[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/07/trial.jpg)Barack Obama has stepped up deportations but the federal government is doing a poor job on illegal immigration, which some states do their best to facilitate. As a recent case shows, California journalists and judges prefer to look the other way, even when illegal immigration has deadly consequences.

The millions of illegals in the United States include Saul Isidro-Aucencio and Francisco Delgado, both Mexican nationals and gang members in Rancho Cordova, near the state capital of Sacramento. In February 2011 Saul Isidro-Aucencio had been beaten by three members of a rival gang and went out looking for revenge with Delgado. The pair could not find the assailants but then they saw Jamir Miller, 15, Richard Ward, 16, and Robert Corpos, 20, riding their bicycles.

Francisco Delgado drove the car as Isidro-Aucencio shot the victims, from behind, with an AK-47, a military weapon that shoots a 7.62 round. Isidro-Aucencio shot Jamir Miller in the head and Richard Ward in the torso before chasing down Corpos, father of an 18-month-old boy, and shooting him in the back as he sought cover behind a tree. According to police testimony, Corpos was a gang member and the two teenagers were associated with a gang. None of the murder victims was able to testify otherwise.

Police knew the killers’ illegal status as soon as the suspects had been booked and their prints run through AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System). The Sheriff’s department also notes that ICE (immigration and Customs Enforcement) work in the jail almost around the clock, interviewing arrestees and determining residency status.

Police do not notify journalists about the residency status of those they arrest. Journalists have to ask and in this case it seems they practiced a version of “don’t ask don’t tell.” For the year and a half before June 22, not a single news story revealed that Isidro-Aucencio and Delgado were in the country illegally. No journalist disclosed the pair’s actual nationality or inquired how they got here in the first place. Did they enter illegally themselves or did their parents bring them to the United States as children?

It also failed to emerge how two illegal aliens got a car, drivers’ licenses, an apartment, and how they procured an AK-47, of Russian provenance and a favorite weapon of terrorists. Had the pair committed other crimes? Had they ever been deported? Had they ever attempted to vote in an American election? Nobody in the local media seemed at all curious.

Sacramento Bee stories on the case even fail to describe Isidro-Aucencio and Delgado as “Latinos,” a simple matter of identification. The politically correct use of Latino is to describe Hispanic people who think and vote alike, need more government services, have serious problems with American immigration policy, and do mostly good things. It is not politically correct to use “Latino” for those do bad things, such as joining gangs and murdering innocent civilians. In this case journalists willingly slapped a gag order on themselves. No so Melissa Jellison, Jamir Miller’s mother.

In the June 22 sentencing she expressed anger that her son’s killers were in the country illegally. Such anger is entirely understandable for a grieving mother, but she got no sympathy from Superior Court judge Helene Gweon, a Schwarzenegger appointee who earned her JD at Harvard Law School and her BA at UC Berkeley.

“This case,” said Gweon, “has nothing to do with illegal aliens but it does have something to do with gangs.” Since both perpetrators of the triple murder are illegal aliens, that smackdown required the kind of cognitive dissonance not normally found in a judge.

The two illegals had already been convicted on three counts of first-degree murder on May 31. In California, judges can impose the death penalty for first-degree murder. In February a Yolo County judge imposed the death penalty on Marco Antonio Topete for murdering Deputy Jose Antonio Diaz with an assault rife. But in this case, three counts of first-degree murder were not enough.

Judge Gweon sentenced Delgado to three life terms without parole. Shooter Isidro-Aucencio also got three terms, plus two other lengthy terms. Both will fit well in prison culture and their multiple homicide will boost their status. The sentence sends the message to terrorists and criminals alike that they can enter the USA illegally, kill innocent people, and essentially get away with it.

President Obama favors a “Dream Act” for children of illegals. That takes priority over policies to protect children of American parents from violent criminals the federal government failed to keep out of the country.

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