Editorials

Skating on Thin ICE; For Want of a Paper Trail

The pregnant question is: What on earth would Barack Obama actually do with that $3.7B he’s asking for from Congress?

He says it’s to manage the logistics of rounding up, holding hearings, and administratively dealing with those 77,000 unaccompanied children found ineligible for permission to stay in the United States? And I assume, others to come.

Now let’s see? How many have actually arrived? And where are they today? How did they get here? Has each one been interviewed? Or given at least a rudimentary physical examination? You known the sort of stuff they did at Ellis Island, 188o-s 1930s, and which was remarkably similar to how they processed millions of American men who received letters to report to their local selective service center to register for the draft, starting in 1940..

Imagine a row of tables. The first table was for those with papers, the second table for those without, thus the term WOP. Most in fact were Italian, but other European languages were also involved, and the candidates were directed to a table where someone who could speak to them in their native tongue could begin the processing, where, their name and age were entered, home country, village or town and any known relatives in the United States. Now then, go through that door, take off your clothes (men one  side, women the other), put them in a wire basket and have them inventoried, whereupon you will be handed a slip (a hand receipt, sort of like a hat check stub, which was very popular in those days) then fall in line to be examined by a doctor or nurse. Sick ones were chuted through one door (quarantine and further examination) or that other door, where you will put your clothes back on and await further disposition. In selective service rooms, this took a few hours. (I did it in 1964.) At Ellis Island the process sometimes took 2-3 days.

Whether a WOP or a kid waiting draft classification, the process ended with a big heavy stamp on a sheet of paper that said ADMITTED or 1A-to-4F, which the candidate either showed to his local draft board, or, to a guy on the gangplank on the launch going over to the city, which he would then board and shortly be in America, where the real adventure would begin.

ellis2

It was a steady process, like a factory, where there was a steady stream of raw material coming in one door, and a steady stream of finished product going out another, and clerks with clipboards standing around and counting everything. There was never a shortage of pencils or printed forms, or people sitting behind each desk waiting to move the candidate down to the next desk. Bottom line: for every person who ever came through Ellis Island there is still a physical piece of paper, a file, a history, of that event in one of the government repositories that tells their tale even today. All you have to do is have the patience to go find it.

Ellis Island was a time when government used pencils, paper, clipboards, and manila folders, none of which ever crashed or mysteriously disappeared. The INS of the day faithfully reported the day’s, week’s and month’s “tickets punched’ in triplicate, through Republican and Democrat administration alike, through Progressive and Conservative administration  alike. Trust me, it is the same today no matter what they say.

Back to these kids who seem to be the vanguard of a border invasion. Who are they? No one seems to know. How many from Nicaragua? Honduras? El Salvador?  How did they get here? By plane? Bus? Hitchhiking? Coyote? Afoot? And how did they afford, or alternately, survive the trek? Hours or days? Is that tale written down anywhere? And what a tale some would be, don’t you think?

Out here in America, first we are told on television about illegal children being removed from Texas and taken by bus and dumped at Phoenix bus stations. But what we saw was film of toddlers being carried off busses by women? Their mothers? Relatives? Were they also illegals, or just Latino temps hired as escorts? No one is saying, but perhaps that is because no one is asking?

We then see photos of older kids sleeping under those space-cloth blankets, but many of those photos are being used over and over again, so we wonder if any of the photos go with any of the stories that are being filed that day. I assume the photos are to generate pathos, but since no outsider can visit  some people wonder if this is not the same studio they used to fake the lunar landings in ’68?  Are we just seeing the same 100 or so space blankets, only photographed from various angles? Texas military bases report maximum capacity at their facilities, but those are only a few hundred. Those Murietta busses who keep getting stopped, what once, twice, three times, how many can they carry? Two hundred in three busses? Are those the same kids or different kids? And what of the disposition of those allegedly rerouted to San Diego? Did any intrepid reporter actually trail the busses to see where they stopped and fed the kids? Or did they carry bag lunches? (We assume they weren’t Michelle-Lunches or those kids would have bolted back for the border long ago.) Who contracted the busses? And when? Were these contracts from the RFQ’s (request for quotes) put out by the government in January? We’ve all seen the RFQ’s but has anyone seen an actual contract? Where’s the paper trail? There has to be dozens.

77,000 they say. Only who’s “they”. And there’s the rub, isn’t it?. And who’s asking ICE and HHS these questions anyway? And there’s the other rub. Of course ICE knows the answer to every question, just as we all know, including our congressmen, there  are places in IRS where all their lost emails are stored.

Seriously, can Texas confirm federal accounts of how many kids have actually arrived inside their borders as UAC’s (unaccompanied children)? How many have departed? And where? Do Border Patrol counts match ICE headcounts? Does ICE know where they are but are just not telling us, or do they have no earthly idea? Stop and freeze a moment in time, say  7PM PST yesterday, and tell us just how many of these kids are actually in federal control? It should equal how many have come in, minus how many have been placed in one of three or four different categories of disposition. Can ICE tell us what those categories are? Again, is anyone asking?

You see, we are hearing reports from part of the government that many, most, some or a few, have already been released to family, relatives, but also purported relatives, or just olive-skinned people who showed an interest in the children…possibly Denver drug gangs?, la Raza?, who the hell knows (or from ICE’s point of view, cares, as long as they are out of sight). Supposedly many already have received some sort of notice from ICE to show back up at their local ICE office (as far away as Boston, I think) to begin proceedings so that their deportation case can be adjudicated, which is why Little Obama says he needs that money.

Back to the question I asked at the top, just what does Little Barack Obama want to do with that $3.7B? We already know that however many UAC’s have been released, on a promise to come back in a weeks and file that petition, less than 5% ever do. Obama says he needs the money for lawyers and judges to adjudicate this flood of new cases. What? Three thousand? I could sub-contract that out to southwestern law schools at $125/hour. But Little O is asking for $80,000 a head for the number currently reported. The only known cost is that we can put them back on a bus to Honduras for less than  $1000/head, with bag lunches.

The Paper Tale

A local Virginia county, Prince William, has been keeping their own numbers. Local law enforcement has turned over 7700 illegals to ICE, (not children mind you) after having arrested and convicted them for a battery of crimes. ICE simply released them. Same-oh, same-oh. But over 10% of those released showed back up in the same county, to be arrested again, after assurances they had been ‘removed.”. (This probably explains LAPD’s recent statement they will no longer turn illegals over to ICE. The percent of crimes committed around the country by illegals, and the illegal prison populations are staggeringly high.) Anyway, in building a case to sue ICE, Prince William Country asked for written proof of their disposition of those 7700 illegals, and ICE replied they had been “removed”, which in bureaucratese has no meaning as ordinary humans understand it. I think they were removed in the same way the VA, another federal bureaucracy, “removed” veterans from waiting lists; i.e, “to be removed” means to no longer exist in the federal system, or in its mind. They no longer exist to the bureaucrats.

The Virginia federal district court sent Prince William County’s lawsuit back, without prejudice, because they had not exhausted every administrative remedy with HHS. So they are now working their way up the bureaucratic ladder, basically by asking all the question the media and Congress should be asking today, also knowing ICE and HHS cannot afford ever to provide factual answers to their questions, for it would prove a criminal conspiracy. PW County is simply using these questions to paint ICE into a corner. And since the GOP isn’t currently charge in the Justice Department, where criminal indictments begin,  they don’t have to be in that big of a hurry.

From the IRS testimony by that custodian of federal records, we learned that this sort of loss/mishandling of public records is “illegal”. He wouldn’t go so far as to call it criminal, after all he is also a federal bureaucrat and a bureaucrat can only carry his hypocritical fealty to the rule of  law so far.

But I will.

The questions I am asking here are not facetious. The Prince William County open case proves to me that 1) the government is purposely misplacing or losing records, which is a federal crime. And they are doing it with purposeful intent. To avoid prosecution. I.e., a criminal enterprise.at the top, with many expendable mid-level management bureaucrats to take the fall should the whole plot fall apart. Think of a bureaucratic My Lai where only a lieutenant, sergeants and grunt soldiers take the fall.  The questions I am asking now are in anticipation of a lawsuit or criminal action at some later date. Once the people realize that document (evidence) destruction is part of an overall plan to avoid political or legal fall out, but are powerless to do anything about it now (with the DOJ working for the crooks) what we can do, with or without our congressmen’s help, is to put mid-level bureaucrats engaged in this process on notice that they will be held accountable at some time in the future. Remind them that that peculiarly military  law about issuing or obeying illegal orders applies equally to the federal bureaucracy. Once made aware of these risks, I’d like to think that, unlike Lois Lerner, a life-long, committed political hack, a senior GS-11 is not really that anxious to throw himself, and his retirement, on the sword of the Democrat Party’s political ambitions.

Trey Gowdy, call your office, because you may have some people who will want to talk to you soon..

Today it doesn’t matter that there s no DOJ to bring charges, but it does matter that ICE, IRS, VA officials, et al, be put on notice that charges await them once there is a change in government. Issuing an illegal order or obeying one, is a crime, we all know, but it always falls on the head of those who carry those orders out. The underlings. They are those who we need to be targeted to break this code of silence.

About that money, think of Obama’s $3.7B as a kind of payola, a payoff to ICE, for much of it will go to feed that beast in exchange for services rendered. it will be wise for them to read up on the laws of extradition, too.

 

 

 

Tagged , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *