ATF Death Watch 128: Manuel Arellanes and the UK Home Office

So here I am in the Eurozone. Gunless. No biggie right? It’s the same as being gunless in the States only better ’cause the bad guys don’t have guns. Statistically. So my risk is lower. Statistically. Although there are more terrorist attacks. Debate that amongst yourselves. Meanwhile I’ll say this about that: walking down those endless, tubular, exit-less airport transit spaces [see: above] has been a pretty scary experience. Should something untoward have occurred, myself and my fellow travelers would’ve been trapped like gerbils in a Habitrail. Of course, it’s the same in any large U.S. airport, isn’t it? And it seems that both the US and UK put their citizens at risk of violent crime in the pursuit of politically correct immigration policies. Yesterday’s Times:

Foreign nationals who are sentenced to a year or more behind bars are supposed to be deported automatically at the end of their sentences . . . A significant number have subsequently been arrested for violent crimes, including three murders, three kidnappings and 14 sexual offenses, including rape.

Sound familiar? It will to anyone living on America’s southern border. Lest we forget the [sole] Mexican national held in the killing of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was not unknown to the local constabulary. tusconweekly.com:

Manuel [Arellanes] was detained in Mesa on Nov. 17, 2003, for resisting arrest. According to the Mesa police report, when officers responded to a call about a man looking into backyards and “possibly casing houses,” they found Manuel yelling in Spanish at a woman waiting in her car for her daughter outside of New Horizon elementary school.

Manuel refused commands to move away from the car, and when police tried to arrest him, Manuel “spun away from our grasp and attempted to run,” the report said. He continued to struggle after being handcuffed.

To get him into a patrol car, officers had to wrestle him to the street twice and Taser him twice, to minimal effect. At the Mesa jail, he fought officers again, after which paramedics were called to take him to the hospital due to a rapid heartbeat.

Manuel, a day laborer in the country illegally, admitted that he used marijuana, cocaine and meth, according to a pre-sentencing report by a Maricopa County probation officer.

He said he began smoking marijuana frequently at age 13. He began using meth “one or two times per month” at 26, and had last used the drug two weeks before his arrest.

He pleaded guilty to resisting arrest and was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation.

After a period during which Manuel seemed to do well, passing all court-ordered urinalysis tests, he was arrested again on May 21, 2006, for aggravated assault on a police officer.

Officers were summoned to his house in Mesa on a domestic-violence call after his wife reported that Manuel was drunk and causing a disturbance. Police had been to the house several times in previous months for the same trouble.

As an officer approached him, Manuel said, “Don’t arrest me.” When the officer attempted to handcuff him, Manuel punched the policeman in the face, causing a bloody cut on his left cheek and a bloody lip.

Court papers in Maricopa County state that Manuel admitted using cocaine the day of the arrest. He also said that in the three months prior to his arrest, he’d been using meth, and it had made him “very paranoid,” according to the pre-sentencing report.

The report also noted that the officer with whom Manuel fought had been to the house before, on a domestic call during which Arellanes had “smacked up his wife pretty good.”

The report provides a glimpse into Manuel’s life. He admitted coming to the country illegally in 1999. He said he was married and had two stepdaughters.

Beginning in March 2003, he worked as an $11-per-hour tile-setter for a company in Gilbert. In a letter to the court, his boss said he was pleased to have Manuel on his staff, because he was “a very dependable and reliable worker.”

But in a phone interview with the Weekly, company owner Slobadan Daki said that “was on the days when he showed up.”

Manuel pleaded guilty to felony aggravated assault on a police officer and got 60 days in jail, followed by three years of probation. He also was ordered to undergo domestic-violence and anger-management counseling, and submit to DNA testing for law-enforcement purposes.

Court records show that Manuel’s next arrest occurred six months before the Terry murder, on June 8, 2010, when Border Patrol agents found him after he had entered the country illegally near Nogales. He pleaded guilty to that crime and was deported on June 14—his last known appearance in the country before his re-entry in December.

The UK is an island nation. The U.S. is not. But both governments are loathe to defend their borders against illegal immigrants. Getting rid of them once they’ve been discovered here has proven equally “problematic.” Even after they’ve committed violent crimes against legal citizens of their host nation.

TTAG’s not giving up our focus on the misdeeds by the U.S. government that illegally armed vicious criminals or the coverup that followed. But it’s important to realize that Operation Fast and Furious was part and parcel of a systemic federal failure to address America’s national security interests.

Luckily, in the States, we can arm ourselves against the dangerous people that our own government returns to society with their ludicrous “capture and release” and porous borders policies. Unfortunately, the Brits’ “mustn’t grumble” gestalt leaves them vulnerable to its government’s failings. It’s something to think about.