Obama Expands Bush Administration’s Policy of Deporting Criminal Aliens

  I have to admit that this news caught me by surprise, in a good way. The president has asked for a 30% increase, a total of $200 million, in funding for an ICE program called the “Secure Communities” program.

   It is not very often that I agree with the president on anything. As a matter of fact the only issues that I have agreed with the president on is his continuance of every one of the Bush administration’s policies on the war on terror Overseas Contingency Operation. This is another example of the president continuing a Bush administration policy. Not only a continuation but an expansion.

   What is the “Secure Communities” program?

   The money allocated for this program goes to finding jailed illegal aliens and deporting them once they have served their sentences. This may be the first money that the president has spent on a program that I agree with. I still can’t get over the fact that this president didn’t decide to stop this program when he announced that he was going to cut a few million dollars out of his multi-trillion dollar budget. Perhaps he calculated the political ramifications of ending this program and figured it wasn’t worth the fallout. Regardless of many of the politician’s views on amnesty for illegal aliens, the American people are by and large opposed to the rights that have been given to illegal aliens. 

  I can only hope that the president and Homeland Security are actually serious about deporting illegal aliens who have committed additional crimes once they broken into the country and that this isn’t window dressing. I still have my doubts.

  On a side note I find the title of the article that I linked to (Obama Expands Bush Administration Program to Deport Criminal Illegal Aliens)
a  little redundant. Criminal and illegal, is it necessary to have both of those words in the title? Are we forgetting that it is a crime to break into the country in the first place? Are we forgetting that the manner in which they arrived in this country made them criminals in the first place?

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has said that deporting illegal aliens who have committed crimes would be a priority under her leadership.

   That is where my skepticism still remains, the fact that Homeland Security and the president are still seemingly unwilling to acknowledge that coming to this country illegally is a crime. The sentence above is a redundancy, if you are an illegal alien you have already committed a crime, you shouldn’t have to be jailed for an additional crime in order to be deported.

  The expansion of this program is a good start, but that is all that it is. If we are going to deport all of the illegal aliens that have committed a crime than we must deport all illegal aliens. They have all committed a crime.