Open Borders, No Interior Enforcement Lead to a California Tragedy, Two Officers Killed

By Joe Guzzardi
October 27, 2014

The Obama administration’s unwillingness to enforce even the most basic immigration laws has again had fatal results. During a Friday six-hour rampage, Luis Enrique Monroy-Bracamonte shot three northern California sheriff’s deputies, killing two of them.

U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said that Monroy-Bracamonte’s fingerprints match those of a Mexican national who had been deported in 1997 after an Arizona drug conviction. Previously in 2001, Monroy-Bracamonte was deported for an unspecified crime. Monroy-Bracamonte is charged with two counts each of murder, attempted murder and carjacking. The suspect’s wife, Janelle Marquez-Monroy, was also arrested Friday and is charged with carjacking as well as attempted murder.

The victims are Danny Oliver, a 15-year veteran of the Sacramento County Sheriff’s office who leaves a wife and two children and homicide detective Michael David Davis. Both were shot at close range with an AR-15 type assault rifle.

Marcelo Marquez, the alias Monroy-Bracamonte provided to law enforcement officers, came to California from Salt Lake City. A database search of Utah court records for Marquez uncovered ten citations for misdemeanor traffic offenses and small claims filings for unpaid debts.  

Sadly, tragedies like the one in Sacramento are too frequent. In August, two Mexican aliens shot and killed an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent in front of his family while they were on a fishing vacation. Each of the aliens had been deported and then returned unlawfully numerous times.  

In May, an alien speeding in the wrong direction on the freeway for 35 miles and driving with a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit killed a veteran Arizona police officer in a head on collision. Ten years after Raul Silva Corona pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy, he was still in the U.S. working as a gardener. 

These senseless deaths are the sad consequence of the federal government’s catch and release policy which shows a craven disregard for immigration enforcement and public safety. Deportations from the interior are plunging at the same time that ICE is releasing criminal aliens from detention centers. Between the start of the budget year beginning October 2013 and July 28 this summer, ICE deported about 258,608 aliens. During the same period last year, it removed 320,167 people, an annual decrease of nearly 20 percent. Fewer than 10,000 criminals were deported in April 2014, the lowest total since 2009.

Documents obtained by USA Today under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that despite ICE and the Department of Homeland Security’s assurances that the 2,200 aliens released from immigration jails last year under the guise of cost saving were “low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal records,” many faced charges that include homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping and drug trafficking. 

More broadly, the chance of a non-criminal alien being deported is next to zero, according to Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and president of the New Democrat Network, a center-left D.C.-based think tank. Obama has, said Rosenberg over the weekend, unilaterally made immigration laws meaningless.

In the name of public safety and upholding his Constitutional oath, President Obama should focus on tighter enforcement and on imposing more severe penalties for immigration law violators. Instead, his administration insists on turning a blind eye to the heartbreaking cost of open borders combined with token interior enforcement. Being deported means little to aliens who know they can cross back into the U.S. at will.

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been nationally syndicated since 1987. Contact him at [email protected]