Three important things happened at Tuesday's hearing of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security.
The first was the testimony of two mothers of children killed by illegal immigrants. The second was the outrageous and false contention by a Methodist bishop that the mere act of bringing attention to these heinous offenses is a form of "blind vengeance" over "isolated ... incidents." (In other words, it is our moral duty to shut up.) The third explains why very few Americans have no idea that the first two items occurred, namely that the establishment press, consistent with its practice since Republicans took over the House of Representative in early 2011, chose not to cover what happened at yet another congressional hearing.
The video which follows includes some of the testimony of Michelle Root and Laura Wilkerson.
Mrs. Root is the mother of 21 year-old Sarah Root, who was (cough, cough) allegedly killed by illegal immigrant Eswin Mejia in January. Police say "Mejia was driving drunk while street racing on January 31st ultimately causing the crash that killed Root." He "posted bond, skipped out on alcohol monitoring, and failed to show up in court multiple times." Further, "Omaha police had asked (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for an immigration hold on Mejia after the deadly wreck; immigration and customs rejected that." No one knows where Mejia is.
Mrs. Wilkerson's teenage son Josh was brutaly murdered in 2010 by Hermilo Vildo Moralez, an illegal-immigrant classmate to whom he gave a ride. 2-1/2 years later, Moralez, who tried an unfit-for-trial dodge to avoid accountability, was convicted of Josh's murder. At a congressional hearing last July, Mrs. Wilkerson read from her son's autopsy report indicating that he was "tied up with braided rope — 13 loops around his neck in a slipknot," that he "was kicked so hard in the stomach that it sent his spleen into his spine, and sliced it in two," and that he "His throat and his voicebox are crushed."
Here is the video (story HT to CNS News; video posted by Western Journalism Center):
Transcript (bolds are mine throughout this post):
2 Grieving Mothers Beyond Upset At Lawless U.S. Immigration Policies
NARRATOR: Laura Wilkerson, mother of a teenage boy murdered by an illegal immigrant, gave an emotional testimony in front of Trey Gowdy on Tuesday.
WILKERSON: Nothing has been done about it. We can have hearing after hearing, after hearing. Until there is action, we’re just talking.
I see this American government scrambling over themselves to pretend to care about American families. And instead, you give every bit of America to people who have broken our laws on how to enter this country, then on to break other laws. You talked about fear - illegals are afraid to come out of the shadows. You want to know what fear is? When somebody reaches into your house and grabs your littlest kid and tortures them. You’re afraid of everything for a long time.
I could care less about the fear that they put themselves in here. I didn’t bring my kid across a border. I did not put my kid in harm's way when he went to school that day. You did. Everyone of you is elected by an American. It is time for you to stand in the gap for Americans. I don’t understand it, how you pick and choose a law. You know, the laws are here to be enforced by who? By you. And they’re not being enforced, and my kid suffered terribly for it.
NARRATOR: Michelle Root - another mother at the hearing - shared her frustration about how a drunk, street-racing illegal killed her daughter and fled the country.
ROOT: It’s just devastating that the laws that we have in place weren’t carried out. The local law enforcement did their job. They detained him. Went to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], tried to get a hold on him - ICE refused. Eswin [Mejia] spent four days in jail and is believed to have fled the country. He posted $5,000 bond - which was less than the cost it was to bury my daughter Sarah. Because of the lack of controls, the police, immigration, U.S. Marshals and law enforcement have little or no information on his whereabouts. Eswin was not a stranger to law enforcement and failed to honor his legal obligation for minor traffic infractions prior to killing my daughter. Now a failed local judicial system that set his bond too low, coupled with the flawed Obama administration policies, have rewarded the illegal and punished my family and hampered law enforcement in their investigations.
NARRATOR: Will the current administration do anything to stop the dangers of illegal immigration?
The testimony, in a sense, moved Bishop Minerva Carcaño of the United Methodist Church. Bishop Carcaño is "the official spokesperson for the United Methodist Council of Bishops on the issue of immigration."
After a ritual recitation of sympathy for the victims and their families, she was moved to display hideous, callous indifference towards those who have been and continue to be victimized by illegal-immigrant violence. Additionally, as seen in the full hearing video, the bishop, a longtime "advocate," made what she must surely know is a gross misrepresentation of the involvement of illegal immigrants in criminal behavior and activity:
Bishop Minerva Carcaño of the United Methodist Church said using stories about children’s deaths as part of a campaign to try to deport illegal immigrants amounted to “blind vengeance.”
“It is unjust, totally unjust, to take isolated, certainly very tragic incidents, and implicate millions of our undocumented community members,” she said.
She added that she found U.S. immigration laws unjust when they tried to prevent “hardworking” people from coming to the U.S. if they were trying to improve their family’s circumstances.
“It is irresponsible to allow children to die,” the bishop said.
It's also irresponsible for parents to endanger their children by sending them unaccompanied on a dangerous and illegal journey to another country in the hope that outfits like UMC, which has received millions of dollars from the federal government, will take care of them, and then effectively allow them to stay here by slowing the justice system to a virtual halt, making it years before their cases are heard. Apparently, the bishop has no problem with this form of parental irresponsibility.
The idea that illegal-immigration violence is "isolated" is an outrageous lie, and the bishop either surely knows this, or is so ignorant that she doesn't belong in any position of responsibility or influence:
Illegal Immigrants Accounted for Nearly 37 Percent of Federal Sentences in FY 2014
While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.
According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.
Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.
... Eliminating all immigration violations (included in above figures), illegal immigrants would account for 13.6 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.
Illegals commit federal crimes — other than their presence, which is in and of itself a crime — with 4.3 times the frequency of the rest of those present in the U.S.
As of March, 22.5 percent of all federal prisoners claimed a native country other than the U.S. Over two-thirds of the 44,000 such federal inmates were natives of Mexico.
More compelling information about the vastly disproportionate level of crime committed by illegal immigrants is at an American Thinker item posted by Randall Hoven in July of last year. One key estimate:
Here are the numbers of crimes per day committed by illegal aliens in just a few crime categories (based on an analysis) over four years: - Kidnappings: 9
- Murders: 15
- Sex offenses: 43
- Burglaries: 71
- Assaults: 131
Sorry, Bishop Carcaño, murders by illegal immigrants aren't "isolated" incidents. They are daily incidents. There's a commandment against bearing false witness, and she has clearly violated it.
During the course of her testimony, as the Daily Caller reported yesterday, Bishop Carcano also contended that it's America's fault that people are pouring over our borders illegally:
... the bishop — the first Hispanic woman elected to her position at UMC — launched into an attack on U.S. foreign policy, blaming it for a situation that has forced Central Americans to flee their homes.
“Immigrants want to stay home,” she said. “They’re not able to stay home because we’ve undermined their economies. We have raped their lands.”
“I would restate that most immigrants want to stay home. But they can’t feed their families,” she continued, adding that the U.S.’s involvement in Central America has harmed their economies “in disastrous ways.”
“We’ve been involved in their politics in ways that have undermined their countries and left their societies in shambles.”
Bishop Carcaño is essentially saying that leftist supporters of open-borders immigration consider it a necessary form of international reparations.
It would be nice if America knew that this is how the head of one of the nation's largest churches sees things while learning about the horrible deaths of Josh Wilkerson and Sarah Root. But the establishment press's virtual blackout of congressional hearings during the past seven years will mostly prevent that from happening.
Besides the Google search result noted earlier which contained no establishment press items, searches on the two mothers' last names at the Associated Press and the New York Times also came up empty.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
