With the border wall separating them, to the left lies San Diego, Calif., and on the right Tijuana, Mexico.
Nobody denies that Domar Shearer, a 23-year-old man from Jamaica, is in the United States illegally, having overstayed a visa three years ago. Nobody denies that he was recently arrested in a domestic disturbance with his wife in Ansonia. Nor does anyone deny that he has been working illegally at a restaurant in Bridgeport.
But Shearer is the latest cause celebre of Connecticut's immigration law nullification movement, enjoying support not just from a New Haven-based organization of immigration law obstructors, Unidad Latina en Accion, but also the state Judicial Department, the state public defender's office, a U.S. senator, and newspapers.
Shearer became a cause the other day when federal immigration agents went looking for him at the courthouse in Derby as he arrived to resolve his criminal charges. The public defender's office let him hide there for hours until court closed and the agents left. Then the nullifiers escorted him to a "safe house" in New Haven, home to thousands of other illegal immigrants, many holding identification cards issued by the city to facilitate their lawbreaking.
The nullifiers portray as an injustice the pursuit of illegal immigrants at courthouses. They say it discourages illegals from seeking justice. But then the people being pursued aren't entitled to be in the country in the first place and the immigration agents would not pursue them at courthouses if those weren't good places to find them.
Of course the nullifiers' idea of justice has no room for federal immigration law. Their premise, which has been largely incorporated into Connecticut law, is that anyone who is in the country illegally and makes it to Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law enforcement unless he is a terrorist.
That is, the objective of the nullifiers is open borders, the end of the United States.
Thanks to the Shearer case, at least this objective must be admitted now. One of the newspapers celebrating Shearer's escape to the underground, the New Haven Independent, even published a photo of him with his rescuers holding revealing signs. One reads, "Erase all borders." Shearer himself holds a sign bearing, in Spanish, an obscenity about immigration agents.
Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who issued a statement supporting Shearer against the agents, should contemplate those signs. Legalizing people who long have lived in the country illegally but productively and without committing offenses is a worthy objective of immigration law reform along with securing the borders. Both liberal and conservative presidents, including Ronald Reagan, have supported it. So is legalizing people who were brought into the country illegally as children and know no other home. But in assisting people who want to erase the country's borders and degrade immigration agents, the senator has forgotten his oath of office.
xxx
ABORTION COMES FIRST: The Connecticut Catholic Conference's annual report on abortion in the state, published this month, shows that Connecticut continues to nullify the law in another way.
That is, the report says Connecticut abortion clinics are attracting minors from states that require parental notification for abortions -- this state has no such law -- and that abortion clinics here increasingly violate state law's requirement to report the ages of abortion recipients.
That is, the report is a reminder that Connecticut law considers abortion more compelling than protecting children against rape.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
