RUTHFULLY YOURS

Immigration: The president tells a border state U.S. senator that if we beef up border protection Democrats will lose the bargaining chip for comprehensive immigration reform. Forget national sovereignty — sue Arizona!

As the Obama administration prepares to sue the state of Arizona to block its copycat enforcement of federal immigration law, Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl reveals that in a private meeting President Obama put his party’s agenda above the nation’s sovereignty.

Last Friday, Kyl told the audience at a North Tempe Tea Party town hall meeting:

“I met with the president in the Oval Office (regarding securing the southern border with Mexico),” Kyl said, “just the two of us . .. here’s what the president said. ‘The problem is,’ he said, ‘If we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform.'”

If we secure the border? The nation’s security is a bargaining chip for politically motivated legislation with political consequences?

Every nation has a right to protect its borders, and our commander in chief has a duty to protect ours. Refusal to do so for political reasons is unconscionable. Our border states should not remain exposed to the escalating violence of a Mexican drug war that has already claimed the life of one Arizona rancher.

The murderers of Robert Krentz escaped to a protected pronghorn antelope area that the Interior Department of Secretary Ken Salazar had placed off limits to U.S. border patrol agents in order to protect endangered species.

So unserious is the administration about protecting the border that it has placed off limits some 4.3 million acres of wilderness area that has become both a haven and a highway for illegal aliens, drug smugglers, human traffickers and potential terrorists.

Arizona is now the kidnapping capital of the United States, and Phoenix has the second-largest kidnapping problem in the world, just behind Mexico City. Claremont Institute fellows William J. Bennett and Seth Leibsohn, writing in National Review, report that someone is kidnapped every 35 hours in Phoenix.

According to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, kidnapping in Arizona increased 402% between 2004 and 2008, with almost 70% of the kidnapping cases submitted for prosecution involving illegal immigrants.

This is part of a much bigger crime picture. The Center for Immigration Studies reports that while illegal aliens make up 9% of the Arizona population, they are responsible for 22% of the felonies in the state and they constitute 11% of the state prison population.

Instead of securing the border, the Obama administration is preparing to sue Arizona for doing the feds’ job by passing SB 1070, which mimics existing federal law.

The irony here is that the Department of Homeland Security has Memorandums of Agreement (MOAs) with around 70 state and local law enforcement agencies to participate in program 287(g) partnerships to enforce federal law.

Nine of these jurisdictions are in Arizona and all of the agreements were inked while Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was Arizona governor. Last October, Napolitano said these “agreements promote public safety by prioritizing the identification and removal of dangerous criminal aliens and ensure consistency and stronger federal oversight of state and local immigration law enforcement efforts across the nation.”

Under these agreements, local law enforcement is trained and authorized to enforce federal immigration laws by arresting criminal illegal aliens. Nationwide the program has ID’d and processed for removal more than 110,000 criminal aliens since January 2006.

The Obama administration wants to sue Arizona for doing what it authorized Arizona to do. No court should allow that.

In a statement issued Friday after it was confirmed the administration was preparing to sue, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer called Obama’s decision “outrageous” but “not surprising.”

“Our federal government should be using its legal resources to fight illegal immigration, not the law-abiding citizens of Arizona,” Arizona’s governor said. We concur.

President Obama’s words to Sen. Kyl seem to indicate a willingness to hold the American people hostage to a political agenda and should be roundly condemned. We need to plug the hole on our southern border first.