I’ll be doing a phone-in to Fox & Friends in about 4 minutes to discuss the Bush administration’s continued “catch and release” policies for illegal aliens.

Tune in if you’re free!

Thanks to John O’Sullivan for the mention is his excellent piece, “The Crackdown that wasn’t” in today’s NYPost:

IT happened last Wednesday, and it was nicely timed.

One week later - about now, in fact - the U.S. Senate was scheduled to reconvene to discuss an immigration bill. The bill proposes to amnesty most of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and to admit millions more legally as guest-workers. The controversial measure is strongly promoted by the White House and both party leaderships in the Senate - but opposed by most Republican congressmen and a large majority of voters.

Something was needed to break the log-jam of opposition.

And last Wednesday federal agents “swooped” on plants in 26 states belonging to IFCO, a U.S. subsidiary of a Dutch firm supplying wood pallets and plastic containers to industry, and arrested 1,187 illegal immigrant workers. Seven former and current IFCO managers were also charged with employing illegal aliens. The next day, Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff held a press conference to stress that such tough enforcement of immigration law, internally as well as at the border, would now be the rule.

Having established its willingness to crack down on illegality, the administration’s political machine crossed its fingers and hoped that this display would now help passage of the “Not an Amnesty” law.

All this was not only timely; it was powerfully symbolic. What it symbolized, however, was not the tough enforcement of immigration law but its colander-like leaky ineffectiveness.

For even before Chertoff had spoken (but not before blogger Michelle Malkin had predicted it), four-fifths of the illegals arrested had been . . . released.

Two hundred and seventy-five of them were deported. The rest were sent away in return for a promise to return for a court hearing. Many, probably most, will disappear. And since the government’s computers were “down,” their brush with immigration enforcement may not even be officially recorded.

“Comprehensive immigration reform” starts with fixing the deportation mess now.

Not later.

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