Crackdown on Illegal Immigrant Gangs
So today it was announced how a summer surge against illegal immigrant gang members was a whopping success. Looking at the Operation Shield website, I note some statistics that will interest anyone who is following this story:
The fiscal budget for 2007 is over 4million dollars. ICE has approximately 15,000 employees working in 400 offices nationwide and over 50 locations internationally.
In FY06, CE removed 185,431 illegal aliens from the country, a ten percent increase over the number of removals in FY05. This essentially means that for every employee of the ICE program, 12 illegals are brought in in a year. Is that enough?
I think if I worked an entire year on finding and dealing with illegal immigrants with my sister, who is a lawyer, we could deport at least 50 people. I find this a staggering number of illegals for such a huge workforce.
While “the government” seems proud to boast the numbers of illegals netted, like the current wave of 1300 of them, I find the number small and unsatisfactory. Of the 1313 that were taken in, 1300 of them were in Los Angeles, or so it seems from all the doublespeak press releases I’ve been reading at the ICE website.
While I’m not advocating removal of your local gardner on immigration infractions, certainly you can find more gang members and deadbeats in the illegal population than this scrawny number.
According to ICE, since the latest effort kicked off, authorities have arrested 7,655 gang members from 700 different gangs. That’s great, now what about the other 100,000 out there that are destoying American cities with gang violence.
Even the Justice Department’s estimate in 2005 of more than 700,000 gang members nationwide could be too low by at least 200,000, said Patrick Word, vice chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Gang Investigators Network, a group that helps collect data for the Justice Department. At this point with the collection of 185,000 per year, it could take 10 years to eradicate our streets of violent gang members, and moreover, while they are doing it another 700,000 will enter this country illegally. From what I hear there are over 12 million illegals here at this time. That means that we have 1 in 10 of them in gangs.
If the government is set on handling this problem, their employees will have to step it up because 10 illegals per worker is not enough enforcement.
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