Enforce existing laws on illegal immigrants

A FEDERAL JUDGE in Norfolk has struck a powerful blow against employers who hire illegal immigrants. His sentencing in a case last week, coupled with the unrelated arrest of a man who allegedly sold license plates to illegal immigrants on the Eastern Shore, indicates how law enforcement officials can use current laws to attack the issue roiling the country.

The United States still desperately needs comprehensive immigration reform, an initiative that so far has eluded Congress. Possible solutions - facing political, logistical and economic hurdles - have been difficult to craft. And there's no simple way to deport an estimated 12 million people.

However, courts, police and federal agents can do their part to enforce existing laws and regulations.

U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson sent a stern warning to employers who repeatedly - and knowingly - hire illegal workers. The judge sentenced Yvonne Michelle Peabody to 90 days in prison for hiring 126 undocumented workers on her fishing trawlers over a four-year period.

Jackson said the court was particularly incensed because Peabody, operator of a Newport News-based company, had been chairwoman of the law enforcement subcommittee of the regional fisheries council.

"The court finds your conduct to be egregious," Jackson said, according to Tim McGlone's article in The Pilot. Earlier, Peabody's father had been sentenced to home confinement. The father and daughter have already paid $6.9 million in fines and forfeitures.

The 90-day sentence might not seem like serious time, but the charge was only a misdemeanor, not a felony, and both the prosecution and defense had urged leniency.

Also last week, the FBI arrested a Guatemalan national on federal charges of buying hundreds of Tennessee and Mississippi license plates and car titles, and then selling them to immigrants who couldn't prove their residency. Virginia requires that proof. The FBI also raided the home of Felipe Jesus Mazariegos-Perez in Accomack County.

The illegal sale of plates and titles has threatened the safety of motorists on the Eastern Shore. In October 2005, The Pilot reported on numerous car crashes, several of them fatal, involving unlicensed, undocumented Hispanics driving cars with Tennessee plates.

U.S. 13, from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the Maryland line, has been a particularly dangerous stretch.

What's not immediately clear is why Mazariegos-Perez wasn't arrested sooner. The State Police caught him with several out-of-state plates and new vehicle titles in 2003 but never charged him, and the FBI had been investigating him more than a year and a half.

Though it often takes time to establish a case that will hold up in court, the delay placed residents on the Eastern Shore in jeopardy.

The cases involving an employer and motor vehicles are just two small dots on the federal landscape involving immigration. Lawmakers in Washington must do their part to fill in the rest of the picture.