In a previous blog, I demonstrated – using the cases of actual illegal alien felons – that a porous, unsecured, and largely wall-less southwestern border often serves as a revolving door for foreign criminals. Below are several more cases, all taken from FAIR’s online archive of crimes committed by illegal aliens, that reinforce the need to continue building the border wall and other efforts to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
- In early June 2020, Utah State Prison honored an ICE detainer that resulted in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) taking custody of Marco Antonio Garcia Arriaga, an illegal alien from Mexico with convictions for murder and aggravated robbery. On May 27, 2016, the illegal alien and another Mexican national shot and killed Mauricio Martinez in Salt Lake City, Utah, during an attempted robbery. Garcia Arriaga, who was deported in 2011 and 2012, will be deported again (after serving less than a year in jail) – hopefully permanently this time.
- On May 5, a criminal complaint was unsealed against Marcin Ciborowski (aka Rafal Golaszewski) and another illegal alien from Poland, Mariusz Daniluk. The two had been running a human trafficking and prostitution scheme (known as the “Norridge Girls”) in Northwest Chicago and the adjacent suburbs, regularly bringing in women from Central and Eastern Europe for this purpose. Ciborowski has been deported from the U.S. twice – in 2002 and 2005 – but reentered illegally through Mexico in 2010 and later obtained false identification papers.
- On April 28, ICE officers took custody of Kristian Jonas Gamez Trejo, a Honduran national, in San Francisco. Gamez Trejo, who was on the “ICE Most Wanted” criminal alien list, was convicted of felony sex with a minor in November 2016. He had also been arrested on domestic violence charges in April 2019. Gamez Trejo had been deported to Honduras twice in 2015. Since San Francisco is a sanctuary jurisdiction, the county jail had ignored ICE detainers and released the illegal alien six times between 2017 and 2019.
- On February 20, a U.S. district judge in Georgia sentenced Mexican national Pedro Santos-Garcia to 52 months in prison for illegal reentry and violation of supervised release. Santos-Garcia was pulled over in late April 2019 by Cook County Sheriff’s deputies and injured one of the officers while attempting to resist arrest and flee. He had been deported a total of eight times between 2002 and 2017, making him the record-breaker for this blog.
What these cases show is that a Swiss-cheese-like border is an incentive for foreign bad guys – be they from places relatively close, such as Mexico or Central America, or distant ones, such as Central and Eastern Europe – to attempt to sneak into the United States, sometimes repeatedly. They also show why the continuing construction (200 miles built or updated so far) of a secure border wall/fence is a necessity and a public safety issue, rather than some sort of nativist, “anti-immigrant” distraction (as the left so often portrays it).
Granted, a wall is not a 100 percent fool-proof solution. However, people throughout the world did not erect walls for thousands of years because they expected them to be completely and totally effective. Rather, they understood that, when built and used properly, barriers such as fences and walls can serve as both a deterrent and a force multiplier. In other words, the goal is to deter the run-of-the-mill illegal alien so that the Border Patrol can focus its resources and manpower on stopping the criminals who are much harder to deter. In any case, the fact that illegal alien criminals, like the ones profiled above, were deported several times – and yet continued to re-enter – makes the case for continuing to build more wall.
