Patterico has a heartbreaking account of 3-year-old Marten Kudlis, a 3-year-old in Aurora, CO who was killed on September 4 by Francis Hernandez, a drunk-driving illegal alien with a long record of criminal offenses, mostly vehicular. Only three days earlier, Erika and German Clouet, two young newlyweds in Dallas, were killed by another drunk driver with a long string of DWIs, Uriel Perez Palacios. True to form, the Ass. Press doesn’t even mention Mr. Palacios’s citizenship or immigration status. The Dallas Morning News does, but only to discount it without any serious investigation:

Sgt. [Paul] Lehmann said it’s unlikely that Mr. Palacios is an illegal immigrant because no deportation holds have ever been attached to his criminal offenses.

Well, that settles it, then. No deportation hold, no illegal alien. After all, it’s not as though Dallas were a sanctuary city or anything, so if no deportation holds were ever attached to Mr. Palacios’s multiple crimes, he couldn’t possibly be an illegal alien. In fact, seeing as several of his priors are deportable offenses even for legals, the absence of such holds must be proof he isn’t an alien at all!

For all I know, maybe Palacios is a U.S. citizen. But if he’s not, he sure as hell should have been deported a long time ago, even if (and that’s a big if) he originally entered the country legally. And he certainly should have been rotting in prison long before these innocent lives, like Marten’s, were senselessly snuffed out. The only question is which side of the border both of these bastards should have been rotting in jail on before finally turning them loose in whatever country they hailed from (

In this past week’s debate, Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory made clear that he would make illegal immigration a major priority if elected, and would petition the federal government to establish a detention center here in NC (right now the nearest one is in Atlanta). He also promised to do all he could to ensure that criminal illegal aliens (yes, I know, they’re all criminals, but many are criminals on other levels as well) be deported first. By contrast, Bev Perdue couldn’t even bring herself to use the word “illegal” to describe illegal immigrants, strongly implied she favored a policy of giving them driver licenses, and prattled on about the need not to be “divisive.” The choice could scarcely be clearer.