Most of the people the U.S. Border Patrol stopped from sneaking into the country last year were from countries other than Mexico, according to agency statistics, a startling shift that might have provided fodder for politicians leading up to Tuesday’s election.
But they didn’t get much of a chance. The Border Patrol’s annual statistics were posted on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website for about five hours on Oct. 10, then taken down. Now some are questioning whether the decision to pull back the data was another example of the Obama administration playing politics with public information.
Even before Tuesday, the Obama administration said it was waiting until after the midterm elections to deal with immigration reform so that any losses would not be blamed on the Democrats’ proposal. For some, removing the apprehension statistics – which both parties could use to criticize U.S. immigration laws – was another flatly political move.
“It worries me that they may have been taken down for purely political reasons,” said U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. “If the information is ready it should be made available. The idea that it was and then yanked down for political reasons is outrageous.”
Yesterday voters in the blue State of Oregon rescinded a state law giving illegal aliens access to driver cards by voting down Ballot Measure 88. The citizens veto referendum, which was placed on the ballot by an issue committee called Protect Oregon Drivers Licenses (PODL), gave voters an opportunity to decide whether the 2013 law (SB 833) should be implemented. Voters said “No” by a 68-32 margin.
The measure’s demise is a major defeat for illegal-alien advocates. Earlier, they failed to get the state legislature and the courts to re-write the referendum title in a manner favorable to keeping the law. And leading up to the election, they falsely claimed that the 2013 law would require illegal aliens to purchase car insurance and improve highway safety.
