illegal alien charged in fatal Christmas crash

Metro Police charged Ramon Nerl Olea, 22, with vehicular homicide by intoxication Tuesday in connection with a two-vehicle crash Christmas morning in the 200 block of Haywood Lane.

Olea was driving a Chrysler Seabring northbound on Haywood Lane when he lost control of the car and crashed into a southbound Mitsubishi Gallant driven by Moni Rai, 22, at 8:30 a.m., police said.

Rai’s backseat passenger, Tika Koirala, 46, who was critically injured in the crash, was transported to Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he died today, police said. Rai, of Nashville, and two other passengers in the Mitsubishi were taken to Southern Hills Medical Center where they were all treated and released.

Police said Olea, the sole occupant of the Chrysler, smelled of alcohol. A blood sample was obtained for alcohol and drug analysis by the TBI Crime Laboratory. He was transported to Vanderbilt University Medical Center where he was treated and released into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, police said.

ICE placed a federal immigration hold on Olea who is suspected of illegally entering the United States.

Source - http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/suspected-illegal-immigrant-charged-fatal-christmas-crash

Illegal Alien Murders Teen for Speaking English in America

I swear we don’t plan this stuff out.

But no sooner than does a series of articles about the Collier County Sheriff’s Office program to deport troublesome illegal aliens conclude than an illegal alien is in the headlines, and not in a good way.

The sheriff’s program, as outlined in stories Sunday and Monday, targets illegal immigrants who run afoul of the law. Deputies, through extra training, are empowered to enforce federal laws and begin deportation proceedings as they see fit. In places without the program, local authorities have to rely on federal agents to undertake the deportation process against known illegal immigrants residing in their jails, a demand the feds are not always prepared to meet.

The program and the articles about it elicited the predictable responses from good-hearted people who see tragedy in the separation of families. They fret over the anxiety experienced by those who skirted the rules to find a better life in the United States yet are one traffic stop away from losing it.

Then along comes Mauricio Escalante. The 33-year-old illegal immigrant was arrested Saturday for stabbing to death a 17-year-old on the streets of Immokalee.

The teenager’s affront that set off the fatal confrontation — daring to speak English in America.

According to Sheriff’s Office reports, around 3 a.m. Saturday Charlie Guzman and some friends gathered at the laundry of an apartment complex on Colorado Avenue. Three others, including Escalante, were already there and the two groups began talking until a dispute erupted over the victim’s group speaking English, not Spanish.

Escalante went to a nearby apartment, got a knife, and fatally stabbed Guzman, according to reports.

So much for the notion that illegal immigrants are universally a hard-working, law abiding set committed to doing the jobs Americans won’t do, all while trying to assimilate.

While plenty of people in the community of illegal immigrants, a majority, no doubt, fit that description, there are bad actors in the group.

The bad actors are the ones targeted by the sheriff’s program. For proof of that, one need look no further than Escalante. A year ago, he wound up in jail because deputies found him so drunk he was deemed to be a threat to himself or others.

But being drunk out of your mind in public isn’t the sort of thing that gets you deported under the sheriff’s system.

“Until the murder, he didn’t have a criminal history with us,” Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Karie Partington said.

In two years, about 2,200 illegal immigrants have been either deported or are awaiting deportation through the sheriff’s efforts. Among that many cases, there are bound to be a few where the triggering offenses seem minor or the hardship upon family members here legally seems great.

But there are hardships to be borne by turning a blind eye toward illegal immigrants among us.

Ask the family of Charlie Guzman.

Source - http://www.eutimes.net/2009/12/illegal-alien-murders-teen-for-speaking-english-in-america/

Illegal Alien Arrested for Slashing Throat of Elderly Woman

Another illegal turns on his employer.

On Wednesday, police in Slidell, LA, arrested an illegal alien for slashing the throat of his 84-year-old neighbor with a razor blade. The attack left an 8-inch gash in the woman’s throat, her assailant stole about $65 in cash.

The octogenarian victim survived the attack and later identified the man who did odd jobs for her, Ricardo Tenorio-Palma, 20, as the man who tried to kill her.

Slidell Police Capt. Kevin Swann said: “It wasn’t like he demanded money; he stabbed her first. He slashed her first, before he robbed her. He intended to kill her,”

Police allege that on Wednesday afternoon, Tenorio-Palma entered the woman’s home through a door she always left slightly open for her cat.

Punching and kicking, the woman fought off her attacker until the loss of blood and fatigue set in. Left bleeding on the floor, the woman then activated her medical alert necklace.

The victim recently paid the Mexican national to string-up Christmas lights on her house, and in the past, had given him furniture and other household items.

Tenorio-Palma sits in St. Tammany Jail, and has been charged with attempted first-degree murder and armed robbery. If convicted, he faces a possible sentence of up to 99 years in prison.

Source - http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/2009/12/22/illegal-alien-arrested-for-slashing-throat-of-elderly-woman/

Video - Illegal Alien Cuts Throat of An 84 Year-Old Woman

Video - Congressman Brian Bilbray: No Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants - America's Morning News

Illegal alien caught with someone else's passport

In 13 years in and around New York, Augusto Noguera built an impressive life. From humble beginnings in Paraguay, he became a mainstay of his nation’s expatriate population, running a division of a construction company, working for charitable and political causes, and entertaining visiting dignitaries at his house in Flushing, Queens.

The crowning moment came in September, when President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay appointed him to an administrative post in the government’s New York consulate. It was a job Mr. Noguera had eagerly sought, friends said, as payback for supporting Mr. Lugo and other candidates in last year’s elections.

There was just one problem: Mr. Noguera was an illegal immigrant.

Today, he is locked in an immigration detention center in Arizona, awaiting deportation. His botched appointment has deeply embarrassed the Paraguayan government. And it has stirred a mix of shame, anger and dismay among his countrymen in New York, who have been agitating for a more robust consulate to help them build organizations and raise their community’s profile.

Only Mr. Noguera’s closest friends knew he was in the United States illegally, the men said. Representative Elvis Balbuena, a Paraguayan legislator who was a major supporter of his bid for the job, said Mr. Noguera had sneaked into the United States in the mid-1990s.

Shortly after dawn on Nov. 26, Mr. Noguera was detained by American immigration officials at the border crossing in San Ysidro, Calif., said Rubén Benítez Palma, Paraguay’s consul general in Los Angeles. Mr. Noguera was carrying someone else’s passport, Mr. Benítez said.

“It was legal,” he added. “But it wasn’t his.”

http://queenscrap.blogspot.com/2009/12/illegal-alien-caught-with-someone-elses.html

Video - Congressman Brian Bilbray: No Amnesty For Illegal Aliens

illegal aliens Lose Lawsuit Against Atlanta Hospital. Thank God!

ATLANTA — Efforts to force the public hospital here to continue providing free dialysis treatment to a group of immigrants, most of them illegal, suffered a setback on Tuesday when a judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging the recent closing of the hospital’s outpatient renal clinic.

A lawyer for the roughly 50 patients said he would appeal. But the ruling for Grady Memorial Hospital brings the patients closer to a Jan. 3 deadline for finding new sources of the life-sustaining dialysis treatment.

When the struggling hospital closed the clinic for fiscal reasons in early October, it agreed to pay for three months of dialysis for the patients at private clinics, either in the United States or in their home countries. That reprieve has nearly expired, and most of the patients have not taken steps to seek treatment elsewhere.

A hospital spokesman disclosed Tuesday that three of the patients had died since the clinic’s closing, two of them in Mexico and one in Atlanta. None of the deaths, he said, appeared related to inadequate access to dialysis.

“Based on the best information that we have, the patients’ deaths were not caused by a lack of dialysis care but by other health issues,” said Matt Gove, the Grady spokesman.

The hospital, which provides charity care to patients regardless of their immigration status, has lost five dialysis patients in each of the last two years, Mr. Gove said. Nationally, about one in five dialysis patients dies within a year of starting treatment, and about two in three die within five years, according to government figures.

The hospital has said its offer to assist patients in relocating will end on Jan. 3, and patients have signed forms stating that they understand as much. But that may not mean they will be cut off from care after that date.

Grady has a contract with a large dialysis provider, Fresenius Medical Services, that covers the patients’ treatment until September 2010. If the patients continue to go to Fresenius clinics, and the clinics continue to treat them, Grady will presumably be billed for their continuing care.

Because of their immigration status, the patients are not eligible for Medicare, the federal insurance program, which covers the prohibitive costs of dialysis for American citizens and longtime legal immigrants.

At a hearing on Tuesday morning, Judge Ural D. Glanville of Fulton County Superior Court provided little reasoning for granting the hospital’s request to dismiss the patients’ lawsuit. The patients’ lawyer, Lindsay Jones, had contended among other claims that Grady had illegally abandoned the patients. A lawyer for the hospital, Bernard Taylor, said the patients were asserting a constitutional right to medical care that does not exist in law.

Several patients said they were saddened by the ruling. “I’m a person who loves life, who wants to live,” said Reina Andrade, 32, one of the plaintiffs. “If I return to my village in Honduras, I know I will die.”

Mr. Gove, the hospital spokesman, said he could not name the three patients who had died or discuss details of their cases. But one of them is Adriana Ríos Fernández, a 23-year-old mother of two whose father said she died in Durango, Mexico, on Nov. 28.

Ms. Ríos was receiving only two dialysis treatments a week, rather than the standard regimen of three, said her father, Adrian Ríos Zuñiga. Five or six hours after each treatment, he said, her lungs would fill with fluid, making it difficult to breathe. Mexican nephrologists briefed on her case said it was possible that more dialysis would have made a difference.

But Ms. Ríos left Atlanta in August, shortly after Grady announced that the clinic would close and before the hospital offered its deal for three months of paid dialysis, Mr. Ríos said. He said his family had paid the $118 cost of her treatments out of pocket and could not afford more than two sessions a week.

“We sold rings, we sold chains, we got money from cousins and friends,” he said. “A lot of people did try to help us, but unfortunately it came to an end.”

Mr. Gove would not comment on whether the hospital kept track of Ms. Ríos after her departure, or whether Grady felt any obligation to patients who left the country before the hospital made its offer of assistance.

“We’ve done everything we can to see that patients, if they chose to go back home, had safe travel and the support they needed,” he said.

http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20091216/ZNYT04/912163009

Video - Ray Stevens - We The People

Want to sneak into U.S.? There's an app for that

Illegal aliens crossing the U.S.-Mexico border now have a cell-phone tool to chart the best route, find food and locate people who will help them enter the country – courtesy of a professor at a state-funded university.

Ricardo Dominguez, a University of California, San Diego tenured visual arts professor and activist, designed the Transborder Immigrant Tool, an application much like a global-positioning system used in cars, to help illegals find the best locations for food, water and groups to assist them as they sneak into America.

Dominguez is also co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, or EDT, a group that developed virtual-sit-in technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He also helped set up a website-jamming network called the FloodNet system to attack official sites of the U.S. Border Patrol, White House, G8, Mexican embassy and others.

"It allowed anyone with Internet access to overload the websites of several governmental entities," he told Vice Magazine.

Dominguez also called for a three-day virtual sit-in on the Minuteman Project website in 2005, targeting it with denial-of-service attacks, according to an account in "Tactical Media."

Dominguez said his research lab at the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology, or CALIT2, on the UCSD campus is called BANG Lab, which stands for Bits, Atoms, Neurons and Genes. He said he's been focusing on developing "border-disturbance technologies."

To create the Transborder Immigrant Tool, Dominguez used a Motorola i455 cell phone, which includes a free GPS applet.

"We were able to crack it and create a simple compass-like navigation system," he explained. "We were also able to add other information, like where to find water left by the Border Angels, where to find Quaker help centers that will wrap your feet, how far you are from the highway – things to make the application really benefit individuals who are crossing the border."

Dominguez told the North County Times, "The primary goal of the tool is to offer those crossing a way not to die."

But Jim Gilchrist, founder and president of the Minuteman Project, told WND the tool goes a step further.

"It helps illegals avoid all of the Border Patrol hot spots," he said. "It helps them to illegally infiltrate the United States."

Gilchrist said Dominguez is aiding and abetting people who break the law.

"What he's doing is not developing something to put in a cell phone to summon 9-1-1 in case they're stuck in the desert and in trouble and they need help," he said. "He's providing them a detailed, mapped pathway into the United States so illegals can bring in their drugs, anchor babies, illegal alien cargo, armaments and anyone who wants to come into the United States, regardless of our rule of law. That's what this professor is doing. He should be indicted."

He continued, "This is serious. What is next? Someone using that to get someone in the United States to kill a member of law enforcement or a bunch of kids at an elementary school in the name of some god or some culture from the anti-American mantra? Who knows what the consequences could be?"

Messages left with Dominguez had not been returned at the time of this report.

According to the BANG blog, the Transborder Immigrant Tool was the winner of "Transnational Communities Award" and was funded by CALIT2 and two awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities.

Dominguez said he has plans to "interface with communities south of the border," including nongovernmental organizations, churches and communities that deal with people who are preparing to illegally cross the border.

"How can we train them to use this? What is the proper methodology? Those are really going to be the most nuanced and difficult elements with, let's call it, the sociological aspect of the project," he said.

Border Patrol spokesman Mark Endicott said smugglers have used GPS devices in the past, and the application won't hinder law-enforcement efforts, the Associated Press reported. But Gilchrist disagrees with that assessment.

"Yes, it will," he said. "It's going to be another tool of encouragement to come to the United States. It'll tell them this nation is no longer a nation of laws; it's a nation of mob rule as far as our immigration laws are concerned. Just come on over, and we're going to help you."

Asked what other projects he is working on, Dominguez told Vice Magazine, "We've got a lab where we're working with similar applications using nanotechnology and labs where we teach researchers about electronic civil disobedience and border-disturbance technologies."

He said UCSD graduate students recently completed a project in which they installed a Skype system on a pay phone near the border in Tijuana, Mexico. The students direct illegals to the free pay phone when Homeland Security drops them off on the Mexico side of the border.

Also featured on the BANG lab website are Dominguez's fellow UCSD researchers, Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas. Cardenas is described as "a transgender artist" and lecturer in the visual arts department at UCSD. Mehrmand and Cardenas have participated in several demonstrations called "Technésexual" in Tijuana, San Francisco and Montreal where the two engage in erotic acts on a stage and use biometric sensor devices to amplify their heartbeats before a live audience.

As for the Transborder Immigrant Tool, Dominguez has said he hopes to make it available for free on the Internet.

Gilchrist questioned where Dominguez's loyalties lie.

"What is a real American? Is it someone who hates America and encourages lawlessness? Is that an American?" he asked. "I don't think he's an American at all. I think he's an anarchist."

He added, "Instead of Dominguez saying, 'You should not be breaking U.S. laws. I am an American. I respect the rule of law in my country, and I encourage you to stay in Mexico and Central America,' he's just saying, 'Come on over. May the rule of law be damned.'"

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=117865

Video - Senator Mike Crapo

Boat carrying 21 illegal aliens is seized off La Jolla coast, U.S. officials say

A small boat carrying 21 illegal immigrants tried to flee from federal agents before being stopped Wednesday morning about 14 miles off the La Jolla coast, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said today.

The 25-foot boat had been spotted farther up the coast near Leucadia by a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. A Blackhawk helicopter and a Midnight Express Interceptor vessel were dispatched to help track down the skiff-like boat, known as a panga.

The boat's driver was arrested as a suspected smuggler. The other people – 20 men and one woman, all of them Mexican citizens – were turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol.

Smugglers operating from beaches near Baja California's Rosarito Beach frequently subject illegal immigrants to dangerous and arduous journeys by sea. In this case, the suspected smuggler at least provided the immigrants with flotation devices, authorities said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/12/us-agents-seize-boat-with-21-illegal-immigrants-off-la-jolla-coast.html