A majority of House Republicans joined by 42 Democrats voted for a bill that makes it harder for asylum seekers to succeed in their claims and waives a host of laws in allowing the Department of Homeland Security to order completion of a 14-mile, three-tier fence along the San Diego-Tijuana border and similar border barriers along the country's boundaries with Mexico and Canada. The bill also ban licenses for illegal immigrants.
This was not enough for Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, he added last-minute amendment that would encourage bounty hunters to track down hundreds of thousands of immigrants whom courts have ordered deported.
The bounty hunter provision was a last-minute addition by Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas. He said only 13 percent of the 400,000 people ordered deported by immigration judges had actually been sent back to their countries of origin, including those from countries linked to terrorism such as Iran and Sudan. Bounty hunting -- legal in most states including California -- is an additional way to enforce those court orders, he added.
Federal law already makes it legal for bounty hunters to capture those ordered deported, but Session's amendment would encourage the practice by establishing 10 centers around the country where bounty hunters could turn in deportees to immigration authorities.
"We need to make sure that those ordered deported are deported,'' Sessions told the House, which passed the amendment without a roll-call vote. "We need to use the tools we have to enforce the laws of the United States.''
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas compares the amendment Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
"The truly frightening aspect of this is it smacks of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,'' said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.
"You can be assured that in a discriminatory fashion you'll be rounding up people who look or speak differently,'' she added.
The slave law, part of the Compromise of 1850, said that blacks suspected of being runaway slaves could be arrested anywhere in the country, even in states that had abolished slavery.
Ari Berman at The Nation give us a brief history about Rep. Pete Sessions.
Bounty Hunted
The bounty hunter provision also exhibits Pete Sessions' hard-right world-view and proclivity for making questionable comments in unquestionably bad taste. In a debate last year with Rep. Martin Frost, Sessions called September 11 a "home game" and Iraq the "away game." In another debate, when asked to comment on the gap between rich and poor, Sessions replied, "This is the only country in the world where the poor have color televisions." Local residents took special umbrage last April when Sessions named a post office in an African-American section of Dallas after the white wife of a political donor who didn't even live in the area. The crass insensitivity may have been due to the loss of Sessions' communication director, who was convicted for defrauding a fellow Representative last May.
To this day, Sessions still doesn't reside in his new Congressional district. Maybe a bounty hunter should come and move him.