Felinda Williams couldn’t make herself go to court on a recent morning, couldn’t bring herself to look at the man accused of driving drunk and killing her daughter, her son-in-law and her 2-year-old grandson.
She knows few details of the Aug. 11 crash in Houston that killed the newlyweds and the little boy nicknamed “Peanut Butter.” She does know that her daughter didn’t die on impact. The young woman, according to reports, felt the flames and begged helpless bystanders to pull her free.
The grieving woman knows two things about Juan Felix Salinas, the man charged in connection with their deaths: She knows his name, and she knows he was in the U.S. illegally, out on bail after an earlier arrest.
“He’s been through the courts and the jail before, and nobody caught it,” Williams said. “If they’d caught it, he would have been in jail or deported, and then he wouldn’t have been out there on the streets, and my babies would still be alive.”
The deaths of Tenisha and S.J. Williams and Xavier Brown have once again focused attention on a controversial topic for law enforcement in Harris County and across the country — how to deal with illegal immigrants accused of crimes.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/metro/5073457.html
It is hard to be this stupid without being drunk.
The fact that there are “lots” of illegal aliens (I will not call them undocumented immigrants) committing “lots” of very serious violent crimes is not at all contradicted by the fact that there are “lots” of illegal aliens in the United States who do not commit additional crimes, beyond being here illegally, of course. Both can be true.
Nobody is contending that the vast majority of illegal immigrans are committing horrendous violent crimes. But the fact of the matter is that those living outside the law are more likely to break the law, and are more diffucult to control, because they have nothing to lose.
On balance, we would have less violent crime in this country if all illegal immigrants were back where they belong, in their home countries. This fact cannot be denied.
