New England United 4 Justice (NEU4J), a reincarnation of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), has joined forces with several other civil rights groups to sue Massachusetts for disenfranchising millions of low-income citizens by not registering them to vote during visits to welfare offices where they collect free taxpayer services. Specifically, this means poor ethnic minorities who traditionally vote Democrat.

This sort of minority disenfranchisement widens the gap between the registration rates of high and low-income individuals, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court this month. The 32-page complaint was posted by a national legal newswire that quotes a state welfare official indirectly committing to remedy the situation; “voting is one of the most important civic duties, and helping people comply is one of our top priorities,” the official proclaimed.

NEU4J is the reincarnation of ACORN in New England, according to a Judicial Watch analysis of records. Its president, Maude Hurd, was previously the national president of ACORN and a board member at ACORN Housing.  Its executive director is Noemi Ramos, who was ACORN Boston’s head organizer, and its vice president is former ACORN Massachusetts President Sandra Ramgeet. Much like ACORN, NEU4J promotes social justice by representing low and moderate income families.

This is scandalous because ACORN supposedly shut down after a series of exposés about its illegal activities, including fraudulent voter registration drives and involvement in the housing market meltdown. Read all about it in Judicial Watch’s special report, “The Rebranding of ACORN.” The legal scandals led Congress to pass a 2009 law banning federal funding for the Chicago-based community activist organization with strong ties to the president. For years ACORN enjoyed a huge flow of taxpayer dollars to promote its various leftwing causes.

The Obama Administration has violated the congressional ACORN funding ban, however. Last summer Judicial Watch uncovered records that show ACORN got tens of thousands of dollars in grants to “combat housing and lending discrimination.” The money came via Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which awarded a $79,819 grant to yet another ACORN reincarnation called Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA).

In addition to violating the ACORN funding ban, the grant was astounding because federal investigators had previously exposed fraud by the same Florida-based ACORN/AHCOA affiliate. HUD’s inspector general found that the group “inappropriately” spent more than $3.2 million in grants that were supposed to be used to eliminate lead poisoning in its housing program.

Gray has been embroiled in a variety of controversies throughout his political career, which includes a lengthy tenure on the D.C. council before taking over as mayor last year. As council chairman he got busted for using official stationery to solicit donations for the Democratic Party and for having a politically-connected contractor renovate his house. Gray used official council stationary to solicit a $20,000 contribution from a cable company to help pay for Democratic Party activities, in violation of measures forbidding taxpayer resources from being utilized for political reasons or to raise cash for a particular party.

As council chair Gray also had a mega developer that does strictly large commercial projects renovate his house. At the time the company had a $300 million real estate contract in an area that Gray represented and initially the then-councilman denied any work had been done on his 2,800-square-foot home. He only came clean after a reporter dug around and gathered evidence of the shady arrangement.

More recently Vincent, who once headed the District’s Department of Human Services, has been accused of operating a seedy cash-for-campaign scheme during the 2010 mayoral race. Federal authorities began investigating Gray after a disgruntled staffer (Sulaimon Brown) revealed that members of his mayoral campaign gave him envelops stuffed with cash and money orders to stay in the race and maintain a verbal assault on incumbent Adrian Fenty. Vincent has hired Bill Clinton’s sex-scandal lawyer (Robert Bennett) to defend him.  

This week the feds charged Vincent’s close friend and campaign treasurer, Thomas Gore, for destroying records associated with that illicit operation and for making illegal campaign contributions. The capital-area’s largest mainstream newspaper alludes that it could be the tip of the iceberg in a wide-ranging federal investigation of Gray’s mayoral campaign. The report also reveals that Gray was in Las Vegas “working to attract business to the District” when his pal got slapped with the charges.  

Even after becoming mayor, Gray has come under fire for hiring an army of senior staffers with lucrative salaries while the city suffers through a painful $400 million budget shortfall. Among Gray’s highly-paid employees are the son of his chief of staff and the daughter of a close adviser. This sort of thing is commonplace in a local government that has mastered the art of making national headlines for the many transgressions of its elected leaders. 

Who could forget Mayor Marion Barry—elected to the D.C. Council four times since his drug conviction—starring in an FBI surveillance video smoking crack? Barry, who represents Ward 8, has since been in trouble for failing to pay his taxes, violating the terms of his probation and stalking a former girlfriend. Yet he remains a fixture in D.C. government.  

What sort of corruption? The federal agents who are supposed to safeguard America against terrorists and instruments of terror are teaming up with Mexican drug cartels and alien smugglers, according to Customs and Border Protection Deputy Commissioner Thomas Winkowski. The shocking acknowledgement was made by Winkowski at a recent hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security.

In the last eight years, 138 agents from CBP have been charged with corruption and more than 2,000 have been charged in other criminal cases, according to Winkowski’s testimony before the panel. The purpose of the hearing was to address ethical standards within the DHS and its various agencies. Winkowski was there to inform the panel about CPB’s efforts to address issues concerning corruption and misconduct among its employees. 

As America’s frontline border agency, CBP has more than 60,000 law enforcement officers and support personnel along the U.S. borders, ports of entry and overseas. This includes 21,370 Border Patrol agents responsible for securing nearly 6,000 miles of Mexican and Canadian international land borders and more than 2,000 miles of coastal waters surrounding Florida and Puerto Rico.

The overwhelming majority of CBP officers serve with honor and integrity, Winkowski said, but a small minority have “disgraced the agency and betrayed the trust of the American public” by engaging in illegal and unethical behavior. That “small minority” is never the less enough to compromise national security. In fact, CBP is starting to conduct lie detector tests on its new hires and current workforce.       

Some apply to work at the agency in order to help drug trafficking organizations move huge amounts of narcotics into the U.S., Winkowski admitted. “In some cases I believe that their sole purpose in wanting to become a Customs and Border Protection officer or Border Patrol officer is to infiltrate us,” he told the congressional Homeland Security panel.

This frightening disclosure comes on the heels of a federal report that said DHS determined the Border Patrol achieved its “goal” by gaining “operational control” over a mere 13% of the nation’s borders. That means the feds have the ability to detect and interdict illegal activity in just a snippet—1,107-mile range—of the nation’s foreign borders. Yet this is considered mission accomplished for the U.S. government. 

In that case, two employees in D.C.’s Brentwood Post Office, who had handled anthrax-contaminated letters, died. Government officials, however, covered up the danger and kept the facility open for days, unbeknownst to other employees whose lives were at risk. Judicial Watch represented hundreds of U.S. Postal Service (USPS) workers in a lawsuit against the government for its reprehensible treatment of the employees who processed the anthrax-contaminated letters at the facility. 

Besides the two employees who died, many others still suffer health complications related to the anthrax exposure that the government tried to hide from the American public. During the course of JW’s investigation, stunning information and a diary/log written by Brentwood’s facility plant manager revealed that government officials knew that “mail was leaking” anthrax spores into the environment and that multiple anthrax spore swab tests “tested hot.” 

That was in 2001. Now fast forward to this month’s news report about a Florida USPS employee who got really sick last year after handling a leaking package from Yemen at an Orlando mail-sorting facility. The parcel was leaking a brown viscous substance, according to the news story and the postal employee, a 44-year-old man named Jeffery Lill, is quite sick with tremors, extreme fatigue, liver and neurological problems consistent with toxic exposure. 

Postal officials refuse to investigate and have said through attorneys that the incident never occurred. However, the investigative journalism team that published the exposé uncovered related documents and interviewed two whistleblowers who confirmed what happened. Because of that article, which got picked up nationally by many newspapers, the federal agency charged with assuring safe and healthful working conditions, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), has finally launched an investigation.

Prior to the media attention however, OSHA blew off repeated requests from the sick worker and his family to investigate the matter. The sick postal employee’s mom reveals in the news story that exposed this scandal that she’s spoken to OSHA “a number of times and each time they just flipped me off.”   The U.S. Postal Service remains in cover-up mode, however.

The investment will create a “win-win” situation by helping American farmers and, more importantly, providing healthy fruits and vegetables to low-income folks who would otherwise not be able to afford it. After all, the nation’s obesity epidemic has hit poor and ethnic minority communities hardest because they don’t have access to healthy foods, according to the feds.

This is why Michelle Obama made revolutionizing the inner city diet the focus of her $4.5 billion law to conquer childhood obesity. The First Lady pushed the measure through Congress asserting that it’s the government’s duty to protect poor and ethnic minority communities that are overwhelmingly obese compared to their wealthier, white counterparts.

Under this theory, food-stamp recipients—who are supposed to be too poor to afford groceries—are eating too much junk because it’s cheaper and more readily available in their low-income neighborhoods. So in comes Uncle Sam with a multimillion-dollar infusion to con farmers into accepting the welfare vouchers. This will increase the consumption of healthy food and expand the customer base for local farmers, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan. She’s the one who coined the arrangement “win-win.” 

The USDA is the agency responsible for running the nation’s swollen food-stamp program. Under this latest arrangement, farmers’ markets that don’t have access to phone lines or electricity will get it compliments of U.S. taxpayers. This will make it possible for them to redeem the welfare vouchers through the government’s Electronic Benefit Transfer system, which is used by grocery stores.  

A record number of Americans already receive food stamps and the figure will keep rising, according to congressional estimates. Just last month, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed that 45 million people—one out of every seven U.S. residents—got food stamps in 2011, an astounding 70% increase from 2007. This represents a cost of $72 billion for U.S. taxpayers, which is a substantial increase from $30 billion four years earlier.

It’s all part of the Obama Administration’s effort to eradicate “food insecure households.” In the last few years the administration has spent millions of dollars to recruit even more food-stamp recipients and has doled out hefty cash rewards to states that sign up the most people. One state even bragged about a $5 million performance bonus it got from the feds for its “swift processing of applications.” 

The sophisticated operation for years smuggled cocaine from Honduras to northern Virginia, which is considered part of the Washington Metropolitan area that surrounds the capital. Couriers smuggled large amounts of drugs by hiding them in shoes and decorative wooden frames, according to federal prosecutors. The feds also believe that members of the trafficking ring wired more than $1 million from the United States back to cocaine suppliers in Honduras.

In all, 28 people from a “tight network of Honduran immigrants” have been arrested, according to Neil MacBride, the U.S. Attorney that heads the DOJ’s Eastern District of Virginia office handling the case. His announcement, posted on the Department of Justice (DOJ) website, goes into tremendous detail about the operation and mentions how the suspects distributed vast amounts of cocaine throughout Northern Virginia and the mid-Atlantic.

However, there is no mention that the criminal enterprise was run by illegal immigrants, not simply “Honduran immigrants,” which implies they lived in the U.S. legally. Local and national media followed the DOJ’s cover-up lead. One local news report simply reprinted the DOJ press release, which identifies the suspects by name. Maryland’s largest newspaper dedicated a two-paragraph brief to the story because three state “residents” were arrested but, again, no mention of any illegal immigrants being involved.   

The area’s conservative newspaper, the Washington Examiner, was the only to contact federal immigration authorities to inquire about the status of the arrestees in this case. This is a relevant fact, considering the Obama Administration is granting backdoor amnesty to thousands of illegal aliens. The short piece quotes an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official confirming the agency had lodged detainers against all 28 defendants. The information came via electronic mail after an Examiner reporter took the time to do her job. 

It’s simply one of many shameful lapses for the monstrous federal agency created after 9/11 to protect the nation’s transportation system, mainly aviation. With 65,000 employees and a virtually unlimited budget, the TSA has made headlines over the years for regularly missing guns and bombs during random tests at major U.S. airports, approving background checks for illegal immigrants to work in sensitive areas of busy airports and clearing dozens of illegal aliens to train as pilots just as several of the 9/11 hijackers did.

Just last month, the former head of the TSA said the agency is a national embarrassment that remains hopelessly bureaucratic and disconnected from the people it is meant to protect. Less than a year ago a House Transportation Committee called for an overhaul of the TSA, referring to the agency as inept and bloated. The congressional panel determined that, a decade after its creation, the TSA “lacks administrative competency” and “suffers from bureaucratic morass and mismanagement.”  

This week an alarming federal report, issued by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, reveals top ranking TSA managers are not telling the head office about nearly half of the security breaches at the country’s major airports. This compromises security by making it more difficult to spot dangerous weaknesses in the national fight against terrorism, according to the DHS inspector general.  

The facilities and the actual number of breaches were redacted for security reasons, but the audit covers unreported security violations at six major U.S. airports over a 16-month period. The average rate of reported breaches among the six facilities was only 53%, according to the DHS IG investigators. The only airport identified is New Jersey’s Newark Liberty because a senator from that state, Democrat Frank Lautenberg, ordered the probe after reading about a series of security breaches at the facility in his hometown paper. 

In a statement posted on his website, Lautenberg, who is Vice Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, said the new report identifies a “gaping hole” in airport security. He reminds that “the recent attempt by al-Qaeda to take down a U.S.-bound airliner showed us that terrorists are still determined to exploit aviation security gaps in order to attack America.”

What is causing this gaping hole in airport security? Get ready for this; the TSA doesn’t have a comprehensive oversight program to gather information about all security breaches, according to the IG, and therefore can’t monitor trends that could improve security. Furthermore, the TSA doesn’t provide the necessary guidance and oversight to ensure all breaches are consistently reported, tracked and corrected. As a result the agency doesn’t have a “complete understanding of breaches occurring at the nation’s airports and misses opportunities to strengthen aviation security.” This is more than a decade after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history! 

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is recruiting rangers from other states to increase patrols in a busy stretch of the Arizona desert along the Mexican border. Why? Because illegal immigrants are trashing the Sonoran Desert National Monument, the most biologically diverse of the North American deserts, and the Ironwood Forest National Monument, which is known for its historic archeological district.

Both sites are popular among drug smugglers and illegal border-crossers because of their remote locations and possible hiding places, according to an Arizona newspaper report. In just five months rangers have dug up 60 stolen or abandoned vehicles, 60 bikes and at least 24 tons of trash, according to U.S. Bureau of Land Management figures cited in the story. The rangers are armed and have helped arrest more than 1,200 illegal immigrants. Besides keeping watch, the rangers also lead cleanup efforts.

This has been going on for years, but logically the problem would improve if the number of Mexicans crossing into the U.S. were really at an all-time low like the Obama Administration asserts. More on those figures later. As far back as 2007, the Bureau of Land Management, which is also responsible for the trash cleanup, reported that illegal immigrants left about 4 million pounds of trash and human waste as they crossed through federal and state parks during their trek from Mexico to the U.S.

Cleaning up the mess is a never-ending work in progress that has already cost U.S. taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, according to government estimates. The huge piles of litter includes water bottles, clothes, razors, homemade weapons, food, ropes, radios and lots of human waste. The trash piles up at a much faster rate than it can be cleaned up and has proven to be devastating to the area’s natural habitat, according to congressional testimony delivered by a high-ranking U.S. Forest official several years ago. 

The problem is so severe that Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality launched a special state website dedicated to trash along its 370-mile border with Mexico. Earlier this year the agency’s director told state lawmakers that his workers risk their lives to clean up the huge amounts of trash left by illegal immigrants in secluded desert areas with rigorous terrain. The job is becoming increasingly difficult and dangerous as illegal aliens use more remote paths to avoid stepped up enforcement along the vast U.S.-Mexico border, the director revealed. 

 While the nation’s once-pristine federal parklands are literally getting trashed by the high volume of illegal immigrant traffic, the Obama Administration assures that the undocumented population has dropped to its lowest level in a decade. This includes an unprecedented decrease of 41% in apprehensions in Arizona’s Tucson sector, the nation’s busiest portion of border for smuggling. 

In fact, over the weekend Texas’s largest newspaper reported that Homeland Security officials credit a tough new Border Patrol program for drastically cutting border arrests to a 40-year low. Under the plan, known as Operation Streamline, all illegal aliens who are caught are arrested and criminally prosecuted rather than voluntarily sent back to Mexico or getting processed through civil immigration courts. 

In San Francisco a jury found Edwin Ramos, a renowned gang banger, guilty of three first-degree murder counts for the 2008 killings of a 48-year-old man and his two sons. Ramos had a lengthy criminal record when he murdered the family, but San Francisco sanctuary laws shielded him from deportation.

Judicial Watch obtained public records that show police knew Ramos was an active member of the notoriously violent MS-13 street gang and that he had numerous run ins with the law, including arrests for weapons and gang-related charges. Furthermore, police knew Ramos was in the U.S. illegally yet released him after every encounter. In short, the records obtained by JW prove that don’t-ask-don’t tell sanctuary policies protect illegal alien gang bangers and put American citizens at risk.

Regardless, the famously liberal northern California city has long protected illegal immigrants and offered them costly public services that should be reserved for legal residents and citizens. In fact, illegal aliens are assured through costly, Spanish-language advertisement campaigns that they will never be reported to federal officials. In 2007 San Francisco became the nation’s first large municipality to offer illegal aliens official government identification cards. 

A few hundred miles south in Los Angeles, another illegal immigrant gang banger (Pedro Espinoza) was also convicted of first-degree murder this week for gunning down a standout high school football player in 2008. Jurors deliberated for about four hours before reaching a verdict, according to a local news report, that says Espinoza proudly sports a tattoo with the initials “B.K,” which police says stands for “Blood Killer.”

Espinoza had just completed a jail sentence for a previous felony when he murdered the 17-year-old star running back, Jamiel Shaw, as he walked home. Like San Francisco Los Angeles has strict policies banning law enforcement officers from inquiring about suspects’ immigration status. In this case it allowed a violent gang banger to gun down a talented young athlete who was being recruited by top colleges. 

JW has led a nationwide effort to eradicate don’t-ask-don’t-tell law enforcement policies like the ones that led to these horrific crimes. JW has filed lawsuits against police departments in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston where officers are prohibited from inquiring about suspects’ immigration status.

]]> http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/05/2-illegal-aliens-protected-by-sanctuary-policies-convicted-of-murder/feed/ 1 http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/05/jw-probe-special-wh-access-for-obama-tied-anti-gun-groups-against-voter-id-laws/ http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/05/jw-probe-special-wh-access-for-obama-tied-anti-gun-groups-against-voter-id-laws/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 15:20:42 +0000 Irene http://www.judicialwatch.org/?p=13336 Read the full post