Wednesday, May 10, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
The Great Wall
of Trump
Many of us remember
Robert Frost. Typically, we
even have enough of his
inestimable work commit-
ted to memory to recite a few
lines: “Two roads diverged
in a yellow wood,” for
instance, or the notable bit
from “Mending Wall” where
a laconic neighbor says:
“Good fences make good
neighbors.”
That line may even be
true — I often think so —
though the speaker in Frost’s
poem doesn’t buy it.
I don’t know what to
make of the proposed Trump
Wall on our southern border.
I don’t know if it will hap-
pen, or if Trump’s pledge
was merely pulp for popular
consumption. And nobody
can know with any certainty
what the result of building it
might or might not be.
I once sat in a room full
of narcotics detectives where
DEA agents shared photos
of the ramps built on the
southern side of the border
fence — to jump cars laden
with meth from Culiacan
Superlabs into Los Estados
Unidos.
I can only make inroads
toward an intelligent opinion
when I put the proposed wall
up against my own experi-
ence. Here in Oregon, and
particularly in Sisters, we
are largely insulated from
thinking about the results of
illegal immigration and the
attendant human and dope
trafficking because we don’t
brush up against the conse-
quences each and every day.
I will stipulate in advance
that my thoughts about wall-
building — from the per-
spective of law enforcement
— do not, and should not,
frame the entire discussion.
The vast majority of
people I arrested in narcot-
ics work were in the country
illegally, to the point of near
exclusivity. This is not sur-
prising, given that Mexican
cartels control virtually every
aspect of the narcotics trade.
What was surprising, at
least to me, was our inability
to do much about it.
For a time, obtaining an
ICE detainer on arrested
subjects merely required a
phone call and a sympathetic
agent on the phone. The
detainer was faxed to the jail,
and the arrestee held. One
day that suddenly changed
and it became impossible
to acquire a detainer under
almost any circumstance
— other than a homicide
booking — and even that
was questionable.
Dr. Thomas R. Rheuben
General, Cosmetic, Implant
and Family Dentistry
~ Over 22 years Serving Sisters ~
We are preferred providers for Delta Dental PPO and Premier,
MODA, Advantage, Pacifi c Source, Cigna and the V.A.
541-549-0109
|
304 W. Adams Ave.
|
Sisters
Bring your physical therapy prescription to us!
COMMON CONDITIONS WE TREAT:
Back Pain
Whiplash
Pre- & Post-Surgery
Shoulder Pain
Vertigo
Stroke Side Eff ects
Knee Pain
Sprained Ankle
Concussion
On The Job Injury
Headaches
Sciatica
541-588-6848
Then it changed again:
we were unable to even
arrest people with felony re-
entry warrants. To be clear,
it wasn’t that we couldn’t
physically take them into
custody — we just couldn’t
book them because the jail,
with a sheriff mindful of his
constituency, and a facility
perpetually over-capacity,
simply wouldn’t take them.
Wrap your head around
that.
California officers, and I
suspect the same is true of
those in Oregon and else-
where, routinely accept
Mexican Consular Cards
as legitimate identification
— though that is actually
against the law. The people
I encountered most always
carried bogus Social Security
cards, and other counterfeit
forms of ID, all of which
were crimes, and none of
which the DA’s office would
ever prosecute.
Often, after our depart-
ment began taking thumb-
prints on every citation, the
lab techs would discover
the cited subject had given a
false name, and was actually
wanted on multiple warrants,
often in several states, under
a menu of different names,
and for a smorgasbord of
both violent and non-violent
crimes.
The hospitals in the city
I served were overwhelmed,
routinely, with illegal immi-
grants who filled the emer-
gency rooms and used the
services as a primary care
solution. It was not uncom-
mon to find large crowds of
The Garden Angel
541-549-2882
people waiting in the park-
ing lots outside. It was also
generally known that being
brought in by ambulance was
a smart move — it at least
guaranteed being wheeled
into the actual hospital, and
perhaps even being treated in
a timely fashion. Provided,
of course, that the available
beds weren’t already occu-
pied by gang members —
many of them illegally in
the country — full of bullet
holes or stab wounds.
All of that trouble is
headed toward Central
Oregon, by the way.
On May 2, the U.S.
Department of Justice
released statistics on ille-
gal immigrants incarcer-
ated in the Federal Bureau
of Prisons. As of March 25,
2017, there were 41,528 ille-
gal immigrants in the federal
prison system, to the tune of
about 1.2 billion taxpayer
dollars a year. Those num-
bers only account for the fed-
eral system, and say nothing
about the county jail and state
prison populations across
the country, which are con-
siderably higher, and whose
cost can fairly be assessed
in the many billions more.
On the other hand, it’s
also likely that illegal immi-
grants have done more than
anyone else to preserve the
relatively low cost of liv-
ing we all enjoy, by virtue
of their willingness to work
for nearly nothing. A fact
that many large businesses
— who lobby vigorously
against meaningful immigra-
tion controls — also enjoy.
17
There is, furthermore,
absolutely no doubt in my
mind that the vast major-
ity of people who come into
this country — legally or
otherwise — want nothing
more than an opportunity to
improve their station in life,
to educate their children, and
to pursue happiness. Even
as they break our laws to
get here, the overwhelming
percentage of illegal entrants
take up quiet — almost sub-
terranean — lives once they
arrive.
The real question, it
seems, is whether or not
building a gigantic wall is
the solution to any of these
problems. One wonders if a
huge border wall isn’t des-
tined to become a shabby
tourist attraction for some
distant version of us, like
the Long Walls of Athens, or
Hadrian’s Wall.
Frost didn’t like his
neighbor’s insistence on a
wall. “Before I built a wall,”
he wrote, “I’d ask to know
what I was walling in or
walling out.”
That’s a good and impor-
tant question, with reso-
nant consequences, and we
should probably, if we are
still capable of it, engage in
a more circumspect conver-
sation about what it means
to build a wall. We should
wonder aloud if it will actu-
ally work, at least in the
way it is couched, and at
the very least with a studied
eye on how our great-great-
great-grandchildren might
come to understand our
intent.
Happy Mother’s Day!
A natural
approach to
lawn care
LCB#9352
152 E. Main Ave. • 541-549-8771