Another Needless Killing by a Drunk-Driving Illegal Alien

The Daily Caller is reporting the killing of a Johnson County, Kan., law enforcement officer, Master Deputy Brandon Collins, at the hands of an illegal alien, one Adrian Espinosa-Flores, who was driving drunk at the time he plowed his vehicle into Deputy Collins and then ran away.

It was a needless death because, according to the Daily Caller, Espinosa-Flores was on the streets despite having been arrested twice previously — a pertinent fact that somehow just doesn't show up in the Kansas City Star newspaper article about him being charged with manslaughter in the case. Sloppy reporting or political correctness?

One of the prior arrests was in California; the other also took place in Kansas in 2013 — neither of which was reported to federal immigration authorities, the article reports, quite possibly because he was arrested and released in the confines of a sanctuary jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate with immigration agents in their efforts to enforce the law.

It's worth knowing that Johnson County, where Deputy Collins worked, is itself a sanctuary jurisdiction that doesn't honor detainers issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents "without probable cause or a warrant". This is a phrase that often shows up in the verbiage of sanctuary jurisdictions to justify their refusal to fully cooperate, because what they mean is a judicial warrant or finding of probable cause, when these are not the statutory standards for federal deportation cases, which are civil in nature. U.S. district court judges have no standing to issue warrants or find probable cause. Administrative warrants in deportation cases are issued by federal officials who are given the authority under the law to find that there is cause. Those officials are the secretary of Homeland Security and his designees as defined under federal regulations.

It is sad and ironic that Deputy Collins' needless death took place in Overland Park, a suburban town within Johnson County that is the hometown of Julie Myers Wood, former head of ICE during the Bush administration. Also noteworthy is that the Kansas Secretary of State is Kris Kobach, a former Bush administration Justice Department official and a strong advocate on behalf of immigration law enforcement.

The Daily Caller tells us that ICE has filed a detainer against Espinosa-Flores in the manslaughter case, although the local district attorney declined to confirm whether that is the case.

Now that it's one of their own who was victimized, do you figure the Johnson County Sheriff's Office will rethink its ill-considered immigration detainer policy? I sure hope so, even though that would smack of hypocrisy, because it's the right thing to do. It was all along.