By Chris Powell
What will become of Joel Alexander Caiza-Nishue? What should become of him? Who will be responsible for what becomes of him? And who, besides himself, is responsible for what he is charged with doing?
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Caiza-Nishue is the 18-year-old accused of reckless driving, traveling too fast for conditions, and operating without a license after crashing into and injuring two state troopers on Interstate 91 in Enfield last week. Federal immigration authorities say he is an illegal immigrant from Ecuador who entered the country in 2023. He is reported to be a high school student in Waterbury.
The feds have told state authorities they want Caiza-Nishue detained so they can take custody of him and, presumably, deport him. State authorities seem unlikely to cooperate. So presumably the feds will be waiting for Caiza-Nishue if he ever appears in person in state court.
Will court authorities object then? Will the advocates and apologists for illegal immigration, of whom Connecticut has many, protest at the courthouse? Will some even try to obstruct Caiza-Nishue’s apprehension?
Will the protesters include Governor Lamont, Attorney General William Tong, state legislators, and other officials who support illegal immigration and want to make sure that state government refuses to cooperate with immigration law enforcement in regard to any misconduct short of murder?
Or will the Caiza-Nishue case prompt some reconsideration of Connecticut’s official extremism on the immigration issue? That extremism maintains that nearly everyone who enters the country illegally and makes his way to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law.
At Caiza-Nishue’s first appearance in court, made by video from a state jail, his public defender argued that his case is just another car accident. It is hard to imagine that, whatever his recklessness, Caiza-Nishue meant any harm.
But it’s also hard to imagine that the troopers he is charged with injuring don’t resent that he may never have gotten a proper review by immigration authorities and that he entered and remained in the country illegally. Similar resentment is felt by the thousands of victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants, no matter that, on average, illegal immigrants may be no more criminally inclined than the native-born.
For citizenship inevitably exempts the native-born from such vetting while the federal government owes the country a proper review of everyone admitted from outside — an obligation that was deliberately forfeited by the previous national administration on a massive scale in a scheme to devalue citizenship and change the country’s political demographics.
Advocates and apologists for illegal immigration fairly complain that immigration law enforcement is full of violations of due process of law.
This month a U.S. citizen who is an Army veteran was arrested by immigration agents as he arrived for his job at a marijuana farm in California during the chaos of a raid in which dozens of illegal immigrants were being arrested. His car windows were smashed, he was hauled out at gunpoint, and he was jailed for three days before his citizenship was established and he was released. It was outrageous.
Yet this environment was created by the advocates and apologists for illegal immigration. They didn’t object to the previous administration’s failure with the due process of law — the failure to enforce immigration law at all. To the contrary, as in Connecticut, they incentivized and facilitated illegal immigration, providing illegal immigrants with identification documents, driver’s licenses, medical insurance, food, and housing, and promising to obstruct immigration authorities with Connecticut’s so-called Trust Act.
In doing all this, the advocates and apologists for illegal immigration have assumed dangerously that the intentions of all illegal immigrants are good.
The advocates and apologists for illegal immigration say the country’s immigration system is broken. Indeed, and they were the ones who broke it, deliberately. Now, with an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in the country, painstaking due process is impossible with any effective immigration law enforcement.
Regaining control of the border will require years of deportations to undo and deter more of what the advocates and apologists engineered.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 
Ignoring federal immigration laws is a serious dereliction of duty and a violation of the oath of the office the governor and and the attorney general took. The oath is an elected or appointed official’s promise to faithfully discharge the duties of the position and uphold the law. Broken promises from politicians is nothing new, but breaking a promise that also breaks the law has become the norm when it comes to immigration enforcement and the delivery of public benefits to non-citizens.
The failure and outright refusal to obey the law are transgressions that affect every American citizen because they promote a continuum of lawlessness and disrespect for law enforcement and the judicial process. If protest groups want to foray into the world of interfering with ICE apprehensions, that’s their business, but our government officials have no right to impede enforcement action and, in fact, they have the obligation under federal law to assist regardless of what the Connecticut Trust Act purports to say. A law not enforced is not a law at all.
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