HAS THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT BECOME OUR ENEMY?

(CNSNews.com) – Pinal County (Ariz.) Sheriff Paul Babeu is hopping mad at the federal government.

Babeu told CNSNews.com that rather than help law enforcement in Arizona stop the hundreds of thousands of people who come into the United States illegally, the federal government is targeting the state and its law enforcement personnel.

“What’s very troubling is the fact that at a time when we in law enforcement and our state need help from the federal government, instead of sending help they put up billboard-size signs warning our citizens to stay out of the desert in my county because of dangerous drug and human smuggling and weapons and bandits and all these other things and then, behind that, they drag us into court with the ACLU,” Babeu said.

The sheriff was referring to the law suits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the U.S. Department of Justice challenging the state’s new immigration law.

“So who has partnered with the ACLU?” Babeu said in a telephone interview with CNSNews.com. “It’s the president and (Attorney General) Eric Holder himself. And that’s simply outrageous.”

Last week, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton placed a temporary injunction on portions of the bill that allowed law enforcement personnel during the course of a criminal investigation who have probable cause to think an individual is in the country illegally to check immigration status. The state of Arizona filed an appeal on Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Our own government has become our enemy and is taking us to court at a time when we need help,” Babeu said.

Babeu and Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County Ariz., spoke by phone with CNSNews.com last week about the May 17 ACLU class-action lawsuit, which charges the law uses racial profiling and named the county attorneys and sheriffs in all 15 Arizona counties as defendants. The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit on July 6, charging the Arizona law preempted the federal government’s sole right to enforce immigration law.

“If the president would do his job and secure the border; send 3,000 armed soldiers to the Arizona border and stop the illegal immigration and the drug smuggling and the violence, we wouldn’t even be in this position and where we’re forced to take matters into our own hands,” Babeu said.

Dever said the federal government’s failure to secure the border and its current thwarting of Arizona’s effort to control illegal immigration within its borders has implications for the entire country.

“The bigger picture is while what’s going on in Arizona is critically important, what comes out of this and happens here will affect our entire nation in terms of our ability to protect our citizenry from a very serious homeland security threat,” Dever said. “People who are coming across the border in my county aren’t staying there. They’re going everywhere USA and a lot of them are bad, bad people.

”According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), about 250,000 people were detained in Arizona in the last 12 months for being in the country illegally. Babeu said that that number only reflects the number of people detained and that thousands more enter the country illegally each year.

The CBP also reports that 17 percent of those detained already have a criminal record in the United States.

Both Babeu and Dever said they want to remain involved in the legal battle over the law, which many experts predict will end up being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dever has hired an independent attorney to represent him in the ACLU case and his attorney has already filed a motion of intervention in the DOJ lawsuit so the “(Dever) will have a seat at the table.

”A Web site also has been launched by the non-profit, Iowa-based Legacy Foundation to raise money for the Babeu’s and Dever’s legal defense.

Both men said they believe the outcome of the case has national significance.“For us, this is a public safety matter and a national security threat,” Babeu said.

The Fuss over Arizona's Immigration Law

The Fuss over Arizona's Immigration Law
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

By Brit Hume


The president says the Arizona law is "misguided."

His attorney general says it's "unfortunate."

In San Francisco they are talking about boycotting the state.

Al Sharpton is on the way to lead marches and Linda Greenhouse, the esteemed legal affairs commentator of The New York Times, says she will boycott Arizona because, she says, it's now a police state where, "breathing while undocumented" is a crime.

All this is in reaction mainly to two passages of the new Arizona immigration law

One provides when police are engaged in "lawful contact" with someone where there is "reasonable suspicion" the person is an illegal alien, that the police shall make a "reasonable attempt... when practicable" to determine the person's immigration status.

The other provision makes it a crime to be in Arizona illegally. This is the part that Greenhouse says makes breathing while undocumented a crime.

But it's already a federal crime to enter the U.S. illegally. The new law just makes it a state crime, to.

As for the charge police will now make random demands of Hispanics to produce their papers, the bill's authors say that the requirement that there first be "lawful contact" means situations where someone has already been stopped for other law enforcement reasons.

In fact, once you actually read this law, it becomes clear the fuss over it has little to do with breathing in Arizona and a lot to do with hyperventilating in Washington.

— Brit Hume is the senior political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Justice Department Drops Indictment of Alaska Sen. Stevens

According to a Politico Breaking News bulletin, Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered Justice Department lawyers to withdraw their indictment of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens. The move will effectively reverse the conviction of the 84-year old Stevens, who was defeated for re-election in November 2008.

Sanctuary City Mayor Gordon Panders to Hispanic Voters - Compares Maricopa County to Selma in '50's and '60's

Sanctuary City Mayor Gordon Panders to Hispanic Voters - Compares Maricopa County to Selma in '50's and '60's

Phoenix, Arizona is second in the world only to Mexico City in kidnappings; illegal immigrant drop houses are discovered daily, police officers and civilians are murdered by illegal immigrants, thousands march in its streets carry foreign flags and demanding rights for those illegally in the United States, and the mayor of this sanctuary city compares those trying to enforce our immigration laws with racist sheriff's in the south of the '50's and '60's.

The Arizona Republic has reported that Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, a Democrat, who is term limited in 2012, addressed the Reform Not Raids National Summit in Phoenix hosted by Somos America/We are America and said that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's workplace raids and immigration sweeps have given people the impression the state is becoming a hotbed for racial discrimination.

The mayor of America's fifth largest city made his remarks nearly a year after he first denounced the sheriff for enforcing immigration laws at a Cesar Chavez luncheon.

Gordon, who was in Washington, D.C., this week telling lawmakers that more federal money was needed to combat immigration related violence said, "several people told me that, due to profiling and other civil-rights abuses by the Maricopa County Sheriff, Arizona is getting the same reputation as Alabama had in the 1950's." Gordon didn't give any names however of who those several people were.

According to the Republic, Gordon told reporters that Arpaio is "not using dogs or hoses, but he's targeting people of color."

Gordon complained that Arpaio's crime-suppression sweeps that are used to enforce Arizona's employer-sanctions and anti-smuggling laws, have taken place in mostly Hispanic neighborhoods or target day laborers.

Playing the race card and painting everyone who supports enforcement of our immigration laws as nativist and racist is the only card those in favor of illegal immigration have to play and they wont let the truth get in the way.

Danny Ortega, an attorney and the summit's chairman said that he believes Maricopa County is the new Selma, Alabama. "The same thing that was happening to the African-American community in Selma in the '50's and '60's is now happening in Maricopa County today at the hands of Sheriff Joe Arpaio," Ortega said.

Contrary to Danny Ortega's revised history of the United States, Americans of African ancestry did not enter the United States illegally but most were forced over as slaves to provide cheap labor. Illegal immigrants do provide greedy employers with cheap labor, much as slaves once did, slavery was abolished in the United States however, by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1865. To make any comparison of the treatment and blatant discrimination that American citizens of African ancestry suffered with the rights illegal immigrant of today enjoy, insults and minimizes the societal trauma of slavery and the struggle for civil rights in America.

Gordon has wrote to the Justice Department and asked them to look into complaints that sheriff's deputies were using racial profiling in their enforcement of federal immigration laws. In February, four lawmakers who are Democrats asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a Republican.

This month the Justice Department notified the sheriff that they had launched an investigation focused on whether deputies are engaging in "patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures," the Republic reported.

It may take America a long time to get illegal immigration under control as long as we have cheap politicians like Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix.

Bob Haran,

American Conservative Republican

Obama Lied To Gun Owners

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama deliberately and repeatedly lied to America's 90 million gun owners across the country when he insisted that he would not try to take away anyone's firearms, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, reacting to yesterday's remarks by Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder that the president will seek to reinstate the ban on semi-automatic firearms, said Obama "knew he was lying to the nation because his own web site touted his plan to revive the gun ban and make it permanent."

"We warned America that Obama's 'support' for the Second Amendment was empty rhetoric," he stated, "and now Holder's disclosure has confirmed it. Obama was lying, and now gun rights may be dying."

Several times on the campaign trail, Obama told voters "I'm not going to take your guns away." He said it at rallies in Duryea, Pennsylvania and in Boise, Idaho. He also told a news conference that "Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear "I think people can take me at my word."

"Right now," said Gottlieb, "I wouldn't take Obama's word if he said it rains a lot in Seattle." Apparently, law-abiding gun owners have nothing to fear unless they own sport-utility rifles, semiautomatic shotguns, handguns and any other firearm that Obama and his anti-gun attorney general don't like.

"Thanks to Eric Holder, who has been far more honest than his boss about his anti-gun philosophy, it is now clear that the new president doesn't support the Second Amendment at all," he observed. "American gun owners should remind Democrats in Congress that the Second Amendment means what it says, especially when the president doesn't."