Last Thursday, an illegal alien in Mobile, Alabama crossed a highway median and killed a local private schoolteacher in a head-on collision. The alien, 16 years old, was initially denied asylum upon crossing the Mexico-Arizona border in 2017 but was nonetheless free in the nation’s interior despite his having also received a final deportation order. Commentator Daniel Horowitz summarizes the incident at Conservative Review:
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.
Local affiliate NBC 15 reports that some of Sonya Jones’ friends and acquaintances are having a nearly impossible time comprehending the unspeakable — and wholly preventable — tragedy:
“We do morning duty together and I was like she’s never late,” said Aja James.
Sonya taught at Living Word Christian Center Kingdom Academy, but she never made it to class Monday morning.
“You walk in here and I can’t fathom that she’s not going to be here,” said James. …
“We miss her dearly,” said school director Voncile Banks. …
“She was the most caring. She would look out for someone else before she looked out for herself,” said James.
“She will be truly missed. She was dearly loved. And will always have a place in our heart,” said Banks.
As NBC 15 confirms, the illegal alien suspect absconded around the time of his asylum denial and final deportation order. He was never caught until he ultimately killed Sonya Jones. He has been charged with homicide by vehicle and leaving the scene of an accident with injuries.
Crimes committed by illegal aliens who abscond due to catch-and-release policies and lax interior enforcement are, by definition, all readily preventable. As Horowitz notes, Congress passed a statute in 1996 that mandated the creation of a visa tracking system to monitor and apprehend illegal aliens who overstay their visas. And as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) notes, there were nearly 700,000 visa overstays just in 2017.
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, furthermore, there is no apparent connection between the rates of violence in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras — the three Central American nations whose emigrants entail an infamously high share of U.S. border crossers over the past five years — and the rates of U.S. border crossings from those same countries.
The upshot, as CIS notes, is that “[t]here are a range of push-and-pull factors responsible for migration,” and there is no doubt that fleeing violence or gang brutality plays a role — perhaps even an outsized role — for some. But the general statistics simply do not show any base level of correlation of murder rates and U.S.-Mexico border crossings for natives of any of the three Northern Triangle nations. Instead, as CIS notes elsewhere, there are overwhelmingly more Guatemalans who tell pollsters that they flee for the U.S.-Mexico border due to economic reasons than there are Guatemalans who tell pollsters that they flee for the U.S.-Mexico border due to violence/safety reasons.