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Jewish World Review July 29, 2005 / 22 Tammuz, 5765 The travesty of ‘catch and release’ By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
There are two types of people who are intimately familiar with
the practice of "catch and release" — fishermen and border-control
agents. Fishermen at least get some satisfaction from it. For
border-control agents, it is a symptom of this nation's contempt for
its own immigration laws.
When Mexicans are caught crossing into the U.S., they are
returned across the border. When illegals from countries Other Than
Mexico (OTMs) are caught, it's more complicated. They often come
from Latin American countries that have various obstacles to
repatriation, and we don't have the space to hold them. So they are
released into the U.S. after they promise to show up at a
deportation hearing. That promise and $80 might get you the services
of an illegal day laborer.
Congress is beginning a scorching battle over immigration
policy, pitting anti-enforcement business and ethnic lobbies backing
the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill against grass-roots supporters of a
tough-enforcement approach, embodied in the more muscular Kyl-Cornyn
bill. There is no better emblem of the border insanity Congress must
fix than the travesty of "catch and release."
The Border Patrol is set to apprehend 150,000 OTMs in this
fiscal year. Most of those are caught in the Rio Grande Valley
Sector in Southeast Texas, where 52,160 OTMs have been caught so far
this year. Of those, 92 percent have been released on their own
recognizance — and are probably bound for an urban area near you.
The immigration court in Harlingen, Texas, has a failure-to-appear
rate of roughly 90 percent.
The illegals are supposed to provide an address where they can
be found. Instead, they provide fake addresses or none at all. OTMs
are known to present themselves to border agents once they cross the
border so they can get their "notice to appear" (or "to disappear,"
as it is commonly called) and duly proceed on their way.
Law-enforcement officials tell of people claiming to be from South
or Central America being released although they don't speak Spanish.
An estimated 400,000 fugitive illegals in the U.S. have failed to
appear for their hearings.
The office within the Department of Homeland Security
responsible for detentions and removals has 18,500 detention beds.
Of those, 16,800 are reserved for criminals and others who urgently
have to be detained. Those beds are overwhelmed, since so many
criminal aliens attempt to (and do) make it into the U.S. (Between
March 2003 and February 2004, nearly 80,000 criminal aliens were
deported.) That leaves only 1,700 beds for everyone else. It's not
enough.
What is mostly missing, however, is political will. Current high
levels of illegal immigration are not inevitable. When the U.S. has
raised its terror alert, border crossings have diminished because
would-be illegals figure it will be harder to make it across.
According to the Border Patrol, illegal crossings declined by 50
percent in areas briefly patrolled by the Minuteman citizen
activists earlier this year.
The reform bill sponsored by Republican Sens. Jon Kyl (Ariz.)
and John Cornyn (Texas) would encourage authorities to make greater
use of expedited removal, setting aside $50 million for it. On the
other end, it pushes the countries of origin to cooperate by making
a temporary-guest-worker program in the U.S. available to their
citizens only if the governments take back illegals within three
days. Finally, the bill provides for another 10,000 detention beds
over five years.
It would be a step toward rationality at the border, and toward
appropriately reserving the practice of "catch and release" for
trout.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
