Four reasons for my ‘no’ vote on new immigrant lock-up bill
Last year I enthusiastically supported a bill to make sure we lock up illegal aliens who commit crimes for the same amount of time that we lock up citizens. That means we require both citizens and illegal aliens to serve at least 85 percent of a sentence.
Prior to passing House Bill 2451, we only locked up undocumented prisoners for 50 percent of their term, and then we turned them over to Federal ICE for deportation. The old operating theory was that Arizona could decrease our incarceration expenses for this prison population.
The problem was that once deported, these criminals didn’t continue their sentence in Mexico or other countries; they were set free and many were able to come right back through our porous border. So illegal aliens who committed crimes were basically getting half the sentence unless they were caught re-entering the U.S. It was an easy vote to stop this practice and I’m glad we did it.
Sen. Steve Smith introduced a bill, Senate Bill 1279, proposing that illegal aliens must serve 100 percent of their sentence before being handed over to ICE for deportation. Smith didn’t have the votes. So, without engaging skeptics intellectually about his bill, Sen. Smith plotted a Senate floor drama in which he paraded three victims of crimes by illegal aliens. My heart went out to them.
But Sen. Smith’s tactic was cruel to the victims’ families because his argument was a non sequitur. None of their tragedies would have been prevented by his proposed bill.
There are at least four reasons to oppose SB 1279 that formed the basis of my “no” vote:
First, we already addressed the inequity last year; all prisoners now get the same treatment, and illegal alien prisoners get turned over for deportation after serving their sentence.
Second, there may be constitutional problems with administering different sentences for the same crimes. We could spend years wasting millions in tax dollars litigating this bill in court. We don’t have money to waste.
Third, things have changed. We now have an administration that is dedicated to building the infrastructure and hiring the personnel to enforce the integrity of our borders. A firm border should keep criminals we have deported permanently out of our country.
With the presidency and Congress on the same page, immigration law can be addressed where we are supposed to address it: at the federal level. For example, Rep. Andy Biggs has introduced “Grant’s Law” at the federal level to ensure prisoners are deported straight from prison after serving their sentences.
Fourth, we don’t need to spend more dollars on people in prison when we desperately need to focus on money for schools. SB 1279 would increase our incarceration costs for illegal aliens by 15 percent!
Why? This is schizophrenic thinking. The one hand complains about the cost to “educate, medicate, and incarcerate” illegal aliens. Now the other hand is trying to spend 15 percent more tax dollars to lock up illegal aliens than we spend for U.S. citizen prisoners. Let’s get our story straight.
Bob Worsley is a Republican state senator representing Mesa. Email him at bworsley@azleg.gov.