Two cases this week further highlighted the grave flaws in the nation’s immigration system.
The first example emerged on Monday when the Justice Department charged Franklin Freddy Meave Vazquez, a 27-year old Mexican-national, with attempted murder and the murder of Bill Haver, the captain of the fishing boat on which he worked.
On Sunday, Vasquez used a knife and a hammer to attack fellow crew members while the ship was off the coast of Massachusetts. It was not, however, his first encounter with the criminal justice system.
In March he got into a fight with his wife – an incident that resulted in charges of abduction by force, intimidation or deception. While the violent nature of his crime should have kept him in police custody, he was released on $20,000 bond.
“This shouldn’t have happened. He committed a violent crime against my daughter, an American citizen, and they let him go… the system failed,” his mother-in-law Lindsay MacDannold told Newsweek.
In fact, he should have been back in Mexico well before 2018.
According to Fox News, Vasquez had was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program status in 2013 and was denied a renewal in 2016. It remains unclear whether deportation proceedings were even initiated, but he clearly was illegal.
On the other side of the country, Ramon Alberto Escobar, a 47-year old El Salvadoran who’d been previously deported six times, was charged with murder and is being investigated in connection with three other murders and four attempted murders in Southern California.
In addition, he is suspected in the disappearance of two relatives in Houston. But all of those violent acts were preventable.
According to the Los Angeles Police Department, Escobar possesses a criminal record that includes arrests in 2017 and 2018, as well as five years in a Texas prison from 1995 to 2000. Although it defies logic and reason, John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told KTLA that even a serious criminal record does not prevent illegal aliens from claiming asylum to avoid deportation.
These cases are not isolated. In February Indianapolis Colts football player Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver were killed by a drunk illegal alien who’d been deported twice and in May, another twice-deported illegal alien was arrested in connection with the death of a woman and the disappearance of her child.
The failures – and the bodies – will continue to mount up until action is taken to address the serious breakdown the nation’s immigration system.