Mexican Mayors Fret Flood Of California Convicts
Concerns over midnight border crossings are getting turned upside down, in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that compels the state of California to reduce its prison population by upward of 30,000 inmates.
California officials haven’t made any decisions on how they’ll comply with the requirements, but because a goodly portion of the state’s prison population is comprised of illegal immigrants from Mexico, some folks are already speculating one quick fix would be to send them back over the border.
And the prospect that a horde of freshly released convicted criminals could be headed that way seems to not be sitting well with Mexican officials. This from the Boston Globe:
Mayors of 14 border cities from Tijuana to Matamoros meeting in Mexico City on Friday say they already have problems because U.S. authorities often don’t warn them when migrants with criminal records are deported to Mexico.
“There are indications they are going to clean out their prisons,’’ said Manuel Baldenebro, mayor of the city of San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, which sits on the border with California and Arizona. “They (migrant inmates) are a burden, and if they are trying to economize in their jails, they see it as better to send them back.’’
Baldenebro said the notion of more criminals has caused “fear and insecurity’’ in cities already plagued by a stubborn wave of drug-related violence that has killed more than 35,000 people nationally since 2006.
While there are no tracking systems to determine what happens to deported criminals, at least one, Martin Estrada Luna, is accused of becoming a leader of a cell of the Zetas drug gang in the border state of Tamaulipas just 18 months after he was deported from the United States. Estrada, who had a long rap sheet of mostly theft and property crimes in Washington state, is now in custody in Mexico City, where he is accused for masterminding the killing of more than 250 people.
According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, about 10 percent of its 162,694 inmates are from Mexico, the majority undocumented.
So in other words, the mayors from Mexico are worried that Mexican immigrants who illegally entered the US, committed other crimes for which they are currently incarcerated, will once again be crossing the border without notice or warning. You know, kind of like they did in the first place, but in reverse flow.
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