RUTHFULLY YOURS

By one estimate, only 6 percent of American high-school seniors will play college football and Edwin Jackson of Westlake High School in Atlanta was a walk-on at Georgia Southern University. Jackson played well but the odds of making it to the National Football League were not in his favor.

Of some 20,000 college freshmen only 1.5 percent will make an NFL roster and no NFL team showed much interest in Edwin Jackson. Instead of giving up, he went the free-agent route and after release by the Arizona Cardinals he found a home with the Indianapolis Colts. In the eight games he started for the team, Jackson recorded 66 tackles. In the NFL, performance counts and at 26, the hard-working linebacker had the best of his career before him.

By all indications, Jackson was popular with teammates and careful to avoid trouble off the field. Indeed, while out late last weekend, Jackson showed the good sense to take Uber rather than drive. He doubtless planned to watch the Super Bowl but Edwin Jackson would not tune in or ever play another game in the National Football League.

Early on Sunday, a Ford F-150 pickup slammed into Jackson and driver Jeffrey Monroe, 54, who had pulled to the side of Interstate 70 in Indiana. Both men perished in the impact and the driver fled. Police chased down Alex Cabrera Gonsales but that name turned out to be fake.

The man who killed Edwin Jackson was actually Manuel Orrego-Savala, 37. He had no driver’s license and his blood-alcohol level was 0.239, three times the legal limit. The politically correct would say he had a problem with “substance abuse” but in reality he’s a drunk who was not supposed to be in the United States in the first place.

The Guatemalan national entered the United States illegally in July of 2004. The following year, he was convicted of drunk driving in Redwood City, California, but by all indications not handed over to ICE for deportation. ICE arrested Orrego-Savala in October, 2006, and in January of 2007 deported him to Guatemala. He again entered the United States illegally and made his way to San Francisco, where he was arrested and deported in March of 2009.

The Guatemalan national again violated U.S. immigration law and made his way to Indiana. In the aftermath of the deadly crash, the illegal lobby was going easy on him. Ana Kotchkoski of the Venezuelan Association of Indiana, which lobbies for DACA and “dreamers,” told the IndyStar “it’s so unfortunate what happened, this is very, very sad.” She spared the Guatemalan illegal any direct criticism.

The group Faith in Indiana was organizing a February 6 demonstration to support dreamers. Spokesperson Francine Dash told the Star, “what we should not do is minimize the loss of Mr. Jackson’s life by politicizing the driver’s immigration status. Legal status is not the culprit here; drunk driving is.”

In the lexicon of the illegal lobby, to “politicize” immigration status is simply to point out the truth. Orrego-Savala was a serial violator of U.S. immigration law and to avoid that reality is to trivialize the death of Edwin Jackson.

University of Denver law school professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a self-styled expert in “crimmigration,” told the Star, “I’m afraid of what happens if we fall into a trap of not giving the judicial process the time to run its course.” The law professor also urged “a more deliberate approach to this horrible tragedy.” Readers might wonder what, exactly, César Cuauhtémoc was talking about.

Drunk driving is a crime and the Guatemalan national killed two American citizens. Police deliberately arrested Orrego-Savala and at this writing he awaits a lawful hearing, all within the judicial process. The Guatemalan’s previous drunk driving conviction is a matter of record but his violation of U.S. immigration law is still running its course. Meanwhile, another reality has escaped notice.

Victim Edwin Jackson was African American and his Guatemalan killer Manuel Orrego-Savala is as white as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto or the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Even so, Black Lives Matter did not rush out a statement and the BET website described Jackson’s killer as “a Guatemalan citizen who has been deported twice in the past and tried to give cops a fake name after unsuccessfully attempting to flee the scene on foot.” The evasions are not surprising.

For the politically correct, even those with ancestry on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe are “people of color.” Advocacy for false-documented illegals is a subset of the left’s broader jihad against the United States, the nation that actually exists. For the illegal lobby, legitimate American citizens don’t dream to achieve or work nearly as hard as those who violate immigration law.

So no surprise that San Francisco shelters career criminals like Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, the repeat deportee who fired the shot that killed Kate Steinle. For the illegal lobby, the shooter is completely innocent.

For his part, Guatemalan national Manuel Orrego-Savala crashed a truck into Edwin Jackson. The default response of the illegal lobby is to trivialize the death of the African American and defend the white drunk who killed him.