Crime wave: as an illegal-alien crime wave overtakes America, government officials do nothing because they either support open borders or fear to anger the Hispanic community.

On June 5, nine-year-old Jordin Paulder, a towheaded boy with "chubby cheeks," as the newspapers described him, was playing in the parking lot of the Chastain Apartments in Sandy Springs, Georgia, part of metro Atlanta. Jordin saw a car go by and called out to the occupants. The car had a bum tire, the lad shouted. The car stopped, and Santos Benigno Cabrera Borjas emerged, wielding a hatchet. He twice smashed Jordin in the face between the nose and forehead. The second blow buried the hatchet, which paramedics feared removing en route to the hospital. Jordin died. When police cornered Borjas as paramedics worked on Jordin, the ax-murderer tossed a rimmed tire at an officer, breaking his arm. Borjas rushed the cop, who shot him dead.

In New York on November 1, actress Adrienne Shelly died in her apartment in New York City. Shelly was found hanged by a bedsheet on a shower curtain rod, an apparent suicide. But the 40-year-old wife and mother didn't hang herself. Diego Pillco, who was renovating an apartment in Shelly's building, did the deed. He punched the woman and knocked her out when she complained about the noise. Fearing she was dead, he staged the elaborate ruse.

Borjas and Pillco have something in common. They are illegal aliens, from Honduras and Ecuador, just two of the hundreds of thousands brutalizing Americans in a crime wave of unfathomable proportions. They are robbing Americans. They are raping Americans. They are murdering Americans.

The crime data show that illegal aliens have unleashed a reign of terror that would have been considered an act of war 75 years ago. Consider these alarming facts: in 2003, according to the Government Accountability Office, illegal aliens composed 27 percent of the federal prison population. The majority of these, 63 percent, were Mexicans. Some 267,000 illegal aliens were jailed in federal, state, and local facilities that year. And, immigration writer Ed Rubenstein observed, while illegal aliens were an estimated 7.2 percent of the population in 2003, 12.9 percent of them were in jail or prison. In Los Angeles in 2004, 95 percent of the outstanding warrants for murder named illegal aliens.

Yet the federal government, entrusted with the responsibility to defend our country from invasion, does next to nothing. The Bush administration gibbles and gabbles about secure borders while illegal aliens merrily inflict their mayhem. Granted, in June, the federal government conducted "Operation Return to Sender," a nationwide sweep that netted 2,100 illegals (.018 percent of them, assuming 12 million total), including 367 gang bangers nationwide and three-dozen child molesters roaming free in Orange County, California. And in White Plains, New York, in December, the feds arrested six illegal-alien sex offenders, some of whom were registered, on "routine visits" to the probation office. Illegal aliens are registered and make "routine visits" to the probation office? Clearly, the rest have nothing to fear. The reason? A lethal combination of federal inertia, partly due to the president's adamant refusal to deal with the problem, and state, local, and municipal "sanctuary policies" aimed at placating the Hispanic communities.

The Data

Paulder and Shelly are among the thousands of Americans who would be alive if the authorities stopped illegal immigration. Government officials frankly confess their lassitude. Federal bureaucrats can't even keep track of their own immigrant files, and lost some 110,000 of them, the Associated Press reported in November. Of course, 30,000 citizenship applications that lacked documentation sailed through the system anyway.

Bad as that is, the crime data on illegal aliens reveal what the federal government's incompetence means. In April 2005, the GAO studied the 55,322 illegal aliens in federal prisons during 2003. The frightening facts? Those 55,322 illegal aliens were arrested 459,614 times, or eight times each. They committed some 700,000 crimes, 13 each. Thirty-six percent of them were arrested at least five times. Moreover, as Rubenstein notes, the number of illegal aliens locked in federal, state and local jails grew from 9,000 illegal aliens in 1980 to 267,000 in 2003.

Even worse, Deborah Schurman Kauflin, who heads the Violent Crimes Institute, which studied illegal aliens and crime, discovered that a disproportionate share of illegal aliens are dangerous sex fiends.

At her website, Kauflin presents her analysis of 1,500 illegal-alien cases covering nearly eight years. Most of the criminals were gathered in states with the highest number of illegals: California, Texas, Arizona, New Jersey, New York, and Florida. She uncovered a tsunami of drunk driving, robbery, child molestation, rape, and murder, including serial murders and brutal gang rapes.

Frighteningly, she reported, sex offenders represent 2 percent of illegal aliens. Assuming a population of 12 million illegals, some 240,000 illegal-alien sex criminals are now in the United States. That, in turn, "translates to 93 sex offenders and 12 serial sex offenders coming across U.S. borders illegally per day." This might be one reason Operation Return to Sender targeted illegal-alien sex criminals, and why the feds have arrested 100 sex fiends in White Plains since 2003. At any rate, Kauflin's 1,500 offenders victimized 5,999 people, about four victims each. Of those studied, 525, or 35 percent, were child molestations, 358, or 24 percent, were rapes, and 617, or 41 percent, were sexual homicides and serial murders. Illegal aliens, she calculated, victimized nearly 1 million people over the 88 months of crime data she studied.

The data are even more detailed, but you get the picture. In another article, Kauflin recounts the grisly, appalling crimes illegal aliens committed. An illegal immigrant named Maximiliano Esparza "raped and sodomized two nuns and used their rosary beads to control them during the attack. The Sisters were beaten, raped, sodomized, and finally, Esparza used her own rosary beads to strangle Sister Helen Lynn Chaska to death." Esparza, who pickled his liver at a strip joint before the sacrilegious attack, was a career criminal deported once before. The Border Patrol nabbed him again, but released him. Meanwhile, Kauflin observed, television drama treats us to illegal aliens attacked by Americans.

These illegal-alien sex criminals are mostly Mexican. As those concerned about what immigrants mean for American culture have observed, foreigners bring their culture and customs with them. One of those beliefs, Kauflin reports, is the Mexican "concept of rapto," meaning the abduction of a woman or girl to rape her. In 2002, the Washington Post published a long piece backing Kauflin's opinion that rapto is "socially acceptable" in Mexico. The piece also backed her bold charge of misogyny among Mexican men.

One Oaxacan legislator called rapto "romantic," which is no surprise in a country where stealing cattle, the Post reported, is more serious than rape.

"Many [Mexican] states," the paper revealed, "require that if a 12-year-old girl wants to accuse an adult man of statutory rape, she must first prove she is 'chaste and pure.'" Nineteen states simply drop statutory rape charges "if the rapist agrees to marry his victim." Outraged women's and human rights groups were trying to change Mexican law when the Post's article appeared, but whatever their success in Mexico, rapto has arrived in America. Two of the sex fiends in White Plains raped 14-year-old girls, and immigrant attacks on women and girls, including sadistic gang rapes, are rising.

One example occurred on December 19, 2002 in New York, when Victor Cruz, Armando Juvenal, Jose Hernandez, and Carlos Rodriguez, all illegal aliens, joined as many as five other men in raping a 42-year-old woman for three hours near Shea Stadium. Three of the four illegals were violent criminals but were not deported. In a letter to the court, the victim wrote that the rapists attacked her like "a pack of wild wolves." Similar examples of beastly gang rapes, some involving more than a dozen men, are legion.

While many illegal-alien criminals are run-of-the-mill murderers and rapists, if such a creature exists, some of them are serial rapists and killers. The annals of illegal-alien crime, as THE NEW AMERICAN reported in its August 7, 2006 issue, include the recently executed "Railroad Killer," Angel Maturino Resendiz. Between 1986 and 1999, he butchered at least 15 people across six states, eight in Texas and others in Kentucky and Georgia. He murdered a pastor and his wife with a sledgehammer in 1999, pulverizing the woman's face before he raped her.

Sanctuary

The bloody thread running through Kauflin's reports and other data is that many illegal aliens are caught for minor crimes and released ... but not deported. As the Los Angeles Times reported about Operation Return to Sender, "most of those arrested in the nationwide sweep ... served time in county jails.... But instead of being deported, they were released." If deported, illegals often return to the United States. "Nearly 63% [of the criminals Kauflin studied] had been deported on another offense prior to the sex crime. There was an average of 3 years of committing crimes such as DUI, assaults, or drug related offenses prior to being apprehended for a sexual offense," meaning their crimes escalated each time they were caught. The crimes Kauflin documents are so horrendous one wonders how the government erred and failed to deport the criminal illegals.

Most Americans would be shocked, or perhaps they wouldn't, to learn that federal, state, and local governments, far from making mistakes, instead refuse to deport illegal aliens. Some federal immigration officials candidly admit they are not interested in "administrative" cases, meaning those merely involving illegal immigration. The feds are interested in "other crimes." But at the state level, where such "other crimes" are committed, a different worm is eating the apple of American sovereignty. Heather McDonald, writing in City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, explains it in one word: sanctuary.

Many cities such as Los Angeles and New York refuse to notify federal authorities when local police apprehend criminals they know are illegal aliens. And generally, it appears, it isn't police who suggest and approve the policies. It's politicians.

In Los Angeles, McDonald wrote, police can't jail dangerous gang members, despite their violent criminal records and felonious re-entry into the country, because they would violate the police department's rule against enforcing immigration laws. That rule "mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities ... from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These 'sanctuary policies' generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities."

The cops, McDonald reported, are at wits' end: "We can't even talk about it," a "frustrated LAPD captain" told McDonald. "People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics." Sighed another, "I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals]."

The consequences of this dereliction of duty are obvious, as Kauflin's report shows, but McDonald added even more examples of what not deporting illegal aliens means for law-abiding Americans. In 2004, "in Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens." In 1995, a study showed that a gang in southern California boasted 20,000 members, 60 percent of whom were illegal aliens.

Unsurprisingly, public officials defend these sanctuary policies because they believe (or say they do) that illegal-alien victims who do not fear deportation will help police, and for the insane reason that "they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course)." Sanctuary may encourage more illegal aliens to jump on the welfare dole, but it hasn't curbed the crime wave. As McDonald wrote, "no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims." In truth, McDonald reported, sheer numbers energize sanctuary policies. Politicians are afraid of the "backlash" from immigrant groups and their vociferous supporters.

Chillingly, a top presidential contender for 2008, Rudolf Giuliani, created a sanctuary policy and sued the federal government "all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court" over a federal law, passed in 1996, requiring cities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In a sequence of events so eerie it sounds fictive, six days before terrorist illegal immigrants flattened the twin towers on 9/11 and set the Pentagon ablaze, Giuliani's "handpicked charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government." Pandering to illegal immigrants and their supporters, Giuliani said the federal law was a tool to "terrorize people."

Despite 9/11 and losing in court, McDonald wrote, "New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban" until the flagitious gang rape at Shea Stadium. Though three of the illegal immigrants in that case had lengthy rap sheets for violent crimes, the city "never notified the INS."

What Will Americans Do?

This compendium of mayhem and murder by illegal aliens does not count the carnage on the nation's highways inflicted by drunk-driving illegal aliens. These stories are too numerous to recount here, but a quick Google search will divulge countless deaths and maimings by illegal aliens hurtling down the highways on a tankful of gas and snootful of booze. As with their other categories of crime, cases abound where illegal aliens have been caught driving drunk, then released to kill.

A particularly poignant example hit the newspapers the day after Thanksgiving. For the families of Brian Mathews, 21, of Columbia, Maryland, and Jennifer Bower, 24, of Montgomery Village, it was truly Black Friday. Eduardo Raul Morales-Soriano, 25, an illegal Mexican, killed the pair on Thanksgiving night, prosecutors allege, when he slammed his Nissan Sentra into Bower's Toyota Corolla at a red light. Mathews and Bower were on their second date.

Morales-Soriano was polluted, police allege, with four times the legal limit of alcohol. Before that fatal day, the Baltimore Sun disclosed, police collared him three times, the most significant being a wreck in February. Police allege he reeked of alcohol. Although he refused a Breathalyzer test, his license was not suspended, as the law requires. The charges were dropped. In July, the paper reported, police nailed him for driving the wrong way on a one-way street, speeding and negligent driving. The court exonerated him. In September, before the wreck that killed Mathews and Bower, he was convicted of driving on unsafe tires. For the third time, he was not deported.

Brian Mathews, a lance corporal in the Marine Corps who survived duty in Iraq, never knew what hit him. Neither did Jordin Paulder or Adrienne Shelly, nor many others who died at the hands of illegal aliens. Their demises are tragic not just for what their families and communities lost, but for what they reveal about American officialdom, from the anti-American elites in Washington to the vacillating, tremulous elites in cities and counties. They will not act. They fear an "immigrant backlash?'

Until they fear an American backlash, a backlash from the Paulders and Shellys and other victims, illegal aliens will continue to rob, rape, and kill.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Virginia.