JASON LEWIS: Illegal Immigration Kills More People

The national media silence over an illegal alien with a California commercial driver’s license (CDL) accused of killing three people while making an unlawful U-turn on Florida’s Turnpike is instructive on several fronts.

None of them good.

First, it continues the trend of open-border journalists—from the Wall Street Journal to CNN—to place global commerce and identity politics above the lives of Americans. Newsrooms have buried the story because they know how fundamentally disgraceful their editorial decisions really are.

Whether promoting ‘sanctuary cities’ while criticizing attempts at restoring law and order or downplaying the deaths on our highways due to illegal immigrant drivers—these folks, along with the politicians they back, are the real culprits.

Second, the very notion of granting any driver’s license, let alone one for a semi, to someone who cannot read road signs in English is so demonstrably lunatic on its face that no sane person could possibly support it. And yet, California is one of 19 states that issues licenses regardless of immigration status and the ability to understand America’s traffic laws.

In fact, the alleged perpetrator in the Florida crash answered just two of twelve questions correctly when tested for English language proficiency and could only identify one out of four highway signs shown to him, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). (RELATED: Feds Arrest Brother Of Illegal Migrant Truck Driver Accused Of Killing Three In Accident)

How Harjinder Singh was able to obtain a CDL in California where applications are supposedly administered in English is no more a mystery than welfare time limits—blue state outlaws ignore them.

In wacked-out Washington state, where Singh had another CDL, officials allow tests to be taken in English, Spanish, Russian, or Serbian-Croatian. All of which I’m sure you’ve seen on America’s road signs.

Worse, for a mere passenger car drivers license, it’s a free for all with almost every state administering exams in a multitude of foreign languages. Multiculturalism is killing people. And so are the people who enable it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. is pausing all issuance of visas for commercial truck drivers, something that probably should have been done the moment

President Trump signed an executive order requiring the enforcement of decades-old English-proficiency rules for commercial drivers.

Singh first entered the country illegally from India via Mexico (where else?) in 2018, but contrary to the usual lies from Gov. Gavin Newsom, “his work authorization was rejected under the Trump Administration on Sept. 14, 2020. It was later approved under the Biden Administration June 9, 2021.”

So you’ve got a situation where the state of California along with the Biden administration enabled an incompetent illegal alien to drive a semitrailer across the country. According to the Florida Highway Patrol, once Singh made the unlawful U-turn, a minivan in the adjacent lane crashed into the trailer, killing the three Americans.

To the grieving families who lost loved ones, now faced with trying to go on with their ruined lives, only justice matters. Why, then, are we not holding open-border politicians accountable for their abject failure to uphold the law in the precisely the same way a woke ‘defund the police’ mob demanded we hold cops responsible?

You might recall the Democrat-sponsored George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 limiting “qualified immunity as a defense to liability in a private civil action against a law enforcement officer.”

Well, if that’s the standard, what to make of politicians who openly flaunt the law by refusing their duty to uphold it? There is simply no getting around the fact that were it not for the complicity of a few Biden and Newsom officials, three Americans would still be alive today.

If zombie-voters don’t want to do anything about it, perhaps victims’ families will.

Notwithstanding the Eleventh Amendment proscribing lawsuits “against one of the United States by citizens of another state,” the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), passed in 1946, waives aspects of sovereign immunity and allows people to sue the federal government for things like car accidents caused by its employees.

It’s a shame federal taxpayers would have to cover for the dereliction of duty by the Biden administration, so waive its qualified immunity too and go after a few of ‘em personally.

If it’s good enough for Derek Chauvin…

As for California, precedent abounds when you consider the multitude of million dollar settlements going to BLM in the wake of lawsuits brought against government officials acting ‘under the color of law’ following the death of George Floyd.

Did Mr. Newsom and his California cronies not ignore clearly established law or act in a way no reasonable person would—the usual threshold for the deprivation of civil rights under 42 U.S. Code § 1983?

Thanks to Gov. DeSantis and Florida’s political leadership, Mr. Singh will now be charged with vehicular homicide and manslaughter. ICE wants him once his criminal case is complete. But the question remains: will we hold the politicians who have the blood of Floridians on their hands accountable?

Former Minnesota Congressman Jason Lewis writes at Substack and is the author of Party Animal, The Truth About President Trump, Power Politics & the Partisan Press.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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