence, we are telling the world that it’s fine to cross illegally and cut in front of others because they’ll never be deported unless they murder someone.
And even then, there will be groups like Latino Justice try to gum up the works to make it more difficult.
Even if the 48-hour detention is indeed upheld in higher courts as invalid. Why in the world would we allow people who are not even here legally to be rewarded with million-dollar settlements after flouting our laws? There’s something quite disturbing about that.
Let’s send a message that it’s not OK to come here illegally, and you’re certainly not going to be able to get jury verdicts in the millions, thereby further punishing the taxpayer, simply because the government sought to hold you in the process of removing you from the country.