Terry McAuliffe Under FBI Investigation

Posted on May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 by Denise Simon

This should come actually as no surprise as some clues were likely uncovered while the FBI was investigating the whole Clinton email server matter. The timing fits well.

Some even suspect that McAuliffe is on the Hillary short Veep list.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe under federal investigation for campaign contributions

Washington (CNN)Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, U.S. officials briefed on the probe say.

The investigation dates to at least last year and has focused, at least in part, on whether donations to his gubernatorial campaign violated the law, the officials said.

McAuliffe wasn’t notified by investigators that he is a target of the probe, according to the officials.

“The Governor will certainly cooperate with the government if he is contacted about it,” said Marc Elias, attorney for McAuliffe campaign, in a statement to CNN.

As part of the probe, the officials said, investigators have scrutinized McAuliffe’s time as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, a vehicle of the charitable foundation set up by former President Bill Clinton.

Related: Report cites favoritism for McAuliffe and brother of Hillary Clinton It faults the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security for creating “an appearance of favoritism.”

There’s no allegation that the foundation did anything improper; the probe has focused on McAuliffe and the electoral campaign donations, the officials said.

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the FBI declined to comment.

Among the McAuliffe donations that drew the interest of the investigators was $120,000 from a Chinese businessman, Wang Wenliang, through his U.S. businesses. Wang was previously delegate to China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s ceremonial legislature.

“Neither the Governor nor his former campaign has knowledge of this matter, but as reported, contributions to the campaign from Mr. Wang were completely lawful,” said Elias.

Wang also has been a donor to the Clinton foundation, pledging $2 million. He also has been a prolific donor to other causes, including to New York University, Harvard and environmental issues in Florida.

Related: GOP sues to block McAuliffe order to let 200,000 Virginia felons vote

U.S. election law prohibits foreign nationals from donating to federal, state or local elections. Penalties for violations include fines and/or imprisonment.

But Wang holds U.S. permanent resident status, according to a spokeswoman, which would make him a U.S. person under election law and eligible to donate to McAuliffe’s campaign.

Neither Wang nor his company used to make the donations have been contacted by U.S. investigators, according to the spokeswoman.

Related: Trump gave him $25,000

McAuliffe is the second consecutive Virginia governor to be investigated by Justice Department and the FBI. In 2014, Bob McDonnell was convicted of corruption charges related to $175,000 in loans and gifts he received from a donor and friend. The Supreme Court is weighing an appeal of the conviction.

It couldn’t be learned what else the FBI and Justice Department are investigating as part of the probe in McAuliffe.

The officials say the investigation remains active and ongoing.

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Related: McAuliffe authored what became known as the “Lincoln Bedroom Memo,” which sparked controversy by offering special White House access to Clinton’s top campaign contributors.

There is much more to know about the Clinton’s and McAuliffe, historical facts are funny things. Going back to 1999:

With Some Help, Clintons Purchase a White House

NYT’s: President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday settled the question of where the First Family will live once their lease on the White House expires, signing a contract to buy a $1.7 million, 11-room Dutch Colonial home in the wooded suburbs of Westchester County. The choice of a home in New York removes one of the chief obstacles in Mrs. Clinton’s path as she prepares for a run for the United States Senate.

The Clintons, indebted by over $5 million in legal bills from the investigations that have marked the Clinton Presidency, were able to buy the white-shingled, five-bedroom home in Chappaqua after Mr. Clinton’s chief fund-raiser, Terry McAuliffe, personally secured the loan.

The White House said that Mr. McAuliffe had put up $1.35 million of his own money with Bankers Trust. Under the terms of the mortgage, Mr. McAuliffe will get the money back, with interest from the bank, once the Clintons pay back the mortgage, or, as is more likely, refinance it in five years.

The deal was announced in a three-paragraph statement issued by the temporary press office of the White House — a room in the Holiday Inn in Auburn, about seven miles from where the Clintons are vacationing in upstate New York. It apparently concludes one of the more unusual house-hunting expeditions embarked on by any American family, complicated by the Clintons’ station in life, the fact that they have not owned a home in 16 years and Mrs. Clinton’s political ambitions in New York.

”We’re very pleased about the house,” the President said last evening as he and the First Lady left a fund-raiser for her presumed Senate campaign in Cazenovia and headed to another one in Syracuse. ”It’s beautiful. We like it a lot.”

Later, emerging from the Syracuse fund-raiser, Mrs. Clinton declared to cheers: ”As of today, Bill Clinton and I are the newest homeowners in the state of New York.”

”I love it,” she added, ”we’re so happy.”

The choice of a house came after the Clintons, trailed by a Presidential-size entourage of assistants, Secret Service agents and reporters, toured homes in New Rochelle, Greenburgh, Purchase, Mamaroneck and Pound Ridge, all in Westchester County, in two trips this summer. They spent two hours in the Chappaqua house last Saturday; Mrs. Clinton had seen the home before, an aide said.

”Everything about this was normal — except that they are the First Family,” said Kathy Sloane, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens in Manhattan, who guided the Clintons through the process.

The house was shown to the public for only three days. After that, Dr. Jeffrey Weisberg and his wife, Cheryl, who have owned the house for just over 18 years, invited closed bids. The bids were opened at 3 P.M. on Sunday and the Clintons were informed shortly thereafter that the Weisbergs were prepared to sell to them, said people with knowledge of the deal.

Eight bids were submitted on the house, those people said. It was unclear last night whether the Clintons, who offered just over the $1.675 million asking price, had made the highest bid.

There was a clear sense of relief yesterday among Mrs. Clinton’s political advisers, who are concerned that charges of carpetbagging could hurt the First Lady, since she has never lived in New York. Her likely Republican opponent, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, has repeatedly attacked Mrs. Clinton on the issue of her residency.

Mrs. Clinton has begun to visit New York regularly, but her campaign advisers fear that her trips have been marred by images emphasizing that she does not live in New York: she is either leaving to return to Washington or spending the night as a guest of friends or supporters. Accordingly, the First Lady’s advisers have been pressing her to find a house as soon as possible.

The closing date is Nov. 1. Mrs. Clinton’s aides said the First Lady would begin spending a good amount of time there as soon as possible after that. (That said, one complication of the Clintons’ nomadic ways is that they do not have enough of their own furniture to fill a house, particularly one this size, a family friend observed the other day.)

Joe Lockhart, the White House spokesman, said that for the remainder of Mr. Clinton’s term, the President and Mrs. Clinton intended to treat their Chappaqua home much the way other First Families have treated their own private residences. ”The Clintons will continue to live in the White House,” Mr. Lockhart said in a telephone interview from Washington. ”As with other Presidents, this house will be their private home and they will spend as much time there as they can.”

New York elections tend to be decided in the suburbs. And while Mrs. Clinton may now be considered a suburbanite, her aides said that political considerations were not predominant in the Clintons’ deliberations. Nonetheless, the Clintons clearly avoided communities like Scarsdale and Bedford, which are well known across New York as among the state’s wealthiest suburbs.

Still, Chappaqua, if not quite as well-known as Scarsdale, is known as one of the more exclusive, and upper-middle-class, bedroom communities of Westchester County. More here.

This VA Secretary STILL Does NOT Get it

Posted on May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 by Denise Simon

In fact Disney does care about wait lines, apparently he has not been to the theme park. While the FBI is overworked, it is high time to open criminal investigations into the Veterans Administration and the FOIA requests need to be flying, this is shameful and disgusting.

VA Secretary: Disney Doesn’t Care About Wait Times, Why Should the VA?

Mediaite: Secretary for Veterans Affairs Robert McDonald had an interesting take on the criticism of long wait times at VA facilities, arguing Monday that Disney theme parks aren’t judged based on their wait times.

McDonald’s remarks, which were made during a breakfast event held by The Christian Science Monitor, started to gain attention after they were tweeted out by attendee Washington Examiner reporter Sarah Westwood.

“When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important? What’s important is, what’s your satisfaction with the experience?” McDonald said in the full quote. “And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure.”

McDonald continued to say that the “create date” metric, which measures how long a veteran has to wait from the moment they first ask for care, is not a “valid measure” of wait time. Instead, he supports measuring wait times from how long veterans have to wait past their “preferred date” for care.

In 2014, an internal VA investigation found that at least 35 veterans in the Phoenix area died as a result of the long waiting times at the local VA hospital or after being secretly removed from the list entirely.

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Examiner/Westwood: McDonald’s comments angered House Speaker Paul Ryan, who tweeted out Monday afternoon, “This is not make-believe, Mr. Secretary. Veterans have died waiting in those lines.”

McDonald faced questions at the breakfast about the VA’s lack of transparency surrounding how long veterans must wait to receive care at VA facilities around the country. The agency has weathered controversy over the past several years due to its struggle to provide timely care for many patients.

The VA secretary said most veterans report being satisfied with their care and argued that the average wait time for a veteran seeking VA treatment is only a matter of days.

He said he did not believe a measure called the “create date,” which gauges a veteran’s wait time by counting from the day the veteran first requests care, was a “valid measure” of a veteran’s VA experience.

The Government Accountability Office released a report in April exploring the metric used to count a veterans’ wait time, called the “preferred date.” The measure does not count from the time a veteran first calls to make an appointment.

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Related: VA bosses in 7 states falsified vets’ wait times for care

The newly released findings of those probes show that supervisors instructed schedulers to manipulate wait times in Arkansas, California, Delaware, Illinois, New York, Texas and Vermont, giving the false impression facilities there were meeting VA performance measures for shorter wait times.

In some cases, the system encouraged manipulation even without explicit instruction from supervisors. A manager in West Palm Beach, Fla., sent out laudatory emails touting the shorter wait times the system showed. Schedulers in Harlingen, Texas, reported being berated by supervisors when they booked appointments showing longer wait times for veterans. (It was “not pretty,” one employee said.) More here.

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Meanwhile, there is this heartwarming story:

Dying veteran’s horses visit him at hospital to say goodbye

Quadrangle: We would like to thank Roberto Gonzales for his service and sacrifice.

As he lay dying in a Veterans Administration hospital he had one wish, to see his beloved horses Sugar and Ringo one last time.

Roberto Gonzales was wounded in battle on May 21, 1970. “He was in Vietnam for a few months when he was shot an injured”, explains his wife, Rosario Gonzalez.

Now, Gonzalez is paralyzed, restricted to a hospital bed and suffering from organ failure.

He recently went to the hospital for a wound on his back, which is when it was discovered he also needed treatment for liver problems and that his kidneys were starting to shut down.

“Horses are his life”, Rosario Gonzales told CNN affiliate KABB.

A paralysed and dying Vietnam War veteran has been reunited with his favourite horses in an emotional final wish.

The visit was also a testament to Roberto’s love of the animals, as both he and his wife trained and raised horses for almost 40 years together.

Two of those animals are Sugar and Ringo, a pair of horses that have become some of Gonzalez’s closest friends. “They came up to him and I think they were actually kissing him”.

The Hillary Hacker to Plead Guilty, Iceberg Ahead

Posted on May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 by Denise Simon

Hacker who got some Clinton emails set to plead guilty

Deal could give prosecutors right to question Romanian Marcel Lazar, known online as ‘Guccifer.’

Politico: A Romanian computer hacker who obtained some of Hillary Clinton’s emails by breaking into the account of one of her advisers is expected to plead guilty this week, clearing the way for his unfettered cooperation with federal prosecutors.

Marcel Lazar, who was extradited from Romania in March to face U.S. charges, claimed in interviews aired earlier this month that he also hacked into the Democratic presidential candidate’s personal server. However, that claim has not been verified and a spokesman for Clinton’s presidential campaign has rejected the idea that Lazar ever made it into her server.

Lazar is scheduled to appear in federal court in Alexandria, Va. Wednesday morning for a change of plea hearing, according to court records. A prosecution spokesman and a defense attorney for Lazar did not immediately respond to messages seeking confirmation that the guilty plea is part of a plea bargain with prosecutors. Such deals usually oblige a defendant to assist authorities in all ongoing investigations.

Lazar was indicted in 2014 on nine felony charges stemming from his alleged hack into the emails of several prominent Americans, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a relative of former President George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush, and former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal. A set of Blumenthal’s emails were published online in 2013, disclosing a private email address Clinton used. She later changed the address.

Clinton’s email arrangement is the subject of an ongoing FBI investigation, believed to be focused on how email messages deemed classified wound up on her server. Some reports have speculated that Lazar could demonstrate how vulnerable Clinton’s unusual email set-up was to foreign hackers, but it’s unclear how significant that fact would be to a decision about whether to seek criminal charges against Clinton or others involved in creating or using the unofficial email system.

Lazar had been set to go to trial in September.

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Even as Hillary Clinton tries to put questions about her private email server behind her, the FBI has stepped up inquiries into the security of the former secretary of state’s home-made email system and how aides communicated over email, POLITICO has learned.

The FBI’s recent moves suggest that its inquiry could have evolved from the preliminary fact-finding stage that the agency launches when it receives a credible referral, according to former FBI and Justice Department officials interviewed by POLITICO.

“This sounds to me like it’s more than a preliminary inquiry; it sounds like a full-blown investigation,” said Tom Fuentes, former assistant director of the FBI. “When you have this amount of resources going into it …. I think it’s at the investigative level.”

The FBI declined to respond to questions about the scope of its ongoing work.

But POLITICO learned that around early October, the FBI requested documents from a company involved in the server arrangement after Clinton left State. It also interviewed a former high-ranking

policy official at State about the contents of top Clinton aides’ emails.

The official, who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, said the questions explored whether anyone at State was concerned about classified information being put at risk by communicating via email. The source did not know of any such concerns.

Confirmation of the interview and document requests is the first public indication that the agency is moving ahead with its inquiry – and possibly expanding it.

The former State official interviewed by the FBI, for example, had little to do with the Clinton server set-up or any approval process allowing her to use personal email for work — suggesting the FBI’s initial inquiry about the actual physical security of Clinton’s home-made server now also includes looking at the content of messages shared by staff.

Former FBI and Justice officials familiar with the investigative procedures on such matters said the agency must determine two main things: whether the use of an outside email system posed any risks to national security secrets and, if so, whether anyone was responsible for exposing classified information.

FBI Director James Comey acknowledged in October that his agency was probing the server matter generally and believed it had the resources to look into the issues, though he didn’t give specifics.

Over the summer, the Department of Justice said it received a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General about potentially exposed classified information on Clinton’s home-made email server. The referral, Justice said at the time, was not criminal in nature but focused on the counterintelligence law governing national security secrets.

The matter at the time was considered a “preliminary” inquiry.

Clinton’s campaign and lawyers have said they are cooperating, turning over her server and a thumb drive backup of her messages to the FBI. They’ve also said they’re encouraging everyone who worked on the server issue to do the same. Platte River Networks, the Denver-based company that housed her server since she left State in 2013, for example, has said it’s cooperating; so has Datto, another tech company that provided a cloud backup of Clinton’s messages.

But exactly who they’re talking to at the staff level has been unclear. For example: Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at State and lawyer who helped determine which of her emails were personal and work related, wouldn’t say in a recent Washington Post interview whether she had been contacted due to confidentiality surrounding the FBI’s work.

The FBI ultimately decides whether to take a preliminary inquiry to a full-fledged investigation — and if it does so, it is under no obligation to say so publicly. The classification level of any compromised information “may be a factor in determining whether an FBI investigation is warranted,” reads an overview of FBI procedures.

In its review of Clinton’s emails, the State Department has classified more than 400 messages so far — materials that would not therefore be allowed on a homemade email system, although Clinton has said that none of them were marked classified at the time she or her staff received or sent them.

POLITICO reported on Friday that some of the original messages that triggered the referral — a couple messages the ICIG said were “top secret,” the most sensitive national security material — were no longer considered that protected.

Sources told POLITICO this week that as of a month ago, the Justice Department had not determined how to proceed with Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s top IT expert who oversaw her server but took the Fifth and refused to answer questions when subpoenaed by Congress earlier this year.

Republican lawmakers have weighed an immunity agreement for Pagliano, which would bar him from prosecution and allow him to talk about what he knew of the server: who approved it, why and the security surrounding the system.

His lawyer, reached Thursday, would not confirm whether he’s even been contacted by the FBI.

The agency has asked for documents from Tania Neild, the New York-based technology broker for millionaires, who put the Clintons in touch with Platte River Networks.

Neild confirmed the FBI request in an interview with POLITICO, saying the agency asked her to appear with written documents relating to the advice she gave to her client about negotiating with Platte River. Her company, InfoGrate, acts as a middle man between high-worth individuals and companies that oversee their personal technologies, such as emails.

Neild operates under a confidentiality agreement with all her clients. She said the nondisclosure arrangement precluded her from cooperating with the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is also investigating the server issue and reached out to her for an interview. But the FBI notice, she said, trumped her confidentiality agreement.

Her lawyer would not confirm any contact they may or may not have had with the Department of Justice or the FBI.

“What we did receive were inquiries from [the Senate Homeland Committee] that are looking into various things,” said Ron Safer, of Chicago’s Schiff Hardin. “And whether we have had communications with anybody else, I really can’t say at this point.”

Due to secrecy surrounding any FBI investigation, it is impossible to know exactly where the FBI stands. And since the issue involves the 2016 Democratic front-runner, the work is even more sensitive.

Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, said Justice is likely worried about issuing formal legal notices “because they know it will get out, and then you’re talking about a grand jury investigation.” But he said it’s “not uncommon” for companies to require subpoenas, court orders or other legal notices to cooperate to save their corporate reputation, which could otherwise be jeopardized for sharing personal information.

“I am sure there is hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth across the street at the Hoover Building because you’re going to have people saying ‘I don’t want to produce X documents. Give me a piece of paper that covers me.’ And that’s where push is going to come to shove,” Hosko said.

Is the Trump Campaign/GOP Going to Be Hurt By This?

Posted on May 23, 2016May 23, 2016 by Denise Simon

Could this keep the Donald from obtaining security clearance? Will there be some extortion cases as he is the nominee?

This site has published previous articles on Felix Sater knowing there was a potential for some yet unknown Trump history. What is also concerning is the Washington Post has a team looking into Trump’s entire background and they are doing the same with Hillary. The item below was performed by Politico. Further, both Hillary and Donald have huge unfavorable and are beginning to have some parallel dark histories. This is looking bad for the future of who the next president will be but will the electorate on both sides just look the other way, justify their candidate(s) and push them into the Oval Office?

How did we get here?

Just What Were Donald Trump’s Ties to the Mob?

I’ve spent years investigating, and here’s what’s known.

Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases

Posted on May 20, 2016May 20, 2016 by Denise Simon

Declining Deportations and Increasing Criminal Alien Releases –

The Lawless Immigration Policies of the Obama Administration

Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest

May 19, 2016

Statement of Mark Krikorian

Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies

Hearing May 19, 2016

Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.

– Barbara Jordan

CIS: The Obama administration has embraced a radical new approach to immigration law. It has, without the consent of Congress, transformed violation of immigration law into a “secondary offense.” That is to say, the goal is to ensure that an alien faces consequences for breaking immigration law only if he also breaks some other, “real,” law involving, say, violence or drug dealing. And even then, the primary violation has to be quite severe to warrant deportation for the (secondary) immigration offense.

This is comparable to the seat belt laws in many states; in places where failing to wear a seat belt is a secondary offense, a police officer cannot pull you over just for that, but if he pulls you over for speeding or some other primary offense, he can then also write a seat belt citation.

The administration’s November 2014 deportation priorities memo pretends this is not so; it includes ordinary violations of immigration law, but only as the lowest priority for deportation. And the collapse in interior removals of immigration violators shows that this third priority category is just for show.

John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE, stated the Obama administration position succinctly: “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.”

This extra-legal shift in the conception of the immigration statute has been misleadingly packaged as “prosecutorial discretion.” True prosecutorial discretion is exercised by individual law enforcement officers in ways that do not undermine the agency’s mission. For instance, if a state trooper stops you for speeding and your documents are in order, you’ve interacted with him in a respectful manner, and your toddler in the back seat is crying because she needs her diaper changed — and he lets you off with a warning rather than a fine, that is prosecutorial discretion.

What the Obama administration has done is use discretion as a pretext for simply exempting the vast majority of immigration violators from any possibility of legal consequences.

The results of this transformation of immigration law are clear in the data. ICE statistics show that deportations from the interior (aliens arrested by ICE deportation officers and special agents, as opposed to the Border Patrol) have collapsed, from 236,000 in President Obama’s first year in office to 72,000 last year, a decline of 70 percent over the course of this administration:

Not only have total interior deportations collapsed, but even the removal of criminals has declined by more than half, from about 150,000 in 2010 and 2011 to about 63,000 last year — this despite the Obama administration’s claim of prioritizing such removals:

This decline has occurred despite increases in the number of criminal aliens identified by ICE, largely from the nationwide implementation of the Secure Communities program, which screened the fingerprints of aliens arrested by local law enforcement agencies. This successful program, which was tremendously popular with local law enforcement agencies, was dismantled by the president’s November 2014 executive actions, and replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). ICE removal officers are still alerted to the arrest of criminal aliens by local police, but are prohibited by the White House and subservient ICE political leadership from acting on that information.

This collapse in deportations is not because we’ve run out of illegal aliens. After declining in 2007-2009 because of new enforcement efforts at the end of the Bush administration, followed by the recession, the number of illegal aliens has remained essentially constant at between 11 and 12 million. Many of these are new illegal arrivals — we estimate that some 2.5 million new illegal immigrants settled here during the first six years of the Obama administration, offset mainly by departures and legalizations.

Nor is the steep drop in deportations due to a lack of resources. Last year the Obama administration re-programmed $113 million that Congress had provided to ICE/ERO for enforcement and gave it to other agencies within DHS. The White House 2017 budget request actually seeks a decrease in funding for immigration enforcement, most notably a decrease of $100 million in funding for detention beds — from 34,000 beds to 30,900 — and a 15 percent decrease in funding for fugitive operations (i.e., the effort to locate the roughly 900,000 people ordered deported who simply ran off).

Rather, the collapse in enforcement is a policy choice of the Obama administration. Its strategic vision is, as I described above, to downgrade the immigration law to a secondary status. Among the tactics that serve this strategy, especially with regard to criminals, is the termination of the successful Secure Communities program and its replacement with the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). There are three ways PEP suppresses enforcement:

The new, more restrictive PEP prioritization scheme exempts a larger number of criminal aliens from deportation. Essentially, under PEP the only aliens ICE officers can target for deportation are people convicted of felonies, multiple “serious” misdemeanors, certain gang members, terrorists, and recent deportees. This exempts large numbers of criminal aliens from deportation.
PEP imposes new logistical hurdles for ICE, most notably the requirement that an alien be convicted before ICE takes custody — which can enable a criminal alien to abscond from facing charges, or in some cases walk out of a courthouse or jail before ICE is aware that the offender is being released; and
PEP explicitly allows local governments to impose non-cooperation or sanctuary policies on local law enforcement agencies. In 2014, local sanctuary jurisdictions released more than 10,000 aliens that local ICE field officers were seeking to deport.

As a result of these policies, fewer deportable aliens (and criminal aliens) are being removed from the country and criminal aliens who formerly would have been removed are now being released back to our communities only to commit new crimes.

There is an enormous public safety cost to these enforcement suppression policies. Since 2013 ICE has released approximately 85,000 criminal aliens from its custody. Many of these aliens have gone on to commit additional crimes. More than 125 have since been charged with homicide.

Here are some of the most egregious examples of crimes committed by illegal aliens released from ICE custody because of the president’s prioritization rules:

Sarah Root. In Omaha, Nebraska, on January 31, 2016, an illegal alien named Eswin Mejia, age 19, who had entered illegally as an “unaccompanied minor” but was allowed to stay with his brother, was drag racing while drunk and crashed his pick-up truck into the back of a car driven by Sarah Root, age 21. She died in the hospital soon after, just a day after her graduation from college. Mejia was arrested several days later for felony motor vehicle homicide. He had prior infractions as well. Bail was set at $50,000. Knowing Mejia was an illegal alien, local police contacted ICE five times to urgently request a detainer, fearing he would flee after making bail. ICE refused, saying that Mejia “did not meet ICE’s enforcement priorities.” As the local police feared, Mejia disappeared after posting bail.

Grant Ronnebeck. A 21-year-old man who was murdered while working at a convenience store in Mesa, Arizona. Ronnebeck’s killer was an illegal alien who was released by ICE in 2013 after conviction for a burglary and kidnapping involving drug dealing, to await an immigration hearing years in the future.

Katerin Gomez. This 35-year-old mother of three children under age 13 was killed in Chelsea, Massachusetts, on October 18, 2014, by a stray bullet through her window. The gun was fired during a street brawl allegedly by Hector Ramires, a 21-year old illegal alien member of the notoriously violent MS-13 gang, who was at large awaiting trial for two prior arrests for armed robbery (one with a gun, one with a knife), in which his illegal status and gang membership were noted. The police report also includes mention of prior criminal involvement in his home country of Honduras. ICE did not issue a detainer or initiate deportation proceedings after either prior arrest, nor did it make an effort to charge Ramires as an illegal alien in possession of a firearm, which is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Greg Morton. This Frederick County (Maryland) sheriff’s deputy was attacked last November while sitting in his vehicle by Jose Misael Reyes-Reyes, an 18-year-old illegal alien who had entered as an unaccompanied minor. The attacker was a member of the notoriously violent MS-13 gang and had prior arrests, including one for carrying a dangerous weapon. ICE declined to take him into custody after the prior arrests because he was already awaiting an immigration court hearing.

* * *Prioritizing enforcement resources is not, in itself, the problem we face in immigration. Applying any body of law requires trade-offs and choices. The Treasury Department, for instance, devotes significant resources to the detection of money-laundering by organized crime or funding for terrorists. But it also has parallel initiatives of routine enforcement, to serve as a deterrent for ordinary taxpayers who might be tempted to cheat. Likewise in traffic enforcement; a driver doing 100 miles per hour through a school zone, firing a gun out the window, will obviously be top priority — but at the same time, there are parallel, routine enforcement efforts — speed traps and the like — to deter ordinary people from endangering others with unsafe driving.

If the IRS were to issue memos exempting anyone who’s not a mobster or terrorist from paying taxes, Congress would be aghast. Yet that is precisely what ICE has been ordered to do in the immigration context.

Some might object that the anticipated “raids” to take Central American illegal aliens into custody prove that the administration has not relegated immigration law to secondary status. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The first round of “raids,” in January, netted a whopping 121 people — out of thousands of recent Central American illegal aliens — and only 70 of them were actually deported. Even if this next round of apprehensions is several times larger, it still amounts to nothing more than “enforcement theater.” It’s not even good enforcement theater. These Kabuki raids are too small — microscopic would be more accurate — to change the perception in Central America that if you get into the United States it’s unlikely you’ll ever be required to leave.

Despite staged disagreements with the administration over immigration enforcement, Congresswoman Pelosi concisely articulated the view she shares with the White House when she said in 2013 that “Our view of the law is that … if somebody is here without sufficient documentation, that is not reason for deportation.”

This is very different from an earlier Democratic congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, a civil rights pioneer and champion of the rule of law. As head of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, Jordan testified before Congress that “Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave.”