Washington Times - 'We Are Overwhelmed':
The Tohono O'odham Nation here, the second largest Indian reservation in the United States, is facing a medical crisis.
Every month, more than 50,000 illegal aliens cross the reservation, which is located in the harsh desert regions of southern Arizona and shares 76 miles of the international border with Mexico. ...
The hundreds of illegal immigrants who have been injured or have fallen victim to dehydration or heat stroke on the reservation have overloaded its only hospital. The medical costs of illegal aliens seeking to enter the country have also affected dozens of other hospitals along the U.S.-Mexico border, at a cost to taxpayers of millions of dollars a year.
"We are a small rural hospital funded by Congress to take care of our Native American population," said Darrell W. Rumley, director of the Sells Indian Hospital, which serves the nation's 25,500 members. "We are the only hospital between Tucson and Yuma, serving an area about the size of Connecticut.
"But we are required by law to treat those who present themselves for care, including the illegal aliens who show up on their own and those being brought here by the federal government. Over the last few years, their numbers have been going up in a big way," he said. "We're doing what we can to survive."
Mr. Rumley's situation is not unique.
Dozens of hospitals in the 28 counties along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California have either closed their doors or face bankruptcy because of losses caused by "uncompensated care" given to illegal immigrants. ...
A similar crisis exists in public education, where illegal immigration has had a major effect on elementary and secondary school enrollments, particularly among the four border states.
Schools, like hospitals, are prohibited under federal law from denying immigrant students access to a free public education. As a result, the annual cost to taxpayers to provide that education is estimated in the billions of dollars.
A report last month by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) said that rising immigration numbers were to blame for school overcrowding, adding that if the flow of immigrants were not cut, they would account for 96 percent of the future increase in the school-age population over the next 50 years.
The report said the numbers included a massive flow of illegal aliens into U.S. schools and predicted that the quality of education would not improve if the government did not stop illegal immigration.
In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, said children of illegal immigrants have a constitutional right to a free public education. The high court prohibited schools from adopting policies or taking actions that would deny illegal aliens access to education based on their immigration status. ...
The Urban Institute and others have estimated that 15 percent of all kindergarten through high school children in California are illegal immigrants, who cost the taxpayers $1.6 billion annually. Elected officials and education and immigration experts do not have specific numbers for New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, but believe that between 10 percent and 15 percent of the total enrollment in those states are illegal aliens.
NY Times - Immigrants Back In School:
Five children, who were removed from their schools here by the district superintendent three weeks ago because their mothers were in the United States illegally, were allowed to return to school today after state education officials intervened.
NY Post - Sudan pilot charged in immigration fraud:
GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) - A Sudanese pilot who officials say is being investigated for possible al Qaeda links is accused in an affidavit of falsifying immigration documents in an attempt to stay in the United States.
FBI agents said in the affidavit filed in federal court that Mekki Hamed Mekki said he submitted several forms with variations of name, date of birth and place of birth to improve his chances in an immigration lottery.
He submitted the forms for this year's U.S. diversity immigrant program, which makes 50,000 permanent visas available to people from countries with low rates of immigration, the agents said. ...
In the black bag, the agents said they found 20 entry forms for the U.S. diversity immigrant visa program, the form that Mekki said he had submitted with several names, dates of birth and places of birth.
Michelle Malkin - The Deportation Abyss:"It Ain't Over 'Til the Alien Wins":
Credibility in immigration policy, as the late Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan remarked, rests on three simple principles: "People who should get in, get in; people who should not enter are kept out; and people who are deportable should be required to leave." ...
Government watchdogs have found the INS to be habitually lax in its efforts to track down and help boot out the worst criminal offenders among the alien population. A number of federal laws require the agency to initiate deportation actions against aliens convicted of aggravated felonies as quickly as possible and before they are released from federal or state prisons. Congress increased funding and staffing for a Justice Department program to speed up this process. Yet, thousands of criminal aliens have been released into the public after serving their sentences because of the INS's failure to screen and send them into deportation hearings. ...
Meanwhile, untold hundreds of thousands of "absconders" are roaming the country - illegal alien fugitives who have been ordered deported by immigration judges but who continue to evade the law. In December 2001, INS Commissioner James Ziglar revealed for the first time under oath that the INS did not know the whereabouts of "about 314,000" fugitive deportees. Only then did Justice Department officials move, for the first time ever, to place their names in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database.
The absconder statistics remain in dispute after the agency conceded to reporters from Washington, D.C.-based Human Events newspaper that it could not vouch for the accuracy of the number. Some, including Representative George Gekas, a Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the House immigration subcommittee, believe the actual number could run as high as one million. ...
While the INS receives much-deserved flack for the deportation quagmire, a large portion of the blame lies with the independent agency in charge of the nation's immigration courts, the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and its appellate body, the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which thrive on making the deportation process as time-consuming and unwieldy as possible. Together, these two independent agencies - separate from the INS, but also housed under the Justice Department - hold the ultimate keys to deportation. While the INS has responsibility for apprehending and bringing immigration charges against aliens, it is the little-known EOIR that has jurisdiction over the nationwide Immigration Courts and their companion appeals system. More than 200 immigration judges preside in 52 courts across the country. They oversee removal proceedings, as well as bond re-determination hearings, in which the judges can reduce the bond imposed by the INS for aliens in custody who seek release on their own recognizance before final deportation.
The BIA's 20-odd members, based in Falls Church, Va., are politically-appointed bureaucrats who have the power to overturn deportation orders nationwide. The panel - comprised largely of alien-friendly advocates from immigration-law circles - receives more than 30,000 appeals every year, and has a backlog of 56,000 cases, of which 34,000 are more than one year old, 10,000 are more than three years old, and some are more than seven years old. There's even a saying among immigration insiders in Washington about the deportation process: "It ain't over 'til the alien wins."
