Letters to the Editor
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Try to Follow the Logic
I'm not a big O'Reilly fan by any means and the throw-down between him and Rivera was disgraceful, but what Sampson, Koppelman, Rivera, and most of the readers seem to be missing is the basic assertion that O'Reilly made: Alfredo Ramos was in custody previously but was released, only to go on to kill. O'Reilly pointed out that IF the law were followed to the letter, Ramos would have either been in the custody of INS awaiting deportation or no longer even in this country. The authorities who had Ramos in their custody said - accurately or not - that it wasn't their responsibility to check Ramos' immigration status or notify INS. Illegal immigration is a Federal matter, not a municipal or state matter, so the argument went. True or not, Ramos was in custody as a potential criminal, was released, and then went on to kill someone while driving drunk. You don't have to trace the causality all the way back to Ramos' birth (as Sampson does in his "kill all male children" analogy), but simply go back in time to when the authorities had the opportunity to do something but didn't. The rest of the melee between O'Reilly and Rivera obscured this simple point and it became about the two of them scoring political points. Maybe O'Reilly's eventual conclusion was that illegal immigrants cause the crime rate to go up, but his initial assertion was about one specific illegal immigrant and whether his case was mishandled. Agree or disagree with that point rather than opening up a whole debate on how law-abiding a much larger population is or isn't. It's just another red herring that further obscures the fact that maybe we should put more immigration-status authority in the hands of local law officials so that they can't pass the buck and avoid responsibility.