The case of an illegal immigrant charged with vehicular homicide, leaving the scene of an accident and driving under the influence is a spectacular clustermuck that perfectly illustrates why so many Coloradans are fed up with the country’s broken immigration laws.
First there’s the Denver County Sheriff’s Office, which released the 26-year-old suspect Ivan Zamarripa-Castaneda on bond, even though the feds had ordered he be detained.
Zamarripa-Castaneda is charged with causing the fiery crash on I-70 last week that killed John Anderson, a truck driver from Lone Tree. Police later tracked down and arrested the Mexican national.
Then there’s the bond itself that was set ridiculously low at $25,000 for a person who is an obvious flight risk — an illegal alien who fled the scene of the accident and is facing a homicide charge.
It only cost him $2,500 to walk out of jail just two hours before the feds arrived to take him into custody for possible deportation. We’re betting he doesn’t show up for his court date.
Honestly, if we had committed the same crime as an American who was in Mexico illegally, we wouldn’t skate out of there for only $2,500. We’d be rotting in a Guadalajara jail cell eating rats.
Then there’s the fax machine.
Memo to millennials: A fax machine is an outdated means of communication that magically transmits reams of paper from one noisy machine to another. It’s wholly unreliable, therefore it’s still in use by the federal government.
Media reports have so far pointed all the blame at local officials, but we think the feds need to take some heat for relying on faxes to inform them when illegal aliens have been arrested.
And as we mentioned, they might want to review their guidelines for setting bail.
This doesn’t excuse the sanctuary city confusing local policies for not detaining illegal immigrants arrested for crimes, as explained by Denver County Sheriff Patrick Firman:
The City of Denver does recognize requests for notification as well as criminal warrants from ICE, but it does not recognize detainers which ICE also requested in Zamarripa-Castaneda’s case.
“It basically requests that we hold an individual past their release date up to 48-hours and allow ICE to come and pick them up. We have been told that that’s illegal, that it’s a violation of their 4th amendment rights and so we have not honored those since about 2013,” said Firman.
There you have it. It’s their policy not to detain, which is why they didn’t detain him.
A Magellan poll in Colorado last month found that 43 percent of Republican voters said their top concern in the upcoming gubernatorial race is the enforcement of federal immigration.
Later this week, we’ll take a look at where all of the candidates stand on the issue.