Early in January, someone raped and murdered Maria Fuertes, a 92-year-old woman living in Queens. Police eventually arrested Reeaz Khan, an illegal alien from Guyana (although, interestingly, he has a Muslim name). Despite denials from de Blasio, DHS showed documentary evidence that ICE had sought to detain Khan following an earlier arrest, but that New York City had put him on the streets.

On Friday, Daria Ortiz, Fuertes’s granddaughter, delivered a heartbreaking speech to the National Border Patrol Council. In it, she described her grandmother as a “shining example” of legal immigration to America. Speaking through tears, Ortiz also blasted Leftist sanctuary policies that shelter criminal illegal aliens, saying “The man that is responsible for this should have never had the opportunity to do this, had his multiple offenses not been ignored. The system not only failed our family but it failed our city.”

Democrats like to say that illegal aliens are actually less criminally inclined than legal citizens. That’s a strawman argument. The relevant point is that every crime an illegal alien commits is unacceptable because those crimes would not have happened but for the fact that the perpetrators were in the country illegally.

Were the laws properly enforced, their victims would not have been raped, assaulted, murdered, robbed, or subject to any other violent criminal acts. Looked at correctly, even one violent crime by an illegal alien is too many.

And while illegal aliens may commit fewer crimes than legal citizens, that’s not something to boast about given the misery they do cause. Here are just four examples from hundreds that the Federation for American Immigration Reform collected identifying crimes that would not have happened but for Democrat’s willful refusal to abide by federal immigration law:

On December 6, 2019, Florencio Felix Barron shot and killed his ex-common-law wife, Veneranda Martinez-Gutierrez, in front of their three children in East Austin, Texas. Barron then proceeded to shoot himself. The illegal alien had been deported to Mexico after a 2016 conviction for inappropriately touching a 10-year old girl at Allison Elementary School that year, but subsequently reentered the U.S. unlawfully. (KXAN, October 20, 2016; People, December 9, 2019) Authorities in Green Lake County, Wisconsin said they arrested six men – all illegal aliens from Guatemala – on December 11, 2019 for allegedly sex trafficking an underaged girl. The victim escaped a house in Winchester in which she was allegedly being sex-trafficked and called 911 on the evening of November 28 (Thanksgiving). The names of the illegal alien suspects are: Esler Hugo Rivera, Rolando Corado Gonzalez, Avelino Sarceno-Sarceno, Ember Rivera, Noe Bautista-Martinez, and Evis Amabilio Garcia-Rivera. (FOX6, December 11, 2019; The Tennessee Star, December 13, 2019) Sam Nang Lam, a father of four, was sleeping on his living room couch during the early hours of November 3, 2019, in Seattle’s South Park neighborhood when he was struck and killed by bullets fired by illegal alien Julio Cruz-Velazquez. According to ICE, Cruz-Velazquez has a long criminal history dating back to 2000, including charges of rape, domestic violence, burglary, DUI, and assault. On two previous occasions, ICE had lodged detainers on him, but local sanctuary policies resulted in his release. (Q13 FOX, November 15, 2019: K5 News, November 15, 2019) On April 2, Miguel Martinez was arrested in Louisiana on 100 counts of possession of pornography of children under the age of 13, one count of production of child pornography, and one count of sexual battery of a child under the age of 13. Martinez, an illegal alien, was deported in 2005 and remains a registered sex offender in California, a sanctuary state.

ICE’s “Fiscal Year 2018 ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Report” states that

By far, the largest percentage of aliens arrested by ICE are convicted criminals (66 percent), followed by immigration violators with pending criminal charges at the time of their arrest (21 percent). In FY2018, ERO ["Enforcement & Removal Operations"] arrested 138,117 aliens with criminal histories (convicted criminal and pending criminal charges). . . . (Footnotes omitted.)

And here’s something Democrats don’t want to talk about: Illegal immigrants, who often come from rural areas far from Western norms, are at the forefront of child rape and incest. North Carolinians For Immigration Reform and Enforcement has been tracking illegal immigrant child rape and the numbers are staggering – with each rape happening only because Democrats want open borders.

If we had a functioning immigration program, a closed border, and compliance with ICE detainers, 92-year-old Maria Fuertes would not have died a horrific death and thousands of other legal citizens and immigrants would not be victimized annually by crimes that ought never to have happened.