Photo: AJC

The liberal AJC gang changed my letter before they printed it. I don’t write “illegal immigrant” – I call illegal aliens “illegal aliens” and used that term in my letter to the editor. So does the SCOTUS, IRS, federal law, state law, federal appellate courts…you get the picture. What is really amusing, is that the AJC writer, Bill Torpy, mentioned in the below letter had used the term “illegal aliens” in the AJC column I wrote about.

You can send a letter to the editor : Letters@AJC.com 

I wrote a short note of discontent and received a response with an explanation and apology. For which I am grateful.

Atlanta Journal Constitution

Readers Write: July 16 (2017)

Torpy’s column suffers from bad timing

Bill Torpy’s recent foray into the topic of immigration enforcement and amnesty met with some excruciatingly bad timing “Nuanced views on immigration? No way!,” News, July 9.

He wrote three more-noble-than-thou tear-jerkers about a Marietta illegal immigrant church deacon and his illegal immigrant wife (both apparently with 19-year-old deportation orders) being taken into custody by ICE for deportation. Before the ink was dry, we saw news stories about an illegal immigrant being captured and charged after an attack that involved the rape of a mother while her young son looked on. The attackers also threw boiling water on the helpless woman. Then an obviously deranged illegal immigrant in Gwinnett has been charged with stabbing her husband and her children to death.

Then it was illegal immigrant prostitutes in Canton. And then it was illegal immigrant meth dealers with illegal weapons in Gainesville. A busy two weeks in “looking for a better life.”

Torpy also takes note of the 1986 “one-time” Republican immigration amnesty and pushes for a repeat. We can’t help but wonder how often he thinks we should conduct “one-time” amnesties for victims of borders. Or if American borders and immigration laws will be allowed to apply to “church deacons.”

D.A. KING, MARIETTA

HERE

Photo: The Packer

Macon Telegraph

(Mother Jones’) Philpot off base on immigration enforcement stance

July 19, 2017

D.A. King

Tom Philpott’s recent Mother Jones rant on President Trump’s immigration enforcement policy (Trump’s Crackdown on Immigration Is Terrible News for Anyone Who Eats Food – And it’s particularly bad news for farmers) strains credibility in multiple ways. That includes his wildly inaccurate premise that Georgia lost $103.6 million because our legislature took action to protect jobs, wages, benefits and services for legal residents. Note to Mother Jones editors: This is a very popular concept in mainstream America.

As a fellow eater and one who was proudly involved in the creation of the 2011 Georgia law, (House Bill 87) that Phillpot cites as yet another reason to ignore our borders and immigration laws, I offer some first-hand reality.

Philpott’s first paragraph starts him down the path of fiction when he tells readers “in the spring of 2011, Georgia’s fruit and vegetable growers faced a crippling drought. But it wasn’t for lack of rain; rather, their supply of farmworkers had dried up almost overnight.”

The reality is that 2011 brought a historically severe drought in south Georgia’s farmlands and across much of the nation. The New York Times reported it like this:

 

Photo: New York Times -Buster Haddock, an agricultural scientist at the University of Georgia, in a field where cotton never had the chance to grow. Credit Grant Blankenship for The New York Times

“COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement.

“Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days.

“It’s horrible so far,” said Mike Newberry, a Georgia farmer who is trying to grow cotton, corn and peanuts on a thousand acres. “There is no description for what we’ve been through since we started planting corn in March.”

Our governor declared twenty-two south Georgia farming counties disaster areas because of the drought in 2011. We can’t imagine how Philpott missed this.

It is true that here in “the Peach State” the powerful Ag lobby struggled to blame the 2011 crop losses on HB 87 when they could not kill the legislation in the committee process. The law requires use of the no-cost E-Verify system for most private employers – including growers.

But it is also true that many Georgia growers have the same attitude on field labor and government regulations that their predecessors had in 1859.

Philpott has every right to argue against enforcement of our immigration laws and thereby support open borders. But he should not be allowed to invent his own “facts.”

As he noted, HB 87 did require the Georgia Department of Agriculture to give a report on the law’s impact on farming. That January 2012 report shows that HB 87 had little impact on agriculture. We hope people actually read it — our Agriculture Commissioner is the former head of a big Ag lobby enterprise here.

Actually, reported losses in 2011 totaled $10 million – or what a math whiz tells me is roughly 0.015 percent of the state’s total agricultural output in 2009. About 1 percent of employers who hired fewer full-time workers blamed HB 87; 54 percent blamed the economy or the weather (7 percent of employers who hired fewer part-time workers blamed HB 87; 40 percent blamed the economy/weather). Thirty-four percent actually hired more workers. Dry stuff, eh?

Philpott does correctly note there is a legal method for the Ag industry to obtain temporary foreign workers when they refuse to pay a wage that draws American workers. It’s called the H2A visa.

In the 2011 committee process on HB 87 in our state Capitol, I watched the growers and their arrogant and well-paid lobbyists plead with legislators to allow them to continue to use the “more flexible” black market labor they have abused for decades. The legal, “H2A workers are too costly” they fearlessly admitted then.

Philpott’s tale of immigration enforcement and plunging food supplies is not new. In 2011, there were caravans of liberal, anti-enforcement “journalists” flocking from glistening Atlanta TV studios to stand in the middle of dusty south Georgia onion and corn fields with drought-withered crops on camera telling us that because of HB 87, E-Verify and immigration enforcement, we would likely never eat a Georgia-grown fruit or vegetable again. Oh, my. Many of us laughed that “crops dying on the vine because of borders” was on the F4 key.

Fast forward: It is also true that in 2012, the value of Georgia agricultural exports topped $3.32 billion, a 26 percent increase from 2011. And that Georgia’s agricultural exports reached an estimated $3 billion in 2013, up from $1.8 billion in 2009. And that since 2011 and passage of HB 87 and our E-Verify law, Georgia has been declared “the No. 1 state in which to do business” three times by the influential Site Selection magazine.

Here in Georgia, where English is an optional language and the Ag industry continues to fight immigration enforcement, six years after HB 87 we still enjoy eating Georgia-grown veggies and fruits. The farmers are grudgingly moving to the legal labor that has always been available though the H2A visa.

President Trump’s immigration enforcement policy is working and Tom Philpott’s howls prove that happy fact.

D.A. King is president of the Dustin Inman Society. He resides in Marietta.

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/article162332253.html#storylink=cpy

Screen shot taken July 18, 2017 about 11:25. DDS page HERE.

“Driver’s licenses issued by the Republic of South Korea and accompanied by a License Certification Letter from the South Korean Consulate is exempt from taking the Georgia Knowledge (written) and road tests. Successful completion of the vision test is required.”

Click on image to enlarge.

Screen shot taken July 18, about 11:06 PM. DDS page HERE.

HERE is the Associated Press reporting the truth – that “illegal immigrants” are getting Georgia drivers licenses.  The AP story makes the AJC story from about a year later even more amusing. AJC reporter Jeremy Redmon tells us HERE that a state law was passed to end the practice of issuing drivers licenses to “illegal immigrants”. That is not true.

Click on image to enlarge

See “Identity and Lawful Status Requirements” mid-page

Screen shot July 18, 2017 about 10:51 PM   DDS page HERE

Click on image to enlarge. See bottom paragraph.

Screen shot taken about 10:30 PM July 18, 2017

DDS page HERE

Photo: D.A. King

DDS website screen shot taken at about 10:15 July 18, 2017.  DDS page HERE

Screen shot of DDS page done Tuesday, July 18, 2017 about 11:45 AM  Link to page is HERE.

Insider Advantage Georgia

July 17, 2017

D.A. King

House Bill 452: An important public safety clarification

A recent Georgia Public Television report on state Rep. Jesse Petrea’s HB 452 passed in the 2017 year’s legislative session needs a lot of clarification. We are happy to help.

Two years in the making, and carefully researched, HB 452 was written to require the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to share information it has been receiving from federal authorities on aliens who have been convicted of crimes in the U.S. and then released back onto the streets of Georgia instead of being deported.

GBI has been getting the data since August 2015 in a system called ‘EID/LENS.’

In early 2016, and after much searching, this writer was unable to locate a single Georgia sheriff – including in some of our most illegal alien populous counties– who was aware the information was available or going to GBI. Petrea’s bill has changed that curious fact.

Language in the law requires two separate actions: That GBI send the EID/LENS info to the Georgia Sheriff’s Association – and to post it on the GBI website to warn the public about newly released, dangerous criminal foreigners in their communities. Some of these individuals have convictions for homicide, rape, kidnapping and child molestation.

The common-sense idea was to follow the logic of the public sex offender registry.

As InsiderAdvantage reported during the committee process on HB 452, nationwide, Immigration & Customs Enforcement released 19,723 criminal aliens in 2015 alone.

As GPTV reports, citing privacy concerns and federal law, immigration officials now indicate they will not allow the public to have access to the information sent to GBI because it is on a “need to know basis.” But that isn’t what the feds said prior to HB452. “When crafting the bill, I was very careful to examine the published guidelines on privacy for EID/LENS by the Department of Homeland Security. That policy stated clearly that the states had the authority to create their own policies for sharing this important data” Petrea told me last week.

He is referring to a September 2015 “Privacy Impact Assessment Update for the Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) Law Enforcement Notification System (LENS)” put out by DHS. A key part of the guidelines on privacy in the release seems clear enough:

“External Sharing and Disclosure Privacy Risk:

There is a risk that law enforcement agencies may further disseminate ICE’s data to those without a need to know.
Mitigation: This risk is only partially mitigated by DHS. Every LENS notification indicates that the data contained within is For Official Use Only and should be disseminated only on a need to know basis. However, ICE is limited in its ability to monitor and control use of the data by law enforcement agencies once a notification is made. Ensuring that the notification is shared with the appropriate entities is a responsibility of the law enforcement agency initially receiving the data, and any further dissemination may be governed by the state’s laws and policies on information sharing” (emphasis mine).

It is notable that the contact point listed on the 2015 privacy guidelines was Thomas Homan who was then Executive Associate Director, Enforcement and Removal Operations for ICE.

Homan is now Acting Director of ICE under President Trump.

The direct result of Petrea’s tireless work on passage of his HB 452 language is that GBI has now started sharing the criminal alien release information with the Georgia Sheriff’s Association. “That accomplishment alone is a major success” said Petrea. We agree.

Notification that Georgia law enforcement agencies can also directly subscribe to the EID/LENS information provided to GBI since August 2015 was finally posted on the GBI-operated Georgia Crime Information Center’s website – on June 26, 2017. Thank you, Representative Petrea.

“Going forward, I expect that we will clear up any issues halting the implementation of the second half of the bill which allows the public transparent access to data on criminal aliens released into their communities” says Petrea. We hope so.

Rumor has it that the privacy policy on criminal aliens and information sharing procedure is under review in Washington, D.C. We hope so.

The concept that the American public has no “need to know” when already-captured, deportable, criminal aliens are set free is not only ludicrous, but inherently dangerous.

HERE.

D.A. King is president of the Dustin Inman Society

• Added 17 July, 2017 4:33 PM – While DDS is telling lawmakers that they only issue drivers licenses to applicants with “lawful status” while it issues drivers licenses to DACA recipients, the Governor Deal-appointed Attorney General (Chris Carr) is telling the liberal media that DACA (an Obama deferred action executive amnesty program) “does not confer legal status.”

“As Attorney General, I take seriously my duty to defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution and laws of the state of Georgia. We have continuously and clearly taken the position in ongoing legal cases that DACA does not confer legal status,” Carr said. “It is important to remember that it is properly the role of Congress to address immigration issues from a legislative perspective.” HERE.

This post dedicated to @CaryLen and all the Americans who “know” the media and the politicians will never lie to them.

photo: NBC News

Illegal aliens with deferred action on deportation are still illegal aliens. Or “non-citizens without lawful/legal status.” Georgia has issued about 30,000 drivers licenses and official photo ID cards to illegal aliens, most with DACA, but not all. Some of these victims of borders have already been convicted of crimes (some violent) and are under deportation orders.

Link to DDS page shown below is HERE. 

Screen shot below July 13, 2017 at about 9:15 PM

Short version: Illegal aliens with deferred action on deportation including Obama’s illegal DACA amnesty do not have “lawful status.” Never say that the liberal media will not colude with the Chamber of Commerce Republicans who rule Georgiafornia.

USCIS website on DACA and deferred action on deportation:

“What is DACA

On June 15, 2012, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced that certain people who came to the United States as children and meet several guidelines may request consideration of deferred action for a period of two years, subject to renewal. They are also eligible for work authorization. Deferred action is a use of prosecutorial discretion to defer removal action against an individual for a certain period of time. Deferred action does not provide lawful status.”