Texas’ Federal Immigration Problems Add to “Border Security” Dilemmas

As I wrote before, Texas took our opposition to forced enrollment of illegal students in elementary and high school all the way to the Supreme Court. We fight for real border control every day, spend millions of our own tax money to supplement the border security and even try to use our own law enforcement to deport convicted criminals.

However, we’re constantly stymied by changing and ever more intrusive Federal rules and regulations.

Even that last requires cooperation from the Feds, and we can’t be sure that the criminals are deported or whether, as in the past, they’re just released into Texas.

“”But since the legislation passed, parole officials have worried that once they turned over custody of the parolee to federal officials, they might never know whether the felon was sent home or released in Texas if the deportation were to go awry.

“”That’s exactly what has happened in the past, parole officials said. They said over the past several years, several hundred foreign-born felons were paroled and released to federal officials for deportation but were not sent home — and instead were allowed to remain in Texas on parole, on state taxpayers’ dime.

“”Officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in their first public comments on the new law, assured state officials Wednesday that convicts who are not deported will be handed back to state prison officials.””

And it doesn’t help that the Federal forces bring in criminals from all over the US to the 11 Immigration and Customs Detention centers.

Worse than that, though, the Department of Justice has been bringing us captured illegal aliens from other border States like Arizona that they then release in Presidio, Texas or Del Rio, Texas.

“”Under the program, the agency transports illegal border-crossers caught in Arizona to the Texas border and deports them back to Mexico. The Border Patrol first started the program in November 2009: Two buses per day, each loaded with up to 47 male illegal immigrants aged 20 to 60, were taken from Arizona to Presidio, where they were deported to Ojinaga, Mexico. The program generated heated resistance from state officials, including Perry, who worried about an influx of illegal immigrants, and from local officials, who said the remote area could not handle an onslaught of new people.””