Steven Latimer

Thanks are due to George W. Bush for commuting the sentences of former US Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean. The president's commutation occured earlier today.

While the commutation is welcome, and long overdue, it should not overshadow President Bush's well-meant, yet misguided immigration policy. Bush did the just, compassionate thing today, but why the wait?

Said former Congressman Duncan Hunter at the 15 May 2007 Republican Party presidential debate in Columbia, South Carolina (seems so long ago):

I wrote the bill that the president signed in October that takes the San Diego fence 854 miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and it's mandatory. I called up the other day, and they've done two miles of border fence.

This administration has a case of the slows on border enforcement. If we have border enforcement, we will be able at that point to start to regulate the internal problem that we've got. Because as long as you've got a revolving door and you have no border -- and this 2,000-mile porous border, incidentally, is our biggest homeland security problem; it's not just an immigration problem, it's a homeland security problem -- we need to build the border fence. We need to have a Border Patrol which is big enough to get the job done, and we need to be able to ask people when they want to come into America, knock on the front door, because the back door is going to be closed.

Hunter's words ring true today.