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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (23700)	1/10/2004 11:57:00 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793640

LEFTIES FOR TERROR By KRIS W. KOBACH NY Post Commentary January 9, 2004 -- A CLUTCH of liberal interest groups, including the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC), La Raza and the New York Immigration Coalition, recently fired the latest salvo in the left's legal battle against the Bush administration's post-9/11 policies. In a Brooklyn lawsuit, they claim that it is illegal for federal law-enforcement agencies to enter the names of alien lawbreakers into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which police check to see if specific individuals are wanted by other jurisdictions. The lawsuit is yet another example of the left taking a laughable argument out of the policy arena - where it would lose - and dressing it up as a legal claim. The aliens now listed in the NCIC system fall into three basic categories: * The "deported felons file": some 111,000 convicted criminals who were ordered deported after serving their time in U.S. prisons. * Absconders: aliens who already had their day in immigration court, and lost - then became fugitives instead of leaving the country as ordered. More than 400,000 are now at large in the United States - making an utter mockery of the rule of law. * High risks for terror: These aliens were registered in the Nation- al Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) when they entered the United States because they presented elevated terrorism risks. They subsequently disappeared, broke federal immigration laws and met other criteria pointing to terrorist activity. Their apprehension is a high priority in the War on Terror. The NCIC system now lists more than 50 such NSEERS violators. Why list these aliens in the NCIC system? Because federal immigration authorities have no way to locate them all on their own. With fewer than 2,000 federal immigration-enforcement agents to cover the entire country, the only way to apprehend a substantial number of these alien lawbreakers is to get help from America's 700,000-plus police officers. So why the lawsuit? In their brief, the groups behind the suit string together a list of arguments that crumble under the slightest scrutiny: 1) The listing of aliens' names in the NCIC system "encourages racial profiling." This is simply illogical. By listing specific, wanted aliens in the NCIC system, the federal government identifies particular fugitives who should be arrested if cops encounter them during traffic stops. This is, in fact, the opposite of racial profiling. When police arrest specifically named individuals, rather than operating on the basis of general characteristics such as race, they are not engaged in any "profiling" whatsoever. 2) Listing the wanted individuals in the NCIC system will discourage people in immigrant communities from reporting crimes. That's more nonsense. The only aliens who need to think twice before reporting crimes are the convicted criminals, fugitives and NSEERS violators who have been listed. How likely is a lawbreaker in one of these categories to voluntarily walk into a police station to report a crime in his neighborhood anyway? The remaining millions of aliens residing inside the United States have nothing to fear, because they are not listed. 3) Merely listing these wanted individuals somehow forces police departments into assisting the federal government against their will. In fact, local cooperation in arresting individuals wanted by the federal government is, and always has been, purely voluntary. Any municipality is free to sit on its hands and become a sanctuary for absconders and terrorists. Even more troubling than the flimsiness of the plaintiffs' case is their utter lack of concern about the terrorist threat posed by the aliens listed in NCIC. Three of the 19 terrorists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 had overstayed their visas; one of the three had actually been stopped for speeding shortly before the terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, the police officer didn't have that information when he had the terrorist in his hands. If the NSEERS system had been in place at the time and violators had been listed in the NCIC database, the officer would have been able to make the arrest - and possibly foil the terrorists' plans. The ADC and its allies display a similar lack of concern about the criminal threat posed by these aliens. Among the absconders are thousands of murderers, drug traffickers, rapists and child molesters. In March 2002, an alien absconder murdered an off-duty police officer in the New York City area. Had the alien been listed in NCIC and apprehended before the murder, that cop would be alive today. At its heart, this lawsuit seeks to blind America's police officers, depriving them of basic information that can save lives. After 9/11, it became abundantly clear that more, not less, information must be shared with local law enforcement. Two years down the road, that information-sharing is finally starting to gain momentum. With this frivolous lawsuit, the left hopes to reverse what little progress has been made. Kris W. Kobach served as counsel to Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001-2003. He is now professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Missouri (Kansas City).