To be clear from the start: The ultimate responsibility for the death of three people in Aurora last week rests with one person the one who drove through a red light on Havana, broadsiding another vehicle which then careened into an ice cream shop.
That responsible person, according to Aurora police, is Francis Hernandez, apparently a Guatemalan national who is in the US illegally.
The inevitable next question is, to borrow a phrase from the lexicon of pop psychology, who enabled the driver to end the lives of two women and a three-year-old boy?
How, in other words, did an illegal immigrant who accumulated no less than 16 arrests in the Denver metro area on various charges, mostly traffic offenses, manage to escape the notice and action of federal immigration authorities? On that subject, the charges and countercharges are flying faster than baseballs in a homerun derby.
Aurora police say they contacted federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials last April, after arresting Hernandez for speeding and driving without a license. ICE officials say they have no record of that contact.
Aurora police further allege that of the 2,500 referrals they made to ICE last year (arrestees suspected of being illegal aliens), the feds responded only a fraction of the time.
Denver police arrested Hernandez as recently as July, for driving without a license, giving a fake name and resisting arrest. They even impounded his vehicle, but somehow it got back into Hernandezs hands. Its the same Chevy Suburban, significantly, that triggered last weeks fatal crash.
As of this week, it remained unknown whether Denver police also referred Hernandez to federal authorities.
All this reminds us of two disasters: 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The response of emergency officials was severely hamstrung by the inability of government agencies to communicate with each other and to function as an effective team.
Thats what were seeing here. Although Colorado has put new immigration laws on the books, police departments seem to respond appropriately to those laws only some of the time. Courts and authorities are deporting only some perhaps far too few of the illegal immigrants arrested in the state.
Obviously, this is not a comprehensive system for protecting the potential victims of illegal immigrants who are likely to commit crimes. These are half-measures, mediocre at best. The people of Colorado deserve better.
All of the governmental agencies involved in upholding the states immigration statutes need to stop passing the buck and pointing fingers at each other, and instead work together, speak the same language, devise a system that works.
The people are outraged, and rightly so. Passing the buck isnt going to cut it.
