Jamiel Shaw recently provided compelling testimony on Capitol Hill about the murder of his son in a 2008 shooting committed by an illegal immigrant from Mexico.
“Do black lives really matter or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or a white policeman?” Shaw rhetorically asked the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, given that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents never detained the gunman for deportation, who was subsequently sentenced to death in November, 2012, after a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder.
Shaw is pushing for new legislation that would enable the FBI to track illegal alien crime and for better enforcement of existing laws regarding deportation of criminals.
“Prosecutors say the 17-year-old standout running back was killed by [Pedro] Espinoza for carrying a red Spider-Man backpack. They say Espinoza who was a member of the 18th Street Gang, believed the red backpack meant that Shaw was a member of the Rolling 20s, a rival gang,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time of the sentencing.
In the year 2013, ICE reportedly released about 36,000 convicted criminal aliens into the country. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, about 167,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records are at large in the U.S. after being released by authorities.
Shaw’s son, Jamiel A. Shaw II, was gunned down outside his Los Angeles home by the then-19-year-old assailant. His mom is active duty military and was deployed to Iraq at the time.
In the testimony before Congress, the elder Shaw referred to the perpetrator as a DREAMer, after the DREAM Act that was never voted into law. In June, 2012, without going through Congress, President Obama suspended the deportation of about one million undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“Shaw was murdered in 2008, before the Obama created the DACA program in the run up to the 2012 election cycle, but — as a young person brought into the country as a child, Shaw’s eventual murderer would likely have qualified for DACA status,” National Review Online asserted .
In November 2014, the president unilaterally granted by executive action what amounts to amnesty for five million or more illegal immigrants. The latter action has been put on hold for now by a Texas federal judge.
Under Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress — not the Executive Branch — is vested with the power to enact or amend laws relating to immigration, however.
In referencing Ferguson, Jamiel Shaw Sr. declared that “I see in here black politicians, black athletes, black stars say ‘hands up, don’t shoot.’ My son was shot in the head by an illegal alien gangbanger while he lay on his back with his hands up. He still shot him through his hand and into his head and killed him … ”
The suspect “who was eventually sentenced to death in the murder — had three gun charges on his record and had served only four months of an eight month sentence for assault with a deadly weapon and battery of a police officer. He was released from jail the day before he murdered Shaw,” the Daily Caller reported .
Parenthetically, the StreetGangs.com website claims the younger Shaw allegedly had a gang affiliation (evidence for which was apparently deemed inadmissible at trial) and that the murder had its source in a gang rivalry rather than motivated by a backpack or race.
Separately, an AP article published today suggests that uncooperative state and local governments are making it harder and more dangerous for ICE agents to take criminal illegal immigrants into custody for deportation proceedings. “Diminished local cooperation is putting federal immigration officers in dangerous situations as they track down foreign-born criminals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say. They say that more of their officers are out on the streets, eating up resources, because cities and states have passed legislation that limits many of the detention requests issued by immigration authorities.”
On the other hand, the Department of Homeland Security just completed Operation Cross Check, in which several thousand criminal illegal immigrants were taken into custody. “U.S. immigration officers arrested 2,059 convicted criminal aliens in a five-day operation… Those arrested are subject to being removed from the United States, and more than 1,000 have multiple criminal convictions, the department said in a statement… More than 1,000 of those arrested were convicted of felonies, including voluntary manslaughter, child pornography, robbery, kidnapping and rape,” Reuters reported .
Watch Jamiel Shaw’s testimony before Congress as well as an interview with FNC’s Neil Cavuto and draw your own conclusions.
[image via YouTube]