No, I understand the meaning perfectly. “Illegal” means something that’s against a law, any law. But apparently some people misunderstand it, and think that immigration laws are the only laws it’s possible for anyone to violate. Why would that be? Surely, they have the same status as any other law?
Well - NPR had a report yesterday which included this bit:
Thanks. Doesn’t look like there are enough non-sales drug offenders to cover, even if there were no overlapping offenses.
Regards,
Shodan
“Illegal thieves”, “illegal drug-dealers” or “illegal murderers” are all tautologies. “Illegal immigrants” is not. It’s also an accepted meaning of the word according to at least one dictionary. Now, can you drop the pointless diversion?
The NPR report noted that sending them to other states with more space will still be allowed, as is dumping them into county jails.
And when they come back and commit more crimes, secure in the knowledge that they’ll just get deported again?
Which is why I stated in my original comment that with our current border security, they’d be back walking down main street the next day
Maybe embed them with tracking chips before deporting…
Not to mention, a good number of them are Mexicans, and Mexico is so corrupt and so close to being a narco state, that many have grave doubts if they would really be locked up.
If a person commits a violent crime against me and is also an illegal alien, I sure as hell don’t want them to simply be deported. I want that person to be prosecuted and incarcerated to the full extent of the law. Who cares what their status is, they committed a crime in this country and this country should exact punishment.
It was in a front page article in The New York Times:
(emphasis mine) This won’t go over well, politically.
Each of them committed 1.68 crimes per day over that ten-year span, according to your statistics. 
(Obviously midnight was a particularly dangerous time, what with those 1/3 and 2/3 crimes happening just before and after it.)
Because, over and above any putative criminal offense they may have committed against the United States of America by being an undocumented resident (Entering the country is a Federal crime; being present within it without current legal authorization is a civil wrong, not a crime – it’s the same distinction as “The Court orders you get your fence off county property” and “Thirty days”) – over and above any offense they may be guilty of here, they committed crimes against the People of the State of California that justified imprisoning them. There is a large distinction between those illegally present within the U.S. and the small subset of them who commit crimes at California law.
It’s not a “pointless diversion.” “Illegal immigrants” is a phrase with one meaning; “illegals” is an adjective-made-noun which offensively tars illegal immigrants as being the only criminals. And “illegal drug dealers” is not tautological – a legal drug dealer is a registered pharmacist. Just as a legal immigrant is somebody with a green card. And neither are relevant to this discussion. (Right-to-lifers would also note that abortionists could be considered legal murderers, BTW.)
It does no such thing. “Illegals” has been slang for “illegal immigrants” for a very long time. And it certainly doesn’t tar them, nor imply that they are the only criminals.
It’s hard to believe that there are some people who don’t know this.
Honestly, I think either you live in a box, or your having a go at us. Words can mean different things when used in different ways.
Did the court ruling say they must be released, or that the population must be reduced by an amount? There’s a big difference. Released means they go home, reduced means they are shipped to county and city facilities as well as out of state facilities to cure the overcrowding. I’m in too much of a hurry right now to check the ruling but I’m betting it’s “reduce” not “release.”
I want you to try something different in regards to immigration. I want you to think for a minute.
Let’s say a Mexican who entered our country illegally murdered a member of your family. He was caught and convicted and sentenced to a long prison term.
Are you going to feel okay with letting him go free? With the only proviso being he gets sent back to Mexico?
I’d rather keep a murderer locked up in an American prison rather than walking free in another country.
He would be locked up because he murdered, not because he’s an immigrant. I don’t think anyone here is advocating releasing murderers because they don’t have their green cards. That’s ridiculous.
It does make me wonder, though. Do we lock people up just because they’re illegal immigrants? Don’t we just deport them?
What do they mean “needlessly”? With overcrowding like that, it sounds like there’s a great need for prisoners to die off. But one prisoner a week isn’t going to do any good. With a backlog of 33,000, they need to have two or three prisoners dying off every hour.
It is. Gov. Brown was already planning on shipping a bunch of state prisoners to county jails, which would address the court’s ruling.
How did this thread turn into a discussion of illegal aliens? What does the presence of dishwashers and landscapers in California have to do with overcrowded state prisons?