Illegal alien and drunk-driving arrestee Obama Onyango (a.k.a. “Uncle Omar”) was spotted in court in Framingham, MA.

The joke’s on all of us.

Via the Boston Herald:

A giggling Onyango Obama — the president’s illegal alien half uncle — made a brief appearance in Framingham District Court today on charges he was drunk when he nearly struck an unmarked police cruiser last month.

Obama, 67, was visibly amused at the media spectacle, stifling laughter several times before his 30-second court appearance where a judge set a Nov. 17 pre-trial conference.

Obama did not acknowledge a Herald reporter’s question upon arrival at Framingham District Court and neither he nor his lawyer made any comment on his way out where they were followed to the parking lot by a horde of media.

His attorney, P. Scott Bratton, did, however, tell the Herald that Obama, who has been living illegally in the United States for nearly 20 years, has returned to work at Conti Liquors in Framingham.

“He has. He’s doing well,” Bratton said.

Tax-evader. Deportation fugitive. Document fraud artist. Drunk. And now, he’s back to work with his bogus documents at a liquor store facing no sanctions for employing an illegal alien while taking another bite at the immigration court apple even though his case was already reviewed and rejected.

Like they say in the open-borders community: “It ain’t over ’til the alien wins.”

…And giggles all the way to safe harbors from the rule of law.

***

Meanwhile in Massachusetts, another drunk deportation fugitive hits an 11-year-old girl:

Police: 11-Year-Old Massachusetts Girl Hit, Dragged by Truck Driven by Illegal Immigrant

Uncle Omar is once again the beneficiary of America’s reckless immigration catch-and-release policies.

He has been quietly released from federal custody and all lips are sealed. DHS won’t say a word. The White House won’t say a word. Onyango Obama’s immediate family in Boston won’t say a word. And the lawyer who was all set to appeal his deportation is out of the loop.

Where in the world is Uncle Omar?

Officials released President Obama’s uncle from Plymouth County jail yesterday after holding him for more than two weeks on an immigration detainer for violating an order to return to his native Kenya in 1992.

US officials refused to disclose any other information about Onyango Obama, who remained in the United States undetected until Framingham police arrested him Aug. 24 on drunken driving and other charges.

Yesterday, federal immigration officials refused to say whether the 67-year-old Framingham resident posted bond, whether they are keeping track of his whereabouts, or even whether they are still seeking his deportation, raising questions about public accountability in the case.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement website confirmed Obama’s release by listing him as “not in custody.’’

As I said last week — and it bears repeating again this 9/11 anniversary weekend:

Open-borders advocates will call Uncle Omar “harmless.” But it turns out he’s not only a repeat deportation absconder who has ignored two court orders to leave the country, but he is also a deadbeat who owes thousands in back taxes and a fraudulent Social Security card-holder who has managed to evade authorities for half a century.

The policy that allowed Omar to disappear is “voluntary departure” — a security-undermining mechanism that allows illegal alien border-jumpers and visa-overstayers to simply deport themselves after going through the federal immigration court system. Omar lost his first case to stay in the country in 1989; he lost a second bid with the Board of Immigration Appeals in 1992.

Then, as 400,000 to 700,000 illegal alien deportation absconders have done over the past two decades, Omar simply thumbed his nose at the law again and treated his entry into America as an entitlement instead of a privilege.

Now, we know there was at least one other Obama deportation fugitive hiding in plain view who benefited from the freeze.

More damningly, we know that both Republican and Democratic administrations continue to play politics with homeland security while paying lip service to the 9/11 dead.

After the attacks, DHS officials discovered the full danger that the vast ocean of deportation fugitives posed. Consider the case of Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb-builder who entered the U.S. illegally through Canada in 1996 and 1997. He claimed political asylum based on alleged persecution by Israelis, was released on a reduced $5,000 bond posted by a man who was himself an illegal alien, and then skipped his asylum hearing after calling his attorney and lying about his whereabouts. In June 1997, after his lawyer withdrew Mezer’s asylum claim, a federal immigration judge ordered Mezer to leave the country on a “voluntary departure order.” Mezer ignored the useless piece of paper. He joined a New York City bombing plot before being arrested in July 1997 after a roommate tipped off local police.

Countless jihadists have benefited enormously from lax enforcement of deportation orders and asylum loopholes. Jihad plotters Ramzi Yousef and Mir Aimal Kansi also exploited our catch-and-release system by invoking asylum and evading swamped authorities before plotting and executing jihadist attacks.

The post-9/11 absconder apprehension initiative has been decimated. The total number of apprehensions of illegal aliens by immigration enforcement agencies is less than half of what it was five years ago, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. And the White House is dispensing deportation waivers like Pez candy en masse.

“Always remember. Never forget.” Words, just words.

Oh, Uncle Omar.

We’ll get to more of him in a moment.

Over the past decade, I’ve reported on America’s bottomless deportation abyss. After the 9/11 attacks, it finally dawned on federal homeland security officials that maybe it wasn’t such a smart policy to allow 400,000 illegal aliens who had been ordered deported to remain on the loose. These absconders who entered the country illegally, evaded judicial deportation orders, and absconded from justice were beneficiaries of a chaotic system clogged by conflicting statutes, incomprehensible administrative regulations, bureaucratic and judicial fiefdoms, selective enforcement, and a feeding frenzy of obstructionist immigration lawyers.

It is a climate which continues to favor illegal aliens’ rights over citizens’ safety.

I’ve reminded you repeatedly about these deportation truths as clueless politicians on both sides of the aisle blabber about “comprehensive immigration reform”/mass amnesty. In July, I pointed you to a Center for Immigration Studies study that updated and underscored many of the deportation fundamentals we’ve stressed over the years:

* A large percentage of aliens flee from removal proceedings – perhaps as many as 59 percent of all those released to await hearings. On a cost basis from the alien’s perspective, this makes sense. If you are in proceedings and have little chance of relief, why not treat the bond money (if it’s even required) as the cost of having been caught, and then flee, hoping to stay under the radar for as long as possible, perhaps until the next amnesty?

* The total number of apprehensions of illegal aliens by immigration enforcement agencies is less than half of what it was five years ago. For instance, the drop in apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is often explained by improvements in border security; however, this rationale is suspect, as has been pointed out by the Rand Corp. in a study of border metrics. But ICE apprehensions also have dropped steeply, although there has been only a modest drop in the size of the illegal population inside the United States.

When the White House began issuing its deportation waivers last week, I reminded you again about the endless appeals process and immigration litigation lottery played by deportable aliens and their open-borders lawyers. And remember: Capitol Hill compounds the problem with a raft of special private relief bills that protect illegal alien criminals.

This chaos creates a friendly atmosphere in which those who plot to destroy the American dream can hide, work, and flourish. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that awoke snoozing feds to the nexus between systemic lax immigration enforcement and compromised homeland security, the paparazzi president has nothing to say about the deportation abyss. We’ll get photo ops and platitudes about never forgetting. The open-borders lobby will get a continuing windfall of get-out-of-deportation passes.

In November 2008, Barack Obama’s unemployed illegal alien aunt who had been living in public housing for years received special dispensation from the Bush administration despite evading deportation orders for years. Despite failing to win an asylum bid and despite ignoring a judicial determination that she return home, Zeituni Onyango won another bid in the immigration court system. In May 2010, the unemployed illegal alien deportation fugitive won her case and remains in the country today — free to moan and whine about how badly America has treated her while living on the taxpayers’ dime.

And then came Uncle Omar. The brother of Auntie Zeituni and half-brother of President Obama’s father, “Omar” Obama Onyango was arrested for drunk driving last week (h/t to Michael Graham) and is being detained on an immigration detainer. He did have a job, unlike his sister. It was, alas, at a liquor store. The Boston Herald reports today that the uncle (whom Obama referred to in his best-selling “Dreams of My Father” as “Uncle Omar”) “had a valid Social Security number for at least 19 years, despite being an illegal immigrant ordered to be deported back to Kenya.”

The Herald further adds:

Mike Rogers, a spokesman for Cleveland immigration attorney Margaret Wong, who is representing Onyango, said he “wouldn’t know how” Onyango obtained a Social Security number. Wong is the same lawyer who represented the president’s aunt, Zeituni Onyango, in her fight to win asylum last year. Reached at her apartment in a South Boston public housing complex yesterday, Zeituni Onyango said of her brother’s arrest: “Why don’t you go to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C., and ask your president? Not me.” She then hung up on a reporter.

The bust came just days after another illegal immigrant was charged with running down and killing a 23-year-old man in Milford.

Asked about the issue yesterday, Gov. Deval Patrick said: “You know my stance: Illegal is illegal. We need comprehensive immigration reform.”

More nonsense and pabulum from America’s open-borders know-nothings. They’ve turned the American Dream on its head. Entry into this country is no longer treated as a privilege, but an irrevocable right for every last griping Zeituni and reckless Omar.

***

Doug Powers cracks: “If the president was serious about rounding up illegals he’d host a family reunion and have ICE throw a net over the South Lawn.”

Surprise, surprise, Part II.

Yesterday, I discussed the White House deportation waivers — a blanket amnesty through administrative non-enforcement that will benefit at least an estimated 2.1 million future Democratic voters.

Today, the New York Times brings news of the first lucky winners of the Obama amnesty golden tickets.

You’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that they include a 27-year-old leading DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout activist and a lesbian gay marriage activist:

Administration officials and immigrant advocates said Monday that the plan offered the first real possibility since President Obama took office — promising immigrants and Latinos he would overhaul the law to bring illegal immigrants into the system — for large numbers of those immigrants to be spared from detention and deportation.

For Mr. Guerra, who said he wants to remain in the United States to study to become a Roman Catholic priest, the news “was like something from above, from heaven. I don’t want to go back to Mexico,” he said, “and I’ve been fighting this for five years.”

…Mr. Guerra, now 27 and living in Indiantown, Fla., is one of those immigrants. He said he came to this country to escape a violent gang in Mexico. His lawyer, Richard A. Hujber, said Mr. Guerra’s efforts to straighten out his legal status went wrong because they were originally mishandled by an accountant claiming falsely to be a lawyer.

In recent years, even though he was undocumented, Mr. Guerra has been a Florida leader of the illegal immigrant student movement, helping to organize a protest walk by four students to Washington and a mock university held by students wearing mortarboards on Capitol Hill.

“That was so big to me, all these students organizing a school so we could go without our papers,” Mr. Guerra said. If he can obtain a work permit, he and Mr. Hujber said, he could be legally eligible for the first time to apply for financial aid that would allow him to continue his religious studies.

The administration’s announcement also had an immediate impact on a case in Denver, where an immigration judge on Friday postponed the deportation of Sujey Pando, a lesbian from Mexico legally married in Iowa to an American from Colorado, Violeta Pando. Although federal law does not recognize same-sex marriages, administration officials said they would consider same-sex spouses as “family” in their review of deportation cases.

The judge, Mimi Tsankov, cited the flux in laws and policies affecting same-sex cases in delaying a decision on Sujey Pando’s deportation at least until January, said Lavi Soloway, a lawyer for the couple.

Prediction: When all is said and done, the Obama-Biden deportation waiver program will make the fraud-ridden, Clinton-Gore Citizenship USA program look like kindergarten.

Remember: It ain’t over ’til the alien wins.

Hey, wonder if Auntie Zeituni Onyango is available for comment?

No, it’s about as unsurprising as the setting sun or the rising sun.

The Obama Department of Homeland Security late last week announced it would enforce the DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout by administrative order — call them White House deportation waivers — over the heads of a bipartisan majority of Congress that has repeatedly and resoundingly rejected such proposals.

They administration didn’t put it in such stark terms, of course. But that is the effect of the decree.

And it is no surprise at all to you and me.

The open-borders radicals at the White House and within DHS have been telegraphing this for months.

In June, they floated a proposal to order deferred/administrative paroles for masses of illegal aliens. ICE issued memos listed extensive criteria for “prosecutorial discretion” on deportation enforcement — chief among them, the vast subset of illegal aliens who would qualify for the failed DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout.

And now, as of last Thursday, DHS will formally suspend all deportations of potential DREAM Act illegal alien beneficiaries on a case by case basis as part of a coordinated campaign to woo disenchanted Hispanic voters.

The truth about deportation, as I’ve reported over and over and over again through the years, is that both Democrat and Republican administrations have undermined an orderly, consistent system of enforcement. And most of the politicians in Washington who speak about “comprehensive immigration reform” are still abjectly ignorant about the ins, outs, loopholes, and lax enforcement that characterize our chaotic, security-undermining deportation policies. It’s an endless appeals process and immigration litigation lottery played by deportable aliens and their open-borders lawyers. Capitol Hill compounds the problem with a raft of special private relief bills that protect illegal alien criminals.

The question for 2012 GOP primary voters: Is there a candidate out there who you trust to stand on the side of secure borders and strict enforcement, who has consistently opposed DREAM Act illegal alien bailouts, and who will resist the urge to use and abuse his executive powers to override the will of the people?

Here is one scorecard.

Most of the politicians in Washington who speak about “comprehensive immigration reform” are still abjectly ignorant about the ins, outs, loopholes, and lax enforcement that characterize our chaotic, security-undermining deportation policies. It’s an endless appeals process and immigration litigation lottery played by deportable aliens and their open-borders lawyers. Capitol Hill compounds the problem with a raft of special private relief bills that protect illegal alien criminals.

The Center for Immigration Studies is out with a brand new report today on deportation basics.

Among the key findings:

* The total number of apprehensions of illegal aliens by immigration enforcement agencies is less than half of what it was five years ago. For instance, the drop in apprehensions by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is often explained by improvements in border security; however, this rationale is suspect, as has been pointed out by the Rand Corp. in a study of border metrics. But ICE apprehensions also have dropped steeply, although there has been only a modest drop in the size of the illegal population inside the United States.

The report comes as left-wing religious leaders continue to lobby for the DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout. Make sure you are armed with the facts to counter the emotion-driven juggernaut:

As the effort to pass the DREAM Act hits its 10th anniversary, churches, synagogues and mosques around the country will devote a September weekend to teaching their congregations about the faith-based reasons to work for its passage.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., flanked by priests, bishops, rabbis, ministers and an imam, announced July 12 in a news conference at the Capitol that Sept. 23-25 will be DREAM Act Sabbath. Faith leaders said they and their fellows would devote time during or after worship services to explaining the legislation and offering testimony from young people who would be affected by it, all geared toward mustering legislative support.

…Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, retired archbishop of Washington, said at the press conference that “these are Americans, for all practical purposes,” and that many DREAM Act supporters, who call themselves “Dreamers” risk deportation in order to advocate for the chance to become U.S. citizens through its provisions.

“Why would we not want to embrace their dedication, energy, talents, and courage — characteristics that have made our nation great? It would be to our detriment to forsake them.”

He said that speaking on behalf of fellow bishops, “we plan to promote the DREAM Act Sabbath.”

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, linked the effort to Scripture. “Christ himself admonished us to permit the little ones, the children, to come to him for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them.”

***

Recent: Document drop: ICE memos open another door to illegal alien amnesty-by-fiat

The DREAM Act mob is on the march again — and this time they have a prominent left-wing journalist leading the charge. My syndicated column below spotlights the serial law-breaking of former Washington Post reporter Jose Antonio Vargas, who is now an illegal alien activist clamoring for amnesty with the backing of the radical Tides Center, a project of George Soros and the former chief organizer of ACORN, Drummond Pike. (Hey, maybe they’ll hire Obama’s grousing illegal alien aunt Zeituni Onyango as a senior fellow.)

Vargas’s splashy revelations in the New York Times come — no coincidence, of course — amid a renewed push for the DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout.

Remember: This is a brazen “down payment” on a larger shamnesty.

Remember: This is nothing more than a 2.1 million future Democrat voter recruitment drive and a massive open-borders entitlement program for untold numbers of multi-culti ethnic tribalists who pretend to embrace assimilation for show.

And remember: The CBO score estimated that the last, failed DREAM Act bill would increase projected deficits by more than $5 billion in at least one of the four consecutive 10-year periods starting in 2021.”

Citizenship is a privilege, not an entitlement.

Want part of “no” doesn’t the open-borders lobby understand?

***

“Undocumented” folly: A liberal reporter’s illegal alien sob story
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

With great fanfare and elite media sympathy, Jose Antonio Vargas publicly declared himself an “undocumented immigrant” this week. “Undocumented” my you-know-what. In the felony-friendly pages of The New York Crimes — er, Times — the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned illegal-alien activist spilled the beans on all the illegal IDs he amassed over the years. He had documents coming out of his ears.

The Times featured full-color photos of Vargas’ fake document trove — including a a fake passport with a fake name, a fake green card and a Social Security card his grandfather doctored for him at a Kinko’s. He committed perjury repeatedly on federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. In 2002, while pursuing his journalism career goals, an immigration lawyer told him he needed to accept the consequences of his law-breaking and return to his native Philippines.

Following the rules would have meant a 10-year bar to reentry into America. Making false claims of citizenship is a felony offense. Document fraud is a felony offense.

Vargas, who frames himself as a helpless victim, freely chose instead to secure yet more dummy documents. He used a friend’s address to obtain an Oregon driver’s license under false pretenses. It gave him an eight-year golden ticket to travel by car, board trains and airplanes, work at prestigious newspapers, and even gain access to the White House — where crack Secret Service agents allowed him to attend a state dinner using his bogus Social Security number. (Reminder: Illegal aliens were able to get through White House security under the Bush administration, too.)

At least Vargas tells the truth when he says he’s not alone. Go visit a 7-11 in the D.C. suburbs. Or the countless vendors in MacArthur Park. Or any of the 19 cities in 11 states from Massachusetts to Ohio to Kentucky where a massive, Mexico-based “highly sophisticated and violent” fraudulent-document trafficking ring operated until February 2011. “Undocumented workers” and “undocumented immigrants” have plenty of documents.

The persistent use of these open-borders euphemisms to describe Vargas and countless millions like him is a perfect illumination of the agenda-driven, dominant progressive media.

They’re as activist inside their newsrooms as Vargas is out in the open now. Bleeding-heart editors were hoaxed by a prominent colleague, exposed to liability, and yet still champion his serial subversion of the law. San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein bragged that he was “duped” by Vargas, but endorses his “subterfuge” because Vargas’ lobbying campaign for the illegal-alien student bailout known as the DREAM Act “just might lubricate the politically tarred-up wheels of government and help craft sane immigration policy.”

Who’s insane? The Vargas deceit is not an object lesson about America’s failure to show compassion. It’s another stark reminder of America’s dangerous failure to learn from 9/11.

Time and again, security experts have warned about how jihadists have exploited lax immigration and ID enforcement. Driver’s licenses are gateways into the American mainstream. They allow residents to establish an identity and gain a foothold into their communities. They help you open bank accounts, enter secure facilities, board planes, and do things like drive tractor-trailers carrying hazardous materials.

It’s been nearly 10 years since several of the 19 9/11 hijackers operated in the country using hundreds of illicitly obtained fake driver’s licenses and IDs. Most states tightened licensing rules, yet Vargas easily obtained a driver’s license not only in Oregon, but more recently in Washington State. He again used a friend’s residence to pass muster. Washington State’s licensing bureaucracy still does not check citizenship. The man sitting in the White House campaigned to keep driver’s license laws as loose as possible for the open-borders lobby. He appointed illegal-alien lobbyists to top federal immigration positions. His head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement just signed a memo pushing the DREAM Act through by administrative fiat. And the privacy of illegal aliens still trumps national security.

I ask again: Who’s insane?

Vargas believes his sob story is an argument for giving up on immigration enforcement and passing a mass amnesty. It’s a sob story, all right. Homeland security officials across the country should be weeping at the open mockery Vargas and his enablers have made of the law.

We knew it was coming.

I’ve warned for years about illegal alien amnesty by executive fiat and the backdoor sabotage of immigration enforcement by this administration — and every one preceding it over the last two decades. I’ve also reported on how Congress issues individual deportation waivers to illegal aliens. And I’ve spotlighted the deadly “13 strikes you’re out” policies of border-state prosecutors.

On Friday, in another trademark Obama document dump, ICE issued a memo that pushes the perpetually-rejected DREAM Act for illegal alien students. As immigration lawyer Michelle Scopellite explained to me: “In essence, what this means is that if someone, is not a major criminal and is in removal proceedings, ICE officers are now to release them or terminate proceedings if they are involved in a lawsuit or fighting for union ideals. This appears to be another attempt by the Obama admin. to side-step immigration law through administrative acts. My partner and I are just returning from the AILA conference where, we were more than likely, the only Republicans in attendance and the director of DHS and the ICE Director, both discussed this memo and it received rave reviews from the liberal wing of AILA.” There are actually two documents in the hopper, a more detailed six-page prosecutorial discretion memo and shorter policy summary:

Read the documents for yourselves right here:

Prosecutorial Discretion Morton Second Memo June 17 2011

Prosecutorial Discretion Morton Memo June 17 2011

Here are the categories that Morton flags for “particular care and consideration” — e.g., amnesty:

* the person’s length of presence in the United States, with particular consideration given to presence while in lawful status;
* the circumstances of the person’s arrival in the United States and the manner of his or her entry,particularly if the alien came to the United States as a young child;
* the person’s pursuit of education in the United States, with particular consideration given to those who have graduated from a U.S. high school or have successfully pursued or are pursuing a college or advanced degrees at a legitimate institution ofhigher education in the United States;
* whether the person, or the person’s immediate relative, has served in the U.S. military, reserves, or national guard, with particular consideration given to those who served in combat;
* the person’s criminal history, including arrests, prior convictions, or outstanding arrest warrants;
* the person’s immigration history, including any prior removal, outstanding order of removal, prior denial of status, or evidence offraud;
* whether the person poses a national security or public safety concern;
* the person’s ties and contributions to the community, including family relationships;
* the person’s ties to the home country and
* the person’s age, with particular consideration given to minors and the elderly;
* whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child, or parent;
* whether the person is the primary caretaker of a person with a mental or physical disability, minor, or seriously ill relative; ;
* whether the person or the person’s spouse is pregnant or nursing;
* whether the person or the person’s spouse suffers from severe mental or physical illness;
* whether the person’s nationality renders removal unlikely;
* Whether the person is likely to be granted temporary or permanent status or other relief from removal, including as a relative of a U.S. citizen or permanent resident;
* whether the person is likely to be granted temporary or permanent status or other relief from removal, including as an asylum seeker, or a victim of domestic violence, human trafficking, or other crime; and
* whether the person is currently cooperating or has cooperated with federal, state or local law enforcement authorities, such as ICE, the U.S Attorneys or Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, or National Labor Relations Board, among others.

More from Kris Kobach via Neil Munro:

“They’re pushing the [immigration] agents to be even more lax, to go further in not enforcing the law,” said Kris Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state. “At a time when millions of Americans are unemployed and looking for work, this is more bad news coming from the Obama administration… [if the administration] really cared about putting Americans back to work, it would be vigorously enforcing the law,” said Kobach, who has helped legislators in several states draft local immigration-related laws.

…The primary document was the six-page “prosecutorial discretion” memo, which provided new reasons for officials to not deport illegal immigrants.

“When weighing whether an exercise of prosecutorial discretion may be warranted for a given alien, ICE officials, agents and attorneys should consider all relevant factors, including, but not limited to – the circumstances of the person’s arrival in the United States … particularly if the alien came to the United States as a young child; the Person’s pursuit of education… .. whether the person, or the person’s immediate relative, has served in the U.S. military,” said the memo.

“The factors are extremely broad and very troubling … [it] look like a stealth DREAM Act enforcement through non-enforcement,” said Kobach.

The deportation abyss deepens again.

Remember: It ain’t over ’til the alien wins.

I first wrote about illegal alien murder suspect Ingmar Guandique’s possible role in the Chandra Levy case in 2002. Justice has been long delayed for the Levy family.

Today, a jury convicted Guandique on all felony counts of first-degree murder.

More:

A jury on Monday found an El Salvadoran immigrant guilty of murdering Washington intern Chandra Levy.

Jurors deliberated four days before finding Ingmar Guandique, 29, guilty in the 2001 disappearance and killing of Levy.

…

[Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda] Haines said Levy’s death fits a pattern of two other attacks committed by Guandique on female joggers in Rock Creek park in May and July of 2001. Guandique was convicted in those assaults and is serving a 10-year sentence.

And she said the testimony of Guandique’s former cellmate, Armando Morales, is particularly compelling. Morales testified that Guandique was scared of being labeled a rapist by other inmates, and admitted killing Levy but denied raping her.

Haines said Morales’ testimony included details that prove the confession was not fabricated. Morales said that Guandique told him he attacked Levy from behind, the same method that was used against the other two women assaulted by Guandique. Guandique also admitted to Morales that he had attacked other women who had fought him off, which fits the pattern of his other two attacks in Rock Creek Park.

MSM outlets wasted no time whitewashing the illegal immigration angle from the story. See Newsbusters.

***

Here’s the column I wrote in June 2002, still relevant today:

The media’s immigration blinders
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2002

“ILLEGAL ALIEN QUESTIONED IN CHANDRA LEVY CASE.”

Did you miss that headline in the news last week? Well, that’s because no one ran it.

Ingmar Guandique, a violent Salvadoran national who is serving a 10-year sentence for assaulting two female joggers in Washington’s Rock Creek Park last year, was interrogated recently as part of the investigation into the intern murder mystery. But in my review of all 115 news items archived in the Lexis-Nexis database that mention Guandique in connection with the Levy case, not a single story referred to his status as a criminal illegal alien.

The Associated Press described Guandique merely as an “immigrant;” the New York Times called him a “Washington man.” On the basic questions of where Guandique came from, how he got here, and how he managed to stay, the Washington Post-the mainstream media giant closest to the scene of Guandique’s crimes- has printed nothing at all.

Though Guandique reportedly passed lie detector tests, he remains an unofficial person of interest in the Levy case. D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey says the media is making too big a deal of Guandique. Quite the contrary. The glaring omission of Guandique’s immigration status from the mainstream media’s no-stone-unturned Levy coverage is a newsworthy act of negligence as the nation grapples with lax borders and national (in)security.

Only one media outlet, the invaluable Washington, D.C.-based newsweekly Human Events, has published the pertinent facts. Editor Terry Jeffrey reported this week that not only is Guandique an illegal alien, but also that the INS had given him a green light to work in the country legally while his application for “Temporary Protected Status (TPS)” was pending. Guandique’s TPS application was eventually denied, but not before he committed two brutal attacks in the same park where Chandra Levy’s body was found.

TPS is basically a bad-weather pass into the U.S. Whenever a natural disaster strikes, we allow thousands of foreigners to stay here-mostly from Latin America-while their homelands supposedly recover. But the INS doesn’t track down TPS beneficiaries once their status expires. Worse, INS chief James Ziglar recently remarked during a trip to the Mexican border that it would be neither “reasonable” nor “practical” to deport millions of illegal aliens who have snuck across the borders, violated their visas, or overstayed on TPS. How many future Guandiques (or Attas or Almihdhars) are among them? Ziglar doesn’t seem to care. He’s too busy nullifying the immigration laws he’s supposed to enforce.

The public deserves informed analysis of whether fraud-ridden immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status and other various forms of amnesty have come at the expense of our public safety and the national interest. But how can the question be answered if the press never asks?

Instead of hard-nosed analysis, observed author William McGowan at a forum on immigration and media coverage hosted by the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., last week, journalists maintain an “overly romantic” view of the issue. McGowan’s penetrating new book, “Coloring The News,” documents how political correctness has corrupted coverage of myriad policy issues, including immigration. He noted superficial reporting of airport security and visa screening issues in the pro-illegal alien New York Times before September 11, sympathetic stories on providing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, and the flippant title of a bleeding-heart Times magazine cover piece a few years back: “What Immigration Crisis?”

Another panel member and veteran immigration analyst, Lodi (Calif.) News-Sentinel columnist Joe Guzzardi, reported on the results of a 1,500-article review he conducted for NumbersUSA.com, a grass-roots reform group, to gauge fairness and balance of immigration coverage. “Very few stories met the reporters’ definition of fair and balanced,” he said. Most news stories are frontloaded with quotes from illegal immigration and open borders advocates, while opposing views are buried and marginalized.

Indeed, most editors still can’t even bring themselves to use the term “illegal,” preferring the flagrantly biased euphemism, “undocumented.”

Questions about the adequacy of immigration news coverage, as the Center for Immigration Studies noted, are longer academic. It’s “a matter of life and death.” When will the media take off the rose-colored blinders and start reporting the true costs of our continuing, criminal-friendly immigration policies?

***

Related: New out from William McGowan – Gray Lady Down.

Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with how open-borders lawmakers in both major political parties use special congressional legislation to grant amnesty to individual illegal aliens seeking to evade deportation orders. Review my special reports from 2003 and 2007 on how the private relief bill process works.

You can see the more than 100-plus illegal alien waiver bills introduced this session by going to the THOMAS/Library of Congress website right now and typing in “for the relief of” in the search engine. A sample of the results:

The latest, high-profile illegal alien deportation waiver is being sponsored by California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein:

A San Francisco community college student awaiting deportation to his native Peru won a temporary reprieve Friday when U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation halting immigration enforcement proceedings against him.

Steve Li, 20, had been due to be separated from his parents and sent back to Peru last Monday, but federal immigration officials pushed back the deportation at Feinstein’s request while the California Democrat prepared the private relief measure that would allow him to remain in the U.S.

“It’s amazing. It’s extremely rare for a private bill to be introduced,” Li’s lawyer, Sin Yen Ling, told the Contra Costa Times. “It’s clear she thought this was an important case.”

Feinstein said in a statement accompanying the bill that Li moved to San Francisco with his parents when he was 12 and did not know they were all in the country illegally until immigration agents arrested them in September. The parents have been ordered to return to China, where they lived before they fled to Peru.

As the above screen cap shows, there’s nothing “rare” about these bills.

What the article doesn’t mention is that the family already petitioned for asylum status and a judge rejected the claim. They had their chance in court. The court said no. The family received a deportation order in 2004, which they chose to ignore.

Every time a private relief bill is introduced, it’s law-abiding immigrants and applicants who get punished.

As I’ve explained:

Every time a private relief bill passes, the number of available visas for that year is reduced by the number of illegal alien/deportable immigrant recipients granted legal status/deportation relief through the special legislation.

The bills needn’t pass for the recipients to gain benefits. Mere introduction of the bills buys the deportable aliens time that ordinary, law-abiding citizens can’t buy in our court system.

Federal lawmakers pressure immigration officials into releasing illegal aliens while their private bills work slowly through Capitol Hill. If the legislation is turned down (which is rare), it doesn’t matter. The intended beneficiaries can be set free, adding to the more than 600,000 fugitives from deportation that the federal government has yet to track down.

This is illegal alien amnesty by legislative fiat and another outrageous extension of the deportation abyss in the name of misguided compassion.

Where are all the GOP fence-sitting senators on this subversion of sovereignty and equal protection principles?

Ask them.

The latest victims of the feds’ refusal to fully fund detention space and stop the deportation revolving door? Victims of an illegal alien drunk driver in Prince William County, Va., who had been, as so many countless illegal alien criminals before him, released on his own recognizance pending deportation, via WTOP:

The Chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors is furious with the federal government after learning that Carlos Montano – the man responsible for a car accident that killed one nun and injured two others Sunday morning – was an illegal immigrant in the early stages of being deported.

In a phone interview with WTOP Monday, Corey Stewart says on two separate occasions in 2007 and 2009, Prince William County Police identified Montano as an illegal alien.

After serving his sentences, Prince William County Police handed Montano over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who were told to deport him.

Stewart says ICE has refused to tell Prince William County why Montano was released instead of being deported.

The Washington Times adds:

The latest ICE statistics show the agency is actually detaining fewer people now on an average daily basis than they did in 2009.

The Sunday morning crash killed Sister Denise Mosier and injured two other nuns as they were driving to a retreat at the Benedictine Monastery in Bristow, Va. The two injured nuns were in critical but stable condition, according to St. Gertrude High School in Richmond, run by the Benedictine Sisters of Virginia.

Keep them all in your thoughts and prayers.

***

Flashback: May 15, 2009 – Another open-borders nightmare, Josie Bluhm, 4, R.I.P.

Flashback: April 3, 2009 – Ray Tranchant, whose daughter was killed by a serial illegal alien drunk driver, takes a stand against the open-borders agenda.

Flashback: July 5, 2007 – The brutal consequences of catch and release

Flashback: May 21, 2007 – Catch-and-release still rules

Here we go again. I’ve long reported on the danger of illegal alien sanctuary city policies embraced by woefully misguided (at best) and criminally reckless public officials seeking to appease the open borders lobby. One of the countless casualties of this deadly pandering was Houston PD officer Rodney Johnson, who shot and killed during a traffic stop in 2006 by an previously deported illegal alien protected by Houston’s sanctuary law. His widow, Josyln, continues to speak out against continued non-enforcement policies — and she is livid that the Houston police chief will now be joining the Obama administration:

The widow of a Houston police officer killed by an illegal immigrant said Sunday that the policies left in place in her city by a top immigration official in the Obama administration continue to put officers in danger.

That official, former Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt, is taking a job to oversee partnerships between federal and local officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, during his tenure in Houston he resisted enforcing immigration law and criticized ICE’s key program that draws on local law enforcement’s support. Hurtt is now facing a lawsuit over those policies filed by Joslyn Johnson, whose husband, Rodney, was killed in 2006 by a once-deported illegal immigrant who had been arrested three times.

Joslyn Johnson, herself a sergeant in the Houston force, told Fox News that the policies that kept local officers from checking the immigration status of suspects remain in place and pose a risk to her and her colleagues.

“It has remained the same. It has not changed,” Johnson said.

Johnson is suing to seek a change in policy so that federal immigration databases are widely available to local departments. Johnson’s original court petition — naming Hurtt as well as the city and the police department — claimed that the department’s failure to discover the gunman’s immigration status and report him to federal authorities enabled him to stay “at large” in the country.

These open-borders sympathizers endanger us all — and it will only prompt more of an Arizona-style backlash in other states and cities across the country.

“Illegal alien sanctuary” or rule of law community: It’s your choice.

Club Fed for illegal aliens
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Thanks to their international “human rights” advocates, Gitmo detainees receive art therapy, movie nights and video games at their U.S. taxpayer-funded camp in Cuba. Now, the left’s bleeding heart lobby wants to provide similar taxpayer-sponsored perks to illegal alien detainees on American soil. Welcome to the open-borders Club Fed.

According to an internal Department of Homeland Security e-mail obtained by the Houston Chronicle, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency plans a radical overhaul of the immigration detention system. No, the reforms will not increase the nation’s measly, chronically underfunded detention bed capacity — fewer than 35,000 beds last fiscal year to cover an estimated illegal alien population of between 12 million and 20 million. The Obama ICE leadership is headed in the exact opposite direction.

ICE chief John Morton — the same man who signaled last month that he may refuse to process illegal aliens sent to him by Arizona law enforcement officials — has already eliminated 50 detention facilities. This despite a DHS inspector general report released last spring exposing the federal government’s bipartisan failure to expand detention space capacity to end the dangerous game of illegal alien “catch and release.”

Instead, among the p.c. makeover measures under consideration or about to be made by Obama’s ICE agency in the next 30 days:

– “Softening” the physical appearance of privately contracted detention facilities with “hanging plants.”

- Giving illegal alien detainees e-mail access and free Internet-based phone service.

- Abandoning lockdowns, lights-out, visitor screening and detention uniform requirements.

- Serving fresh veggies and continental breakfast and providing Bingo sessions, arts and crafts classes, and, yes, movie nights.

Ensuring humane treatment of detainees is one thing. This, on the other hand, is beyond ridiculous. Detention centers should be clean, safe and temporary way stations for illegal immigrants on their way out the door. These proposals turn the immigration detention centers into permanent Dave & Buster’s-style comfort zones for illegal aliens biding their time until the next amnesty. Dancing lessons? Game halls? This is an invitation for abuse — and a recipe for exploitation by smugglers and drug cartels. Open-borders and civil liberties activists will end up endangering DHS/ICE workers — and the rest of us — under the guise of “immigrant human rights.”

The left-wing campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union, change.org and illegal alien activists targeting our detention system began in earnest after 9/11. Under the Bush administration, hundreds of illegal aliens of Arab descent were detained and questioned as “material witnesses” in counterterrorism probes. The use of immigration laws in the war against Islamic jihadists became a rallying point for the open-borders propagandists.

The New York Times hysterically reported that most of these post-9/11 detainees were held for months without charges. In fact, 60 percent of the 762 immigrants detained after the 9/11 attacks were charged within 72 hours. And the Justice Department inspector general found that there were legitimate reasons for delay in the remaining cases, including logistical disruptions in New York City after 9/11, such as electrical outages, office shutdowns and mail service cancellation that slowed delivery of charging documents. Immigrant abuse charges were hurled recklessly by the likes of Al Gore, who slandered DHS’s detention program during a paid appearance in Saudi Arabia — despite the DOJ’s failure to find any such patterns.

The truth got lost along the way. So did common sense. Allowing illegal alien terror suspects to roam free in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks would have been a dereliction of duty. And countless homeland security experts and DHS inspector general reports have repeatedly spotlighted lax enforcement in the detention safety net over the past decade.

Hundreds of thousands of “absconders” remain on the loose because of failure (or refusal) to detain them. The immigration lawyers’ racket has lobbied for compassionate “alternatives” to detention that routinely result in deportation fugitives simply ditching the process and disappearing.

Their goal is not to improve detention. Their goal is to sabotage it — all while law-breakers munch on croissants and joyfully shout “BINGO!”

In 2007, a gang of MS-13-tied illegal aliens ambushed a group of young college students in Newark and murdered them execution-style in a schoolyard. A refresher course before we get to the jury decision that came down this morning:

I covered the story — and the open-borders failures that paved the way for the murderers — extensively (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. A reminder of the brutal crime:

The four students were hanging out behind Mount Vernon School on Aug. 4, 2007, when they were confronted by their attackers with a handgun and a machete. Three of the victims — Terrance Aeriel, 18, Dashon Harvey, 20, and Iofemi Hightower, 20 — were killed when they were lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head. Terrance’s sister, Natasha Aeriel, survived after being shot in the face and left for dead.

All of the victims were robbed, and Aeriel and the group’s other female, Iofemi Hightower, were sexually molested and cut with machetes and knives, according to a lawsuit recently filed against the city school system and the alleged killers.

And another graphic reminder:

The thugs who shot four college students in Newark reportedly preceded their sick attack by trying to sexually assault their two female victims.

The group of six assailants – who shot two men and a woman dead and wounded another woman – failed in their attempt at a sexual attack, and then decided to kill their victims, according to 1010 WINS radio.

Six suspects have now been charged in the Aug. 4 atrocity, in which the victims were blasted execution-style.

Yesterday, a family member of one of the slain victims, Iofemi Hightower, described the level of savagery of the attack. He said the thugs used a machete to hack their victims.

“They cut my niece’s face off,” said John McClain, who is Hightower’s great-uncle, and the chaplain of the Newark Police Department. “They cut her from cheek to cheek. They left her head hanging.”

McClain said the mortician told him he had to work for three days to put his grand-niece’s face back together.

“Most people couldn’t tell, when he was done, but the family could tell,” he said.

The busted deportation system aided several of the murderous thugs, as I reported in 2007, including Rodolfo Godinez, who was convicted today.

Reminder:

Rodolfo Antonio Godinez Gomez entered the U.S. from Nicaragua on Oct. 24, 1992. He was ordered deported on May 5, 1993, but it isn’t clear if he ever left the country, according to Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontura. “It seems to me that he was illegal,” he said.

The Star-Ledger also reported:

He arrived in the country in 1992 and obtained permanent legal residency in 2001.

He had eluded cops for four years after becoming a fugitive on July 7, 2003, when he ditched a Superior Court hearing on charges that he robbed and attacked three people in Irvington a year earlier.

It took the savage deaths of three promising college students for the law to finally catch up to Godinez today. Notice how this New York Times story is completely silent on the role that lax immigration enforcement played in enabling the barbaric killers:

In the first trial stemming from the shootings of four college-age friends in a Newark schoolyard, a jury on Monday returned guilty verdicts for three murders and one attempted murder, after less than a day of deliberations.

The jury in state Superior Court here convicted Rodolfo Godinez, a 26-year-old native of Nicaragua, of all the charges facing him, including multiple counts each of robbery and weapons and conspiracy. He could face consecutive life sentences on the murder charges…

…Even in a hardened by violence, the killings came as a shock. Three of the victims had been students at Delaware State University, and Ms. Hightower planned to enroll there. The shootings occurred in the Ivy Hill section at the western edge of Newark, not one of the rougher areas in the city’s center and south.

The crimes spurred changes in city policing strategies, including greater use of video cameras and devices to detect the sound of gunshots.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil…enable more evil.

***

Web tribute to Dashon Harvey.

Web tribute to Iofemi Hightower.

Web tribute to Terrance Aeriel.

Seems like I just wrote about our busted deportation system a week ago. And then again a few days ago.

And now this:

The KING 5 Investigators have learned that an illegal immigrant accused of raping a woman in Edmonds Sunday has been deported nine times. That’s much more than previously reported.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement won’t comment on the case of Jose Lopez Madrigal. But KING 5 got the information through confidential sources and documents.

Larry Klein was the man who heard the alleged victim’s cries for help.

…Klein called police, who quickly arrested the suspect. But learning his identity took much longer because of some 30 aliases. It was only through fingerprints that they identified him as Madrigal, a Mexican citizen.

Madrigal’s arrest and immigration record includes a staggering number of contacts with law enforcement since 1989. That’s the year he was convicted of theft using a firearm in California. He was deported a couple of times after that. Then in 1999, he was arrested for drug sales in both San Diego and San Francisco. Records show that he was deported three times that year between April and August. He was arrested for drugs again in Stockton, Calif. in 2000. In 2002, he pleaded to third degree sexual assault in Denver. Later that year, he was deported again. And in 2003, records show he was deported three more times.

People who live near the scene of Sunday’s alleged rape wonder how it could keep happening.

How could it keep happening? Duh. Catch-and-release remains the order of the day. (See here, here, here, and here, for example). And as every savvy immigration lawyer who has gamed the deportation abyss knows:

“It ain’t over ’til the alien wins.”

Jihadists know it.

The open-borders racket knows it.

Prosecutors know it.

And the Obama administration knows it.

ICE chief John Morton’s suggestion that the feds may refuse to process illegal aliens reported by the state of Arizona is simply a validation of the feds’ longstanding policy of selective, politicized non-enforcement.

For further proof, take a look at the little-noticed ICE website unveiled last week with new policy changes and summaries of the major “detention reforms and accomplishments of the last year.” Click on the link and you’ll find that five of the seven new policies that Morton touts as “accomplishments” involve not enforcing immigration law by making it harder to arrest them, catching-and-releasing them, or creating new loopholes for avoiding detention and deportation.

What part of Article IV, Section IV of the U.S. Constitution don’t these people understand?

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.