On July 6, 55-year-old Charles Anderson spent his last day in Marion County Jail. He was arrested 28 days prior for unpaid debts regarding his failure to make monthly payments and fees associated with three court cases dating back to 2003. Upon his arrest, he was jailed with three other men in a 6-by-10-foot cell.
After a long period of unemployment, Anderson found a job working as a carpenter two weeks prior to his arrest. He had intended to resume payments toward the court-ordered debts that have haunted him from a 2003 conviction on methamphetamine trafficking.
On June 9, in the town of Winfield, a police officer pulled Anderson over for running a stop sign on his way to help his new boss fix a flat tire. The officer then issued him a ticket for driving without a seat belt and a warning for failing to adhere to the stop sign. However, he was arrested and taken to jail in Hamilton, which was built in 1979 and meant to house 86 men and women, but it is often overcapacity at more than 120 people. According to Anderson, he was fed nothing but white bread, bologna and peanut butter for the 28 days he was incarcerated.
A handcuffed person in a prison cell (Pxfuel.com) According to the arrest report, Anderson was arrested on three counts of “failure to pay.” Like so many others before him, he was ultimately charged with failing to appear at a payment review hearing, which in his case was held in November 2018.
Anderson was only able to be free of Marion County’s debtors’ prison because Linda Jacobs, his indigent 72-year-old mother, cashed her monthly $1,400 Social Security check on July 3, arriving at the circuit clerk’s office in the county seat of Hamilton on July 6 and paid $1,000 toward his court-ordered debts totaling more than $2,500. As a result of his arrest, his vehicle was towed, and his mother had to pay more than $200 to retrieve it.
Jacobs, in an attempt to raise the necessary funds, placed the family’s tractor, Bush Hog mower and a small boat up for sale. She even offered to sell her three Yorkshire terriers, but Anderson rejected that.
In an interview with AL.com on July 2, Jacobs noted, “I offered to pay $300, and they called and told the judge, and the judge said he had to pay $1,000 to get out. They take away your freedom, they lock you up, and you pay or they keep you locked up. It’s not right.”
Marion County in northwest Alabama, according to a 2019 United States Census Bureau report, has a population of 29,709, of which 94 percent are white, 3.9 percent black, 2.7 percent Hispanic or Latino, 0.4 percent American Indian and 0.3 percent Asian. The median household income is $35,930, and it has an unemployment rate of 3.1 percent (up from 2.2 percent in May), according to a 2021 Alabama Department of Labor report.
As a result of the coronavirus pandemic and declining hourly wages, several people remain incarcerated in Marion County Jail because they dared to commit the crime of being poor and have neither family nor friends with the financial resources to purchase their freedom. Prior to the pandemic, Alabama was rated among the poorest states in the country; in the city of Birmingham, the poverty rate is over 28 percent.
One man arrested in Winfield, Alabama, has been jailed since March on three counts of failure to pay court-ordered debts. According to a court document, he would be released from custody immediately upon payment of $2,819.70. Another man met a similar fate, being held in custody since he was arrested in April for failure to pay “court costs, fines and restitution of: $4,182.56.”
The incarceration of people over unpaid debts, particularly when these “debtors” do not have the wherewithal to pay, violates federal laws and constitutional protections against the operation of debtors’ prisons. From the colonial era to the 1830s, the United States regularly jailed people for failure to pay their debts.
Imprisonment for indebtedness was so commonplace that two signatories of the Declaration of Independence, James Wilson, later an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and Robert Morris, a personal friend of President George Washington, were sentenced for failure to pay loans.
However, debtors’ imprisonment could turn into a life sentence for those without positions which grant certain privileges. In myriad jurisdictions, debtors were not to be freed from bondage until funds were acquired in full, or they had worked off the debt through years of penal labor. As a result of economic turmoil which ravaged Southern and Northern states and colonies alike, many languished in prison, dying even more impoverished than they were prior to their arrest.
After the War of 1812, so many Americans were indebted that prisons held five times as many people on charges of debt than actual crimes. Between 1821 and 1849, 12 states outlawed debtors’ prisons. With the advent of bankruptcy law, citizens were granted a means of escaping insuperable debt, while creditors were made to share some of the risk associated in lending funds. Bankruptcy laws were revised in 1841, 1867 and 1898, eventually requiring payment of as much debt as the debtor could afford while absolving the balance.
Over the course of the 20th century, the US Supreme Court affirmed that it was a violation of constitutional rights to incarcerate those too financially straitened to repay their debts. In 1970, in Williams v. Illinois , the high court decided maximum prison terms could not be extended on account of the defendant failing to pay court costs or fines. In 1971, in Tate v. Short , it was ruled that defendants who are too destitute to pay their fines may not be jailed. Most significantly, the 1983 decision in Bearden v. Georgia compelled judges to distinguish between debtors who are “too poor to pay” and those who have the financial ability but “willfully” refuse to do so.
Federal imprisonment for debt was abolished in 1833, although some, particularly Southern states were allowed to continue imprisoning debtors, even leasing prisoners, who could not buy their freedom, out to plantation owners, effectively continuing slavery after the Civil War.
In places like Marion County, the justice system has a consistent stream of low-income people in and out of jail for failing to pay their debts. “In my opinion, [it is a] debtors’ prison because I owe money and you’re [going to] lock me up for it,” Charles Anderson told the media. Reflecting the impact of the social crisis on the thinking of workers, Anderson continued, “How is this the United States, where we’re supposed to have more freedoms than anywhere else in the world, and we’re incarcerating people for not having money?”
Marion County Sheriff Kevin Williams, in an interview with AL.com on July 7, said he does not draft the laws but is tasked with enforcing them, including issuing arrests for unpaid debts in accordance with judges’ orders. “If you’re sitting here and you can’t pay your fines, but you’re court-ordered to pay them, how do you fix that? How do you make them pay other than to throw them behind bars?”
According to court records, debtors have remained jailed for weeks or months in the Marion County Jail due to indigence. Marion County has incorporated a practice which relies on failure-to-appear charges, issuing arrest warrants to people with unpaid debts before demanding payment for their release. Moreover, court records also reveal many people never receive a letter informing them of their payment review hearings.
Hamilton resident Daniel Ables, another victim of this vendetta against the working class, sat in Marion County Jail for more than four months without an appearance before a judge to have his case heard.
On February 22, a Marion County deputy arrested the 41-year-old Hamilton resident on an outstanding warrant for failing to appear at a March 2020 hearing regarding a plan to pay down his court-ordered debts pertaining to a 2009 drug case. Typical in Marion County, Ables’ arrest warrant had two boxes checked. The first of which stated, “[y]ou may release the accused person without taking the accused person before a judge or magistrate,” and the second, “[i]f the person posts a cash bond in the amount of $1915.60 with the court clerk.” However, the “bond” equaled the exact total of all the defendant’s fines, fees and restitution owed at the time.
When interviewed by AL.com during a jailhouse phone call, Ables said if he were wealthy, this would not have happened. “It’s extortion. That’s pretty much what it is, is it not? They’re [going to] lock me up and hold me here for a year or some crap just because I can’t pay? What would you call it?”
Ables’ family members tried for months to raise the amount of money the county was demanding for his release but found themselves too short. Shortly after his arrest, Ables’ girlfriend offered to pay $700 toward his court-ordered debts but was informed if the amount was not the full $2,000, he would remain jailed.
District Attorney Scott Slatton confirmed via email that Ables was cleared to be released after he had requested “judicial review as to why Inmate Ables had been in jail for 5 months.”
A Zoom hearing was held on the morning of July 8 to review Ables’ case. His required monthly court-ordered debt payment was reduced from more than $100 to $60, or $20 for each of the three cases on which he still owes fines, fees and restitution. According to three court filings, Ables is not required to begin making the payments until October.
After a review of the case, Slatton claimed going forward, his office “will seek judicial review of any inmate being held for [‘failure to appear’] for payments longer than the quarter in which they should have appeared on a docket.” After 137 days, Ables was released from Marion County Jail custody, paying nothing to secure his release following the hearing.
In response to a query on why some people remain in jail for longer than 90 days awaiting a court hearing, Williams directed all inquiries to the judges on their respective cases and the circuit clerk’s office.
When the inquiries were followed up, Marion County Circuit Judge Daryl Burt, who signed the orders stating that Anderson and Ables could be released if they paid off their court-ordered debts, did not respond to myriad requests for comment, including from Circuit Clerk Denise Mixon.
Cody Cutting, an attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights who litigates cases related to the criminalization of poverty in the southern United States, said there is no justification for the imprisonment of impoverished, like Anderson, and is unequivocally unacceptable. “If someone who is arrested can avoid incarceration by paying if they’re able to pay their entire court debt, but someone who is unable to pay that court debt through no fault of their own is forced to languish in jail for months, that violates the Constitution.”
The Southern Center for Human Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center have found that judges in Alabama consistently jail people for “failure to pay” without conducting inquiries or investigation into a debtor’s ability to make payments.
“It could not be clearer that it is unconstitutional to jail someone for failing to pay a fine if the ability to pay that fine is beyond that person’s control,” Cutting said. “In spite of how clear that constitutional command is, it’s completely apparent that jailing people for being poor is common practice in courts across the South.”
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.
DANIEL GREENFIELD
A DACA amnesty would put more citizen children of illegal aliens — known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported , while American taxpayers would be left potentially with a $26 billion bill.
Additionally, about one-in-five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one-in-seven would go on Medicaid. JOHN BINDER
THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!
This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.
Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.
He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.
He qualifies for food stamps.
He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.
His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.
He requires bilingual teachers and books.
He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.
If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.
Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.
He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.
Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.
He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.
Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.
The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/californias-privileged-class-mexican.html
Cheap labor? YEAH RIGHT! Wake up people!
JOE LEGAL v LA RAZA JOSE ILLEGAL
Here’s how it breaks down; will make you want to be an illegal!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/joe-american-legal-vs-la-raza-jose.html
THE TAX-FREE MEXICAN UNDERGROUND ECONOMY IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY IS ESTIMATED TO BE IN EXCESS OF $2 BILLION YEARLY!
Staggering expensive "cheap" Mexican labor did not build this once great nation! Look what it has done to Mexico. It's all about keeping wages depressed and passing along the true cost of the invasion, their welfare, and crime tidal wave costs to the backs of the American people!
AMERICA: YOU’RE BETTER OFF BEING AN ILLEGAL!!!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/06/in-america-it-is-better-to-be-illegal.html
This annual income for an impoverished American family is $10,000 less than the more than $34,500 in federal funds which are spent on each unaccompanied minor border crosser.
A study by Tom Wong of the University of California at San Diego discovered that more than 25 percent of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens in the program have anchor babies. That totals about 200,000 anchor babies who are the children of DACA-enrolled illegal aliens. This does not include the anchor babies of DACA-qualified illegal aliens. JOHN BINDER
“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”. DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE
As Breitbart News has reported , U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans. Simultaneously, illegal immigration next year is on track to soar to the highest level in a decade, with a potential 600,000 border crossers expected.
“More than 750 million people want to migrate to another country permanently, according to Gallup research published Monday, as 150 world leaders sign up to the controversial UN global compact which critics say makes migration a human right.” VIRGINIA HALE
For example, a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers about $26 billion , more than the border wall, and that does not include the money taxpayers would have to fork up to subsidize the legal immigrant relatives of DACA illegal aliens.
Exclusive–Steve Camarota: Every Illegal Alien Costs Americans $70K Over Their Lifetime
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/04/11/exclusive-steve-camarota-every-illegal-alien-costs-americans-70k-over-their-lifetime/
JOHN BINDER
Every illegal alien, over the course of their lifetime, costs American taxpayers about $70,000, Center for Immigration Studies Director of Research Steve Camarota says.
During an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily , Camarota said his research has revealed the enormous financial burden that illegal immigration has on America’s working and middle class taxpayers in terms of public services, depressed wages, and welfare.
“In a person’s lifetime, I’ve estimated that an illegal border crosser might cost taxpayers … maybe over $70,000 a year as a net cost,” Camarota said. “And that excludes the cost of their U.S.-born children, which gets pretty big when you add that in.”
LISTEN:
“Once [an illegal alien] has a child, they can receive cash welfare on behalf of their U.S.-born children,” Camarota explained. “Once they have a child, they can live in public housing. Once they have a child, they can receive food stamps on behalf of that child. That’s how that works.”
Camarota said the education levels of illegal aliens, border crossers, and legal immigrants are largely to blame for the high level of welfare usage by the f0reign-born population in the U.S., noting that new arrivals tend to compete for jobs against America’s poor and working class communities.
In past waves of mass immigration, Camarota said, the U.S. did not have an expansive welfare system. Today’s ever-growing welfare system, coupled with mass illegal and legal immigration levels, is “extremely problematic,” according to Camarota, for American taxpayers.
The RAISE Act — reintroduced in the Senate by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), and Josh Hawley (R-MO) — would cut legal immigration levels in half and convert the immigration system to favor well-educated foreign nationals, thus relieving American workers and taxpayers of the nearly five-decade-long wave of booming immigration. Currently, mass legal immigration redistributes the wealth of working and middle class Americans to the country’s top earners.
“Virtually none of that existed in 1900 during the last great wave of immigration, when we also took in a number of poor people. We didn’t have a well-developed welfare state,” Camarota continued:
We’re not going to stop [the welfare state] tomorrow. So in that context, bringing in less educated people who are poor is extremely problematic for public coffers, for taxpayers in a way that it wasn’t in 1900 because the roads weren’t even paved between the cities in 1900 . It’s just a totally different world. And that’s the point of the RAISE Act is to sort of bring in line immigration policy with the reality say of a large government … and a welfare state . [Emphasis added]
The immigrants are not all coming to get welfare and they don’t immediately sign up, but over time, an enormous fraction sign their children up . It’s likely the case that of the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, more than half are signed up for Medicaid — which is our most expensive program. [Emphasis added]
As Breitbart News has reported , U.S. households headed by foreign-born residents use nearly twice the welfare of households headed by native-born Americans.
Every year the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million foreign nationals, with the vast majority deriving from chain migration. In 2017, the foreign-born population reached a record high of 44.5 million. By 2023, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that the legal and illegal immigrant population of the U.S. will make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. population.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder .
Another line they cut into: Illegals get free public housing as impoverished Americans wait
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/another_line_they_cut_into_illegals_get_free_public_housing_as_impoverished_americans_wait.html
By Monica Showalter
Want some perspective on why so many blue sanctuary cities have so many homeless encampments hovering around?
Try the reality that illegal immigrants are routinely given free public housing by the U.S., based on the fact that they are uneducated, unskilled, and largely unemployable. Those are the criteria, and now importing poverty has never been easier. Shockingly, this comes as millions of poor Americans are out in the cold awaiting that housing that the original law was intended to help.
Thus, the tent cities, and by coincidence, the worst of these emerging shantytowns are in blue sanctuary cities loaded with illegal immigrants - Orange County, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, New York...Is there a connection? At a minimum, it's worth looking at.
The Trump administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development is finally trying to put a stop to it as 1.5 million illegals prepare to enter the U.S. this year, and one can only wonder why they didn't do it yesterday.
According to a report in the Washington Times :
The plan would scrap Clinton-era regulations that allowed illegal immigrants to sign up for assistance without having to disclose their status.
Under the new Trump rules, not only would the leaseholder using public housing have to be an eligible U.S. person, but the government would verify all applicants through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database, a federal system that’s used to weed illegal immigrants out of other welfare programs.
Those already getting HUD assistance would have to go through a new verification, though it would be over a period of time and wouldn’t all come at once.
“We’ve got our own people to house and need to take care of our citizens,” an administration official told The Washington Times. “Because of past loopholes in HUD guidance, illegal aliens were able to live in free public housing desperately needed by so many of our own citizens. As illegal aliens attempt to swarm our borders, we’re sending the message that you can’t live off of American welfare on the taxpayers’ dime.”
The Times notes that the rules are confusingly contradictary, and some illegal immigrant families are getting full rides based on just one member being born in the U.S. The pregnant caravaner who calculatingly slipped across the U.S. in San Diego late last year, only to have her baby the next day, now, along with her entire family, gets that free ride on government housing. Plus lots of cheesy news coverage about how heartwarming it all is. That's a lot cheaper than any housing she's going to find back in Tegucigalpa.
Migrants would be almost fools not to take the offering.
The problem of course is that Americans who paid into these programs, and the subset who find themselves in dire circumstances, are in fact being shut out.
The fill-the-pews Catholic archbishops may love to tout the virtues of illegal immigrants and wave signs about getting 'justice" for them, but the hard fact here is that these foreign nationals are stealing from others as they take this housing benefit under legal technicalities. That's not a good thing under anyone's theological law. But hypocrisy is comfortable ground for the entire open borders lobby as they shamelessly celebrate lawbreaking at the border, leaving the impoverished of the U.S. out cold.
The Trump administration is trying to have this outrage fixed by summer. But don't imagine it won't be without the open-borders lawsuits, the media sob stories, the leftist judges, and the scolding clerics.
Los Angeles County Pays Over a Billion in Welfare to Illegal Aliens Over Two Years BY MASOOMA HAQ
In 2015 and 2016, Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare funds to illegal aliens and their families. That figure amounts to 25 percent of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News .
The state of California is home to more illegal aliens than any other state in the country. Approximately one in five illegal aliens lives in California, Pew reported.
Approximately a quarter of California’s 4 million illegal immigrants reside in Los Angeles County. The county allows illegal immigrant parents with children born in the United States to seek welfare and food stamp benefits.
The welfare benefits data acquired by Fox News comes from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services and shows welfare and food stamp costs for the county’s entire population were $3.1 billion in 2015, $2.9 billion in 2016.
The data also shows that during the first five months of 2017, more than 60,000 families received a total of $181 million.
Over 58,000 families received a total of $602 million in benefits in 2015 and more than 64,000 families received a total of $675 million in 2016.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow who studies poverty and illegal immigration , told Fox the costs represent “the tip of the iceberg.”
“They get $3 in benefits for every $1 they spend,” Rector said. It can cost the government a total of $24,000 per year per family to pay for things like education, police, fire, medical, and subsidized housing.
In February of 2019, the Los Angeles city council signed a resolution making it a sanctuary city. The resolution did not provide any new legal protections to their immigrants, but instead solidified existing policies.
In October 2017, former California governor Jerry Brown signed SB 54 into law. This bill made California, in Brown’s own words, a “sanctuary state.” The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the State of California over the law. A federal judge dismissed that suit in July. SB 54 took effect on Jan. 1, 2018.
According to Center for Immigration Studies , “The new law does many things: It forbids all localities from cooperating with ICE detainer notices, it bars any law enforcement officer from participating in the popular 287(g) program , and it prevents state and local police from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status.”
Some counties in California have protested its implementation and joined the Trump administration’s lawsuit against the state.
California’s campaign to provide public services to illegal immigrants did not end with the exit of Jerry Brown. His successor, Gavin Newsom, is just as focused as Brown in funding programs for illegal residents at the expense of California taxpayers.
California’s budget earmarks millions of dollars annually to the One California program, which provides free legal assistance to all aliens, including those facing deportation, and makes California’s public universities easier for illegal-alien students to attend.
According to the Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers 2017 report , for the estimated 12.5 million illegal immigrants living in the country, the resulting cost is a $116 billion burden on the national economy and taxpayers each year, after deducting the $19 billion in taxes paid by some of those illegal immigrants.
BLOG: MOST FIGURES PUT THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS IN THE U.S. AT ABOUT 40 MILLION. WHEN THESE PEOPLE ARE HANDED AMNESTY, THEY ARE LEGALLY ENTITLED TO BRING UP THE REST OF THEIR FAMILY EFFECTIVELY LEAVING MEXICO DESERTED.
New data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.
c OVID-19 surge explodes Biden’s claim of “independence” from pandemic
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