The tragic consequences of illegal immigration have rocked a quaint Idaho town, where a 10-year-old girl—raped by an illegal immigrant when she was only 9—delivered a baby at a local hospital.

The shocking and disturbing crime occurred in St. Anthony, a tiny agriculture city of about 3,500 residents in eastern Idaho. The illegal immigrant, Guadelupe Gutierrez-Juarez, was arrested and charged with raping the young girl and is currently incarcerated in Fremont County jail. He faces life in prison.

Local authorities were notified about the girl’s pregnancy by medical personnel after she went to a doctor’s office for treatment. The girl later gave birth to a six-pound baby at Madison Memorial Hospital. A criminal complaint against the illegal immigrant says the rape occurred between November 2007 and January 2008, prior to the girls’ tenth birthday.

Area residents expressed shock and outrage that this could happen in their little town. Neighbors say Gutierrez-Juarez lived in a west St. Anthony house with several children and it is not yet known what his relationship was to the rape victim.

While this is among the most atrocious crimes reported, other serious felonies have been committed recently by illegal immigrants, including many with existing criminal records or previous deportations. They include the murder of a cop, the drunken driving murder of innocent Americans on highways across the nation and multiple shootings.

Nearly seven years after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history the federal agency in charge of protecting the nation from terrorism and foreign intelligence threats still needs to make dramatic leaps to prevent future attacks.

A Senate Intelligence Committee has found widespread problems and weaknesses in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) intelligence program that include serious gaps in training and deployment of agents hired since the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and the Pentagon.

In a lengthy report made public this week, the committee outlines alarming weaknesses in the ailing bureau which has already received dismal performance ratings from crucial entities such as the bipartisan September 11 Commission and the investigative arm of Congress known as the Government Accountability Office.

This latest report says that the FBI has yet to fill crucial national security and intelligence positions key to battling terrorism and that nationwide units, considered to be the front lines of the intelligence effort, are poorly staffed. It also points out that the FBI still lacks an effective training program for intelligence analysts and that most analysts are supervised by agents with no intelligence-gathering experience.

Additionally, the bureau has hired only two senior intelligence officers even though Congress deemed the positions critical two years ago and authorized hiring 24. Included in the report is the FBI’s 2009 budget request— $7,108,091,000—with detailed information on its plans to hire more agents.

A Democrat super delegate who is a prominent national party member is selling his vote for $20 million and says the money will be used to register and educate Mexican-American voters long neglected by the party.

The California delegate, a retired lawyer who heads the voting rights committee of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus, admits most people might think of him as “some crazy guy in California” for the hefty price tag on his vote. He says the reality is that his own party is crazy for not aggressively pursuing Mexican-American voters.

So Sacramento super delegate Steven Ybarra, a renowned Chicano advocate, publicly warned the two candidates—Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—battling for the Democratic nomination that his vote is not free. He also wants to alert them that the nation’s large Mexican-American voters are the key to the White House.

Ybarra, who once served as chair of the Democratic Party’s Chicano Latino Caucus, also made the news in February when he blasted Clinton for removing campaign manager Patti Solis, accusing the New York senator of being disloyal to Hispanics because Solis is of Mexican descent.

He circulated a strongly worded electronic mail that pointed out Clinton’s hypocrisy for depending on Latino voters in the Texas, Ohio and California primaries yet replacing her campaign’s highest ranking Hispanic with a black woman, Maggie Williams. He called the move “dumb as a stump” and assured that Latino delegates like him would have cause to pause. Nothing $20 million can’t help him forget, however.

Illustrating that human smuggling rings are not limited to Border States, a Mexican man has been convicted for operating a prostitution ring—consisting of illegal immigrant girls—in an upscale south Florida county.

The lucrative business catered to local Hispanic farm and construction workers, many in the country illegally. The girls were smuggled in from Mexico with promises of a better life and, once in the U.S., were forced to pay off their smuggling debt as sex slaves in Palm Beach County.

Brothels were set up in adjacent south Florida cities—Fort Pierce, Okeechobee, Lake Worth and Boynton Beach, among them—and the prostitution ring netted up to $10,000 a day from its mostly Hispanic customers. Federal authorities first began investigating the operation more than a decade ago when two teenage Mexican girls escaped and alerted officials at the Mexican Consulate in South Miami.

A federal grand jury eventually indicted most members of the Mexican family that ran the operation but the ringleader (Juan Luis Cadena-Sosa) fled to his native Veracruz Mexico. He was recently extradited and faces 15 years in prison for federal civil rights violations and placing girls in a condition of involuntary servitude. Three other defendants in this case are still fugitives and believed to be evading U.S. justice in Mexico.

These kinds of smuggling operations are common in U.S. states located along the southern border but this case proves that the crisis is spreading throughout the country. Federal authorities routinely bust crime-infested immigrant stash houses in Arizona, Texas and California but rarely in other parts of the country.

Blaming the nation’s illegal immigration crisis on racism against Mexicans, commissioners in a major Texas county passed a resolution to stop construction of a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border and halt local enforcement of immigration laws.

The El Paso County Commission voted 3-1 in favor of a measure blocking the federally mandated border wall and prohibiting local police from enforcing immigration law. The new measure also places a moratorium on immigration raids and halts all programs that criminalize illegal immigrants.

The Secure Fence Act was approved by Congress and signed into law by the president in 2006 to protect the nation’s vulnerable southern border from illegal immigration, drug smuggling and terrorism. The law authorizes the construction of hundreds of miles of fencing, more vehicle barriers, checkpoints and the use of advanced technology.

Mayors in at least three Texas cities (Brownsville, Del Rio and El Paso) along the Mexican border have refused to give the federal government access to their land to build the fence, but El Paso County is the first to pass legislation. The county with about 722,000 residents has a large illegal immigrant population that annually costs taxpayers millions of dollars to incarcerate, educate and hospitalize.

The El Paso County commissioner that introduced the legislation says the measure was necessary because the national immigration problem is due to racism against Mexicans. Commissioner Miguel Teran also pointed out that the September 11 terrorists came from the north yet the U.S. isn’t building walls over there.

Federal agents have busted a major smuggling operation in which illegal immigrants from “special interest” countries obtained authentic drivers licenses from a state that doesn’t require applicants to prove legal status in the U.S.

This is just the latest example of the national security threat created by a handful of states—New Mexico, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, Utah and Washington—that allow illegal immigrants to get drivers licenses with easily forged documents such as a tax identification number, foreign passport or the laughable Mexican government-issued identification card known as “matricula consular.”

In this case illegal immigrants from countries considered by the U.S. government to be of special national security concern flocked to New Mexico to exploit its lax drivers license system. A Brazilian man and a Kazakhstan woman have been charged with running the operation and at least 10 illegal immigrants have been arrested.

Federal agents say the lucrative enterprise ran smoothly, with several illegal immigrants who lived in New Mexico charging thousands of dollars to help other illegals travel to the state to get licenses. They used fake bank statements and pay stubs as well as other fraudulent documents to get the highly-touted cards.

The FBI is still trying to determine how many illegal aliens from countries that present a national security threat actually obtained licenses, although agents estimate that dozens got the official New Mexico cards in the past few months alone.

This serious national security breach was facilitated by Governor Bill Richardson, who signed the 2003 law allowing foreign nationals, including those living in the U.S. illegally, to obtain drivers licenses in his state. The former Democratic presidential candidate said the law, which has enabled about 45,000 illegal immigrants to get licenses, improves public safety.

Massive fraud, corruption and nepotism in one state’s public community college system has led a congressman to call for legislation banning the widespread practice of state legislators also holding taxpayer-funded jobs at the schools.

A federal investigation into Alabama’s two-year college system has already resulted in the guilty pleas of the system’s chancellor (Roy Johnson) and a state congressman (Democrat Bryant Melton) who was also on the payroll of a community college in Tuscaloosa. Dozens more have been indicted or are still being investigated.

Johnson, who headed the state’s 22-campus system, pleaded guilty in a federal court to 15 counts of bribery and conspiracy for his role in a multi million-dollar scheme and Melton, who was also employed by Shelton State Community College, admitted using thousands of taxpayer dollars for personal use, including paying off gambling debts and his daughter’s college tuition.

Additionally, the son of a separate college’s executive director pleaded guilty to charges that his dad gave him a bogus $66,000-a-year job as a so-called consultant. Many other Democrat members of the Alabama Legislature, who are also employed by a variety of public colleges, have been indictmed and awaiting trial on charges of fiscal abuse.

The rampant corruption is the result of a system that gives double-dipping public servants excessive power, according to one state lawmaker. Legislators who also have full-time, taxpayer-funded jobs create a conflict of interest and the combination gives them far-reaching power that distorts their sense of right and wrong, according to Alabama House Minority Leader Mike Hubbard.

He points out that one-third of the members of the House Education Appropriations Committee, which writes the $6 billion budget Education Trust Fund, are employees of the two-year college system. Some of them have phantom jobs at the schools that don’t even require them to show up for work. This constitutes fraud and abuse, not to mention criminal activity.

An extremist Mexican “La Raza” group that annually gets millions of U.S. federal grant dollars will receive even more taxpayer money in the next few years thanks to a Massachusetts congressman’s multi million-dollar earmark to counsel Hispanics about housing.

The National Council of La Raza already got $1.3 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development this year to conduct “comprehensive housing counseling’’ for Hispanics, whether they are in the country legally or not. Now the radical group that advocates the return of the American Southwest to Mexico, will get an additional $15 million thanks to an earmark inserted by Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank in a housing bill.

Frank, the House Financial Services Chairman, is giving the National Council of La Raza $5 million this year and $10 million in each of the next two years. The new law (FHA Housing Stabilization and Homeownership Retention Act of 2008) includes $100 million for mortgage counseling to be administered by non-profit groups like the National Council of La Raza, which has raked in millions of taxpayer dollars over the year. In fiscal 2006 alone, the group got $15.2 million in federal grants.

Americans should be outraged that their tax dollars are going to a group that, not only advocates open borders but organized many of the country’s disruptive pro illegal immigration marches a year ago. Although the National Council of La Raza describes itself as the largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, it actually caters to the radical Chicano movement that says California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Texas belong to Aztlan.

The takeover plan is referred to as the "reconquista" of the Western U.S. and it features ethnic cleansing of Americans, Europeans, Africans and Asians once the area is taken back and converted to Aztlan. While this may all sound a bit crazy, this organization is quite powerful and its leaders regularly attend congressional hearings regarding immigration.

The group uses its U.S. tax dollars to fund projects like a Southern California elementary school with a curriculum that specializes in bashing America and promoting the Chicano movement. The school's founder and principal, a Calexico-educated activist named Marcos Aguilar, opposes racial integration and says Mexicans in the U.S. don't want to go to white schools or drink from white water fountains.