Every day there are thousands of crimes committed in America, and there are many suggestions for preventing them, but in the case of crimes committed by people who are here illegally, every single one of them could have been prevented if that person had been blocked from coming or been returned to his native land when he did arrive here.
Sure, the native-born population includes plenty of creeps, criminals, thugs, and bad guys, and they commit many crimes - and the same solution applies to them, except that instead of being deported as illegal aliens, they could have been incarcerated as career criminals. Multiple felonies are committed by folks who have a record "as long as their arm," and if they had been serving time for their crime instead of being free on bail, on their own recognizance, awaiting trial, or after serving a minimal sentence, the thousands of violent crimes this group of people commits would never have happened, either.
The prison system has value as a place of punishment, and it is used as a means of rehabilitation. Imprisoning people is one way to receive justice, and there are other reasons people are locked up. But we think the most important reason to lock people up is to protect the rest of us. If we can keep the career thief, pickpocket, drug pusher, carjacker, or hooligan in jail, we are making it very hard to prey on innocent people. Similarly, if we send the illegals home, they will not be able to commit crimes here.
The statistics are staggering. Criminal aliens comprise 27% of the population in federal prisons. According to a Government Accountabilty Report, 55,322 people who were illegal at the time of their incarceration in 2003 had been arrested 459,614 times and had committed nearly 700,000 criminal offenses.
27% of the illegal aliens incarcerated in New York State are in jail on charges of murder. The mayor of Philadelphia did a happy dance, literally dancing a jig when a court ruled that the US government could not withhold federal funds from cities that adopt a sanctuary city policy. A few weeks later the news broke that one of those men protected by the sanctuary policy had raped a child. The city of Philadelphia had refused to detain the man for ICE, released the man, leaving him free to commit his crimes. Philadelphia will not let ICE access the city's criminal database. San Francisco has similar sanctuary policies and like Philadelphia and many other major cities, would rather let criminals run free than they would cooperate with ICE.
No, we can't prevent all crimes; and yes, plenty of crimes are committed by legal citizens or legal immigrants. But those people have the legal right to be in America. The illegals do not, and every single crime they commit, be it petit larceny or homicide, simply would not have taken place had they been deported and kept from returning. It seems as if that is a pretty simple way to prevent a huge number of crimes from ever taking place.