Bereaved father urges fix of immigration system

WASHINGTON

Two years after the gut-wrenching death of his daughter transformed Ray Tranchant into an activist for tougher immigration enforcement, the Tidewater Community College administrator found his tragedy the focal point Thursday for an impassioned debate over civil rights and public safety.

A "broken system" of justice lets illegal immigrants who should have been tracked down and deported "kill or injure honest citizens," Tranchant told a pair of House subcommittees.

Elected officials preoccupied with "political correctness" frustrate enforcement that would have saved his daughter Tessa and her friend Alison Kunhardt, he complained.

Thanks to a torrent of publicity that followed the deaths of Tessa, 16, and Ali, 17, in Virginia Beach, many Americans know how a car driven by a drunken illegal immigrant, Alfredo Ramos, rammed the girls' vehicle at 70 mph. Ramos, now serving a 40-year prison term, had a record of drunken driving and a phony driver's license but state judges who handled those cases never asked about his immigration status.

"I don't want undesirable people in America. I don't want drunks in America," Tranchant said. "If we have an opportunity not to have them and deport them, we should do that. We want desirable people here."

Two seats to Tranchant's right, Antonio Ramirez offered Tranchant a fellow father's sympathy and an emotional accounting of how police hunts for suspected illegal immigrants have him and other legal immigrants in the Washington suburb of Frederick County, Md., living in fear.

"We are afraid. We are a target," Ramirez said, clutching a paperbound copy of the U.S. Constitution given him when he was naturalized years ago. Latinos in his community who are crime victims won't report rapes and other attacks because they fear police will focus on their immigration status rather than the violence they've suffered, he said.

Police "see the bad part of us," Ramirez said. "But they don't see the good things. We work very hard.... We are human beings."

The hearing underscored continuing partisan divisions over the immigration issue, with Democrats highlighting alleged harassment of Hispanic Americans and legal immigrants by local police and Republicans arguing for tougher action against illegal immigrants.

A federal law that allows federal authorities to enlist state and local police to locate and detain illegal immigrants has been exploited by some of those police to trample on the civil rights of immigrants, said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y.

"That's not law enforcement, that's subversion of the law," he said.

Nadler suggested that federal authorities should terminate agreements with local authorities who engage in harassment of immigrants. Some other Democrats are weighing a moratorium or tougher oversight of such agreements.

But Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, countered that there's no comparison between the suffering of victims such as the Tranchant family and the "inconvenience" suffered by legal immigrants questioned or temporarily detained by police searching for illegal immigrants.

After Julio Mora, 19, an Arizona man, described how he and his father were handcuffed and detained for three hours in February before deputies determined they are legal residents, King suggested they might have avoided problems if they'd reported fellow workers who were in the U.S. illegally.

"Am I supposed to check the status of the person sitting next to me in church?" Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., shot back.

The real problem is Congress' failure to provide sufficient resources for federal authorities to enforce immigration laws, without state and local aid, he said.

Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com