TailOverTeaKettle.com

Last month, almost immediately after the gavel fell closing the meeting where new regulations were placed requiring landlords not to rent to illegal immigrants, the county was threatened with costly lawsuits. Of course, their actions were also accused of being ‘immigrant bashing’ and anti-Christian by pro-illegal groups.

But it seems that the costs of legal challenges (whether they are sound or not) may be causing the county to reconsider their actions. According to the Associated Press, they are delaying enforcement of the new ordinances while they consider things further.

The ordinance, which county commissioners unanimously approved last month, was scheduled to take effect today.

But county workers are not trained to enforce it. And the possibility of having to spend money to defend it from legal challenges has also prompted second thoughts.

Officials in Escondido, California, recently abandoned a similar law after agreeing to pay 90-thousand dollars to lawyers representing civil rights groups who sued the city.

Cherokee County Commissioner Jim Hubbard says that development means their ordinance may need another discussion.

The Cherokee County ordinance would require landlords to collect information about renters’ immigration status. Landlords would have to provide that information to the county on demand.

Hubbard says he supported the ordinance after an acting county attorney told commissioners the legal fees probably would NOT be high, and that the ordinance seemed on solid legal ground.

But now Hubbard says Cherokee County should consider delaying enforcement of the landlord ordinance until a judge rules on a legal challenge to a similar law in Hazelton, Pennsylvania.

              

Indictments have been handed down for four illegal immigrants involved in large scale methamphetamine and cocaine trafficking. The arrests in November netted a $9 million haul of drugs.

Arnulfo Nunez-Villanueva, 26, Miguel Angel Gonzalez, 20, Rafael Garcia-Nunez, 33, and Mauricio Medina-Mojica, 26, all undocumented aliens believed to be from Mexico, were indicted by a federal grand jury late Wednesday.

Search warrants yielded over 145 pounds of Ice, over 135 pounds Of Cocaine and a AR-15 Style Rifle.

“We are coming after those responsible for the scourge of methamphetamine and other dangerous drugs that undermine the well being of our community and our country,” said United States Attorney David E. Nahmias. “We will also seek additional charges and longer sentences for anyone possessing or using a firearm in conjunction with their drug trafficking activities.”

The indictment charges the defendants in relation to 5 separate search warrants that were executed in Gwinnett and Barrow Counties on November 21. A search of 4 residences in those counties yielded a total of 145 pounds of crystal methamphetamine (“ice”), 135 pounds of cocaine, and a .223 caliber AR-15 style rifle.

The indictment charges all four defendants with engaging in a conspiracy to distribute cocaine and methamphetamine. In addition, Miguel Angel Gonzalez is charged with the actual possession of cocaine and methamphetamine and the possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.

              

Back in 2004, I could not believe that college scholarships were actually being set aside to be awarded to illegal immigrants here in Georgia. It didn’t make sense then, and still doesn’t today.

But amazingly enough, it took until the closing days of 2006 for Georgia to finally end the practice of allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition.

I’m sure that the activists and their lawsuits will soon follow. Already, at least one state senator can’t understand it:

State Sen. Sam Zamarripa (D-Atlanta), who fought SB 529, said the change sends a devastating message to some of the best and brightest in communities already suffering from soaring high school dropout rates. Many of the students have lived in Georgia nearly their entire lives but know their families can’t pay out-of-state tuition rates, he said.

“It’s unconscionable to punish children for the sins of their parents,” Zamarripa said. “This initiative is essentially going after kids that are more Georgian than anybody who has moved here in the past five years. They like boiled peanuts. They like southern rock. They like the Braves.”

It’s unclear how many students will be directly affected. The university system doesn’t track the number of illegal immigrants attending state universities. And records at individual institutions are often spotty.

Mr. Zamarripa, it’s not unconscionable at all. A college education is a priviledge, not a right. If you are here illegally, some things are not available to you. And certainly a subsidy for in-state students, given under the assumption that the family has been contributing state taxes (which is clearly unknown in the case of an illegal family), is a big leap to make.

Even if the kids, however many there may be, are Braves fans.

              

With yesterday’s announcement of some additional crackdowns across the country on illegal immigrants engaged in identity theft in order to falsify work status to gain employment at Swift processing plants, there is a chorus of groups trying to ensure that the none of the illegals get, God forbid, returned to their home countries.

But I never would have expected PETA to weigh in with support for keeping an illegal undocumented workforce in place in order to protect animals.

Yes, you heard it correctly.

You see, back in September, the ICE raided workers working at Crider Poultry in Stillmore, GA. The result was that some illegal workers (who previously had been warned that there were discrepancies in their documentation, by the way) were taken in custody and others fled the area. That caused much hand-wringing in response. Then last month, we heard that there were, in fact, workers willing “to do the jobs that Americans won’t do” in the plants, including felons on probation and homeless men who have now found gainful employment at the plant.

Now according to the AP, PETA now says that just won’t do. You might ask what their objection might be? Does the plant employ trained animals against their will? No… it’s even more bizarre than that:

An animal protection organization has raised objections to convicted felons being used to process chickens at a south Georgia poultry plant whose workforce was decimated by a crackdown on illegal immigrants working there.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said Wednesday that it was concerned that criminals with violent pasts could be among the workers being bused from a probation center.

PETA said it wanted to point out “that chicken slaughterhouses are notorious for animal abuse and that staffing the plant with violent criminals is begging for violations of Georgia’s cruelty-to-animals laws.'’

So felons are not suitable for working in a poultry plant because being around this might cause them to start abusing animals outside of work?!?! Maybe they’ll also become vegitarians… would that be a bad thing too???

What a crock.

“Placing animals in the care of convicts with violent histories is like putting children in the care of child molesters,'’ PETA vice president Bruce Friedrich said.

Remind me not to have Mr. Friedrich involved in drafting child molestation laws if he draws a moral equivalence between convicted child molesters being placed with children and felons working voluntarily in a poultry processing plant.

At least we must be able to trust illegal immigrants to protect animals even though they work in the slaughterhouse, just like the ex-felons. After all felons can’t be trusted to observe animal cruelty laws, since they have previously broken laws in the past. Illegal immigrants haven’t broken any laws before…. well, oops.

              

Last night the Cherokee County (GA) Commission unanimously approved prohibition of renting property to illegal immigrants. In the days leading up to the meeting, it seemed that the biggest threat being made was from opponents who threatened to bring lawsuits challenging the rules and thereby costing the county significant money in legal fees if they should lose. At one point this even prompted speculation whether they would let lawsuits already pending against other communities play out to see who would win and pay the bills. But in the end, they did not waiver.

It is still fairly moderate in it’s approach:

The ordinance targeting tenants covers landlords who rent property in unincorporated parts of Cherokee. It does not apply to cities, such as Canton and Woodstock, which have the majority of rental properties in the county, nor does it apply to existing leases.

Earlier I posted questioning exactly how the landlords would be expected to verify and validate a tenant’s immigration status. According to the AJC, the county also is joining a federal program to help do just that.

In addition, English was also designated as the official language and the county made it manditory to check immigration status before receiving public benefits.

The lawsuit threats continued:

A lawsuit is likely to come in Cherokee, warned Jamie B. Hernan, an attorney with offices in metro Atlanta and Tampico, Mexico.

The county “will incur legal fees, and they will pay legal fees incurred by tenants,” said Hernan, who is working with the American Civil Liberties Union. “County government cannot pass immigration law.”

UPDATE: 11 Alive has the money quote resulting from the passage of all of these measures:

“They trampled all over immigrants tonight, it was spin the wheel on immigrant bashing in Cherokee County,” said Jerry Gonzalez, Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.

              

In the work of corporate espionage, they say that the best way to steal information is to infiltrate the office building cleaning crew. Usually a company will provide all sorts of sophisticated techniques to safeguard their information, but then a crew comes into their office space, accessing all parts of the office, usually alone and off-hours, and has access to anything that’s around.

So when we think of our airports, we can see the visible protection measures… including confiscating liquids and making everyone run around with their shoes off, as measures to protect us.

And I’m sure that those measures provide some chance of warding off trouble. But here we are with airport workers in a drywall crew with access to secure areas… including the tarmac.

And just yesterday, the ICE nabbed 6 workers at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport who had security credentials that were obtained so that their crew could do work. One problem - the six happened to be illegal immigrants. Now there’s no indication that any of these people had any malicious intent. But it shows just how much screening is done on work crews before issuing permissions to access secure areas.

From the updated AP report:

Federal authorities say six illegal immigrants arrested at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport posed no specific security threat. But officials are concerned that the undocumented dry-wall workers from Mexico had badges giving them access to a secure area, including the tramac.

U-S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman Marc Raimondi says the men are all from Mexico and all employed by T.C. Drywall, based in Alpharetta. Raimondi says they were arrested as they arrived to work at the airport.

Officials say the men had been hired recently to install drywall inside the airport’s secure area. They will appear before an immigration judge and face deportation to Mexico.

Kenneth Smith, special agent in charge of the ICE office of investigations in Atlanta, says that while immigration officials don’t believe the men posed a specific threat, the concern is that undocumented immigrants had obtained badges to a secure area.

Smith said the agency is aggressively pursing illegal aliens at the places where they work. Smith says “areas of critical infrastructure, such as airports, are especially important to national security.'’

Since March 2003, immigration agents have conducted operations at 196 U-S airports and audited nearly six-thousand businesses. Raimondi says the effort has identified more than 58-hundred unauthorized airport workers and prompted the arrests of 11-hundred illegal workers.

This is not really an illegal immigration problem so much as a security issue. How easy would it be for someone who had malicious intents from getting onto a work crew like this? The answer seems to be… pretty easy.

The company, T.C. Drywall, seems to have pulled down their website. But a couple documents stiull exist (for now) like http://www.tcdrywallinc.com/TCDrywallInc.pdf. It seems that the company has had several contracts to do work at Hartsfield over the last three years. How many other workers have come in without being detected?

Doesn’t give a lot of confidence in the security process for airport workers!

              

Some have blamed the Republican congressional election defeat on their ‘position’ on immigration. Interesting to see it pop up as a “Presidential” topic… from the Democratic side.

Of course, Senator Biden has an interesting voting history on immigration issues - votes both for and against the border fence, etc. But it’s interesting to hear it come into play already this early as a ‘campaign issue’.

Biden blames illegal immigration on Mexico’s ‘corrupt system’:

COLUMBIA, S.C. - Senator Joe Biden says the government should get tough with Mexico, blaming what he calls its “corrupt system'’ for illegal immigration and drug problems in the U.S.

The Delaware Democrat is the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is considering a presidential run in 2008. He spoke Monday in South Carolina, scheduled to be the first southern state to hold a primary.

In a question and answer session in Columbia, Biden described Mexico as an “erstwhile democracy'’ and criticized the country’s “disparity of wealth.'’ He said unless political dynamics change in Mexico and U-S employers who hire illegal immigrants are punished, the problem won’t stop.

He called illegal drugs entering the country from Mexico an even bigger problem, and again blamed Mexican corruption.

              

When the feds did a crackdown in Stillmore, GA, we heard a lot about the people leaving town to avoid the sweep. If you remember, the raid was centered around illegal workers at the local chicken processing plant.

But what’s the real follow-on to the illegal workers leaving the area. today’s AJC reports that while the overall workforce is not up to pre-raid numbers yet, there are workers willing to work at the Crider Poultry plant in Stillmore, GA. (That’s not to mention that wages have been increased as well!).

It seems that some of the workers are felons on probation and homeless men who have now found gainful employment at the plant. I guess that there are some Americans willing to do those jobs.

And what’s happened to those who fled the immigration raids?:

Pastor Ariel Rodriguez drives around Stillmore, explaining what happened to each of the Mexican families that used to live in trailers and apartments.

“The majority of people have gone to Kentucky,” he said. They knew a priest who used to live in the area and followed him up there, Rodriguez said. Other residents have gone back to Mexico.

              

The public hearing into proposed Cherokee County ordinance requiring landlords to verify that renters are not illegal immigrants seems to have mostly proceeded without incident last night. The board took no additional action at the meeting. However, the report in the AJC includes one of the most strange quotes that I have heard surrounding immigration:

Aquíles E. Martínez, a professor of religion at Reinhardt College, said commissioners should follow the example of Jesus.

“The present ordinance is a clear violation of Jesus’ example,” Martínez said. “The people who welcome foreigners welcome Jesus. The people who reject foreigners reject Jesus.”

Well, there you have it!

              

Now that didn’t take long. Yet another metro-Atlanta drug bust involving illegal immigrants is reported today by the AJC. $9 million in cocaine and crystal meth was seized.

According to their report:

Agents arrested four men in the raid, all illegal aliens, said Sherri Strange, Atlanta DEA Special Agent in Charge. One woman who was a drug courier was arrested by Gwinnett police , Stange said.

The men arrested were identified as Miguel Angel Gonzalez, 30; Rafael Garcia-Nunez,33; Arnulfo Nunez-Villanueva, 26 and Mauricio Medina-Mojica, 26. The woman was identified as Susana Maribel Cordoba-Galino, 23.

Federal agents allege that the suspects were part of a “highly sophisicated” multi-state drug dealing organization that stretched from Gwinnett County to Kentucky, Illionois and Indiana.

The suspects brought in the drugs to stash houses in Gwinnett County and the drugs were to be distrubuted to other places, Strange said.

The investigation into the drug dealing was dubbed by agents Operation Kentucky Thunder.

After a three month investigation an survelliance agents arrested supsect at homes Park Forest Drive in Lilburn, Cruse Road in Lawrenceville and Johns Way in Lilburn on Nov. 21, authorities said.

At the homes agents found 63 kilograms of cocaine, 58 pounds of crystal meth and $85,000 in cash. Agents confiscated eight cars , some of the vehicles with elaborate hidden compartments used to hide drugs. Agents also confiscated three guns including a fully automatic AR-15 assault rifles., Strange said.

Previously:

• November 2006: $29,600 in cocaine seized in Gainesville, GA
• November 2006: $497,000 in cocaine seized in Gainesville, GA
• October 2006: $27 million in cocaine and crystal methamphetamine seized in Clayton County, GA
• September 2006: $10 million in cocaine seized in Gainesville, GA
• August 2006: $50 million in crystal meth seized in Gainesville, GA
• August 2006: $25 million in crystal meth seized in Buford, GA