Two more Americans – a Washington state sheriff’s deputy and an Alabama schoolteacher – were killed this week because we senselessly allow illegal aliens to remain in our country.

Gouverneur Morris, one of the Pennsylvania delegation, with Benjamin Franklin, at the Constitutional Convention, is said to have declared, “Every society from a great nation down to a club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted; there can be room for no complaint.” As part of those conditions, we require all those who come here on visas to leave by a certain time or apply for an extension, and we require anyone coming to the border for asylum status to show up for a court date. But if we do not enforce those provisions by deporting violators, our laws are a joke and we have no dominion over our territory. Now, two more lives have been taken by senseless illegal alien murders, all because we no longer appreciate the foundational principle of sovereignty as expressed by Morris, the primary author of the actual prose of the Constitution.

Sonya Jones, a schoolteacher in a Christian academy in Mobile, Alabama, was killed on Monday when an illegal alien from Guatemala hit her head-on after crossing the center line of a local highway. Domingo Marcos, 16, is a poster child for what is going on now at the border. He came here in 2017 claiming asylum at the Arizona border, as encouraged and coached by the smugglers. He was, of course, denied asylum and issued final deportation orders. But as I reported earlier this week, there are over one million illegal aliens in this country with final deportation orders who still remain in this country, and very few of them are being deported. Marcos was one of 129,000 Guatemalans with final orders who remain here, and now a popular schoolteacher has paid the price with her life. Marcos was arrested when he was caught fleeing the scene of the accident.

This tragic death was completely avoidable. How many more ticking time bombs of drivers (drunk or otherwise), drug traffickers, murderers, and robbers will remain in the country and do harm to our people as a result of the lack of basic enforcement of our most foundational federal laws? Why is it that if we, as American citizens, absconded from court, failed to renew our licenses, or failed to pay speeding tickets, the law would easily catch up with us, but somehow illegal aliens and visa overstays remain here indefinitely?

Because of an illegal alien who overstayed his agriculture visa, a sheriff’s deputy in Washington state is dead and another local police officer wounded. According to Fox News, “29-year-old Juan Manuel Flores Del Toro, a Mexican citizen, entered the U.S. at Laredo, Texas, in April 2014 on a temporary agricultural worker visa.” The maximum duration of an H-2A visa is no longer than three years. Del Toro’s visa expired at some time several years ago, but he still remained in the country illegally for an unknown amount of time. Tuesday night, following a road rage incident with Del Toro, police were called out to the scene, and the illegal alien opened fire on the cops. The 42-year-old Kittitas County Sheriff's Deputy Ryan Thompson was killed, and 22-year-old Kittitas Police Officer Benito Chavez was wounded. Thompson is reportedly the first law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in this county since 1927. The suspect in his killing should long ago have been removed from this country.

Why are so many people able to remain in our country completely unvetted after they overstay their visas? Congress passed a law in 1996 mandating the creation of a visa tracking system to monitor and apprehend those caught overstaying their visas, and its implementation was urged by the 9/11 Commission in light of the security problems with so many of these “undocumented” individuals. Just in 2017 alone, 700,000 individuals overstayed their visas, and 85 percent of them still remain in the country.

Between all those who overstay their visas and the one million illegal aliens who remain here after final deportation orders (plus another 1.5 million who have “pending final deportation orders”), ICE obviously has its hands full. This is one of the many reasons why Trump should have held the line on a clean continuing resolution last month to keep this issue alive and make Democrats take tough votes on issues related to deportations. ICE needs more agents than even Border Patrol does. The border is all a policy problem at this point with our self-destructive asylum process. No number of new border agents will change that.

The distinguishing characteristic of a strong sovereign nation compared to an undeveloped country is the ability to monitor and control an external movement into the territory and the ability to apprehend and remove those who trespass on the national private property rights of the people. Yet on every measure, we seem to fail not just in our ability to prevent people from infiltrating our territory, but in monitoring and apprehending those who successfully remain in our country illegally. We the people are regulated or monitored in every aspect of our lives, but somehow illegal infiltrators seem to evade the juggernaut of Big Brother. And all murders that occur as a result of this failure are 100 percent avoidable.