How Much Diversity Must We Tolerate?

In his seventh year of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” as Barack Obama memorably promised five days before he was elected president, we’re learning new details about thousands of immigrants who were released from custody after being convicted of serious violent felonies and horrific sex crimes. Instead of doing his duty to keep bad people out of America (or remove them if they manage to sneak in), Obama is bringing us even more diversity by accepting thousands of refugees from terrorist-harboring countries such as Syria and Somalia.

Immigrants who commit a major crime inside the U.S. are supposed to be returned to their home country after completing their prison sentence. But a number of countries are refusing to take back their own criminals, so Immigration and Customs Enforcement just turns them loose in U.S. communities, freeing them to return to their criminal lifestyle.

We have a U.S. law that is supposed to deal with this; it requires our State Department to impose visa sanctions on countries that refuse to take back their own citizens. But Obama’s State Department simply ignores this law; that’s called executive discretion.

Sens. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have gotten ICE to admit the awful truth: “One hundred twenty-one convicted criminals who faced deportation orders between 2010 and 2014 were never removed from the country and now face murder charges for killing Americans.”

Hundreds of other immigrants who were convicted of violent sex crimes, including depraved acts against children, were released into unsuspecting U.S. communities without being registered as sex offenders. The Boston Globe compiled a database of nearly a thousand immigrant sex fiends, a job made more difficult because ICE seems to care less about the safety of Americans than about the “privacy” of foreign criminals who shouldn’t even be here.

The excuse given for these outrageous releases is a Supreme Court decision called Zadvydas, which held that persons awaiting deportation can’t be held indefinitely. That 2001 decision was accepted by the George W. Bush administration, which released hundreds of violent criminal immigrants including the accused perpetrator of the D.C. Mansion murders, Darron Wint.

Here are just a few of the bloodcurdling crimes committed by illegal aliens released by the Obama administration to continue their fun and games at the expense of very young girls.

Felix Rodriguez, a 67-year-old sex offender, was convicted of raping children as young as 4 years old in the 1990s, but was freed to continue his crimes because Cuba refused to take him back.

He then fatally shot his girlfriend in Kansas City, pleaded guilty, and is serving a 10-year sentence in a Missouri prison.

Andrew Rui Stanley, who was convicted in 2000 of multiple counts of sodomizing a child, was released in the U.S. after Brazil failed to provide a passport to accept him back to his native country. Again on the streets in our country, he viciously abused three St. Louis children, and the U.S. taxpayers are now supporting him in a U.S. prison.

Cuba refused to take back Luis-Leyva Vargas after he served time in a Florida prison for unlawful sex with a teenage girl. After he was released by ICE, he kidnapped an 18-year-old girl in Virginia at knifepoint and raped her. He is now serving a 55-year prison sentence, which U.S. taxpayers (instead of Cuban) are paying for.

Meanwhile, Obama has effectively given up enforcing our immigration laws at the workplace, which was the essential trade-off for the 1986 amnesty that Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed. A Washington Times headline revealed, “Obama gives free pass to businesses that hire illegals,” including aliens who should have been deported for violent crimes.

Although Obama used his executive action to give valuable benefits to the Communist rulers of Cuba without any quid pro quo whatsoever that might benefit the United States, Cuba still refuses to take back its citizens who have been convicted of crimes against Americans. Cuba refused to take back 878 criminals last year and has already rejected nearly 400 criminals this year.

Cuba is the biggest offender among the countries that refuse the return of their own citizens who committed crimes in our country, but there are at least a dozen other countries doing the same thing. It’s bad enough that those criminals committed vicious crimes against our girls, but it adds insult to injury when we have to spend U.S. taxpayers’ money to support foreign criminals for years in our institutions.

Republican members of Congress have proposed several legislative solutions for this lack of cooperation by our so-called friendly neighbors, but to no avail. For starters, Congress should cut off all foreign aid and all other favors to countries that refuse to take back their own criminals.

Photo credit: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

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Phyllis Schlafly is a lawyer, conservative political analyst and author of 20 books. She is the co-author, with George Neumayr, of the New York Times Best-Seller titled “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.” She can be contacted by e-mail at phyllis@eagleforum.org.