It's time to pick on the Republicans for a change and I'm going to keep this short and simple. For about forty years we've been allowing people to enter the country illegally. Or maybe some of them entered legally with some sort of visa or other temporary status that I'm not even aware of and then they decided they liked it here and stayed. Apparently nobody checks the status of people here on a temporary visa status. Then there's a visa status that I didn't know about until about three months ago. It's called permanent resident status and it's a visa that allows the recipient of the card to live and work in the country for as long as they want but they aren't allowed to vote in elections. There is no requirement to become a citizen they just have to obey the law and renew the visa every ten years. I don't know why a person would want to live their whole life in a country without becoming a citizen, but I'm sure there are valid reasons. And I don't really care, but it turns out that the people in charge of passing out visas don't have a limit on the number of visas that can be issued nor does anyone ever follow up to ensure that people are renewing their visas on time, or ever. It's basically an honor system.
Honor systems work fine when you're working with honest people, but even honest people can get lazy and ten years is a pretty long time so time passes and the damn thing doesn't get renewed on time. Over time visa holders and even bureaucrats get kind of lax since there's no penalty for not renewing the visa and no real incentive to renew it at all. It can be hard for a person with an expired visa to renew a driver's license and if a permanent resident card holder leaves the country and has an expired visa they can't reenter. An individual can remain in the country indefinitely as long as they don't get caught breaking the law or otherwise draw attention to themselves so for decades no one really noticed. Then there were a few high profile crimes committed by people in the country illegally and some people became concerned. Then of course there was the tragic attack on the World Trade Center towers in 2001. Many of the terrorists involved on that were in the country with expired visas, mostly student visas. They decided to hijack four jumbo jets with passengers on board and use them to complete a suicide mission; two of them flew into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, collapsing them both. A third flew into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and a forth apparently got lost, but was probably supposed to fly into the United States Capitol building. The passengers overpowered the terrorist hijackers and deliberately crashed the plane into a farmers field in Pennsylvania. What I'm trying to say is that the visa system was a little lax but it wasn't a problem until it was.
There has been near hysteria in the country ever since. Every time an individual in the country illegally committed a murder or a rape it made the news and it seemed to be happening more and more often. Finally a guy decided he'd had enough and he ran for president of the United States almost solely on the platform of deporting people here illegally. The logic was sound; if the murderers and rapists weren't here they wouldn't be committing violent crimes. Drunk driving is another favorite crime committed by illegal aliens and drunk drivers kill and maim lots of people. The man's name was Donald Trump and he had been a celebrity for a long time. He was a real estate mogul who had made billions of dollars and decided he could help the country as president. He ran a good campaign and won the election by a large margin. Democrats hated him and kept him busy for his entire term by trying three times to impeach him without ever presenting any impeachable offenses. In addition to that they charged him with multiple crimes that were never committed, but he still had to waste time defending himself in court.
He was an unconventional president in that he was sending out emails daily defending himself publicly and disparaging his accusers. Some people thought he was probably right, but he was mean so when his term ended in 2020 he was defeated by an old man who was clearly suffering from dementia. His four year term was a near disaster. When he left office hardly anyone in the country could afford to buy a house because interest rates had shot up dramatically. There was a war raging in the Middle East and the Russians had started a war with neighboring Ukraine. So Donald Trump ran again and won by a large margin again and pretty much used the same platform; deport people here illegally especially those who were committing crimes. Of course he also promised to help get the economy moving again and to help stop the wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
This is where my concerns about the Bill of Rights comes in. He was extremely serious about deportations. He unleashed the Department of Homeland Security and told them to deport every single person in the country illegally. Visa checks, work places, prisons he wanted to know where every visa holder was and if their visas had expired or not. If they had he wanted them deported and that's where he lost me. There is a requirement to renew a visa, but no one ever checks and there's no penalty for non compliance. The violator can be deported, but there is no requirement to deport them. To the Trump administration that didn't matter. All violators had to be investigated and the majority of them had to leave. Many of them had been here for thirty years or more and never committed a crime. They had good jobs and owned houses, their kids went to school here and they just didn't see any reason to keep renewing a visa when there was no penalty for not doing it. Well now it's a problem. The Department of Homeland Security has been going after all of them. Moms, dads, kids, everyone.
To make things worse they are allowing officers from the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs enforcement run around with no uniforms, blue jeans and whatever t-shirt they want to wear and to top it off they are allowed to wrap their heads in a rag so no one can tell who they are. They claim they have to do that so criminals won't know who they are and track them down and kill them. All members of law enforcement face the same threat but they don't get to cover their faces so no one knows who they are. So they are running around in unmarked cars and chasing down anyone they think is here illegally. I have a problem with that especially when one of things they use for criteria is a person's race. If you look Hispanic you are at a greater risk of being stopped and questioned and if you don't have some form of identification on you even if you're a citizen they take you to their station to verify your status and there are a lot of people who have entered the country illegally from Mexico and Central America because for the previous four years the guy with dementia encouraged millions of people to cross the southern border illegally. His administration even created a cell phone app that allowed people to request asylum after entering the country illegally. I don't like racial profiling. Knowing a suspects race is beneficial when searching for a suspect that has been identified, but looking for a suspect when all you know is their race is against our basic civil rights. It's been unconstitutional for at least fifty years but they're doing it now. Someone filed a lawsuit that ended up in the Supreme Court. Several lower courts had rule that racial profiling was against the law, but the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government.
I couldn't believe it. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that racial profiling was now legal again. I was genuinely surprised. Probably more than I should have been and I still don't get it. If they can pick on people because of their race what about their political affiliation? Or their membership in the local Elks Lodge or what if they belong to the wrong church? I was in favor of deporting illegal aliens who were committing crimes. To me that was obvious and only democrats were opposed to that. Not only did President Trump let me down by ignoring the civil rights violations, but the Supreme Court agreed with him. So what about the Bill of Rights? As a detective for a major American police department for almost forty years we were bound by it. The Fourth and Fourteenth amendments prohibited unreasonable searches and seizures and guaranteed equal protections under the law. I don't know if those protections are still available to us. I personally don't think the possible dangers presented by the presence of illegal aliens justifies giving up our civil rights. If the cost of border security is giving up our constitutional rights then let's put together some sort of mutual aid agreement with Mexico that allows access on both sides of the border.
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