Illegal – Bradley Farless

Guatemalan Woman Attempts to Secure US Anchor Baby for Immigration

February 2, 2012 Bradley Farless14 Comments

I just saw a report on ABC about a woman who claims that the US government stole her child. She entered the country illegally, which is a felony and an insult to the national sovereignty of this country, and when she was caught, she was deemed to be an unfit mother for smuggling her child across international boundaries. In his 2008 decision, terminating Encarnacion’s parental rights, Circuit Court Judge David C. Dally wrote that the biological mother’s “lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into a country illegally and committing crimes in this country is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child…A child cannot be educated in this way, always in hiding or on the run.”

Her son was taken away from her and has been adopted out to a family that has had him for 5 years. Now this illegal immigrant, Encarnacion Bail Romero, is trying to get her son back. She’s trying to play the ‘broken family’ card to get sympathy from the American public. She’s trying to get us to overlook the fact that she’s a convicted felon who disregarded the sovereignty of our nation by ignoring our legal immigration procedures. She wants to use our own court system against us.

This excerpt from the article sums up my opinion fairly well:

“When parents break the law, they undertake a certain amount of risk that there are going to be consequences,” said Daniel Stein of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“Anyone can feel for the torment that this poor woman is going through, recognizing that she doesn’t have the educational and the language capabilities to fully defend and vindicate her rights,” said Stein.

“Nevertheless, she knew she came to this country illegally, she knew she broke the law,” he told ABC News.

This illegal immigrant will get no sympathy from me. If she didn’t want her family to be broken, she shouldn’t have broken federal laws. We have borders for a reason. We have immigration procedures for a reason. It’s too late. The ship has already sailed. If this kid (formerly called Carlos and now named Jamison) has been adopted out and with a new family for 5 years, she should let the boy enjoy his life, because she would be a stranger to him. What she wants to do would totally destroy this kid’s life, because he would be emotionally scarred forever. I can’t imagine why she would imagine that fighting for custody of the kid would be in his best interest, since he doesn’t even know her and doesn’t speak Spanish (the biological mother speaks no English), unless of course she’s looking for an anchor that she can use to stay in the United States herself.

Original Story on ABC: “Adoption Battle Over 5-Year Old Boy Pits Missouri Couple Vs. Illegal Immigrant“

US Government’s Illegal Torture Policies in the Middle East

December 11, 2011 Bradley Farless4 Comments

A friend of mine came across this documentary and passed along the link. I’m studying Middle Eastern history as my major, so he thought it would be relevant to my interests. It’s 79 minutes and the audio gets steadily further and further out of sync with the video, but hey, it’s free, and it’s worth the information you’ll glean from it.

What I saw in this video is nothing more than what I expected. I have little faith in the US government anymore. I mean, seriously. They can’t fix our economy. They can’t stop giving tax breaks to huge corporations. They can’t take care of Americans. They can’t do anything but blow up other countries to hide their own deficiencies. It also bothers me how caught up most people are in glorifying war and the military in this country. I think Americans are losing sight of what this country is supposed to be about. War isn’t a destination. War was a means of achieving a free society where people have inviolable rights. All people. Not just the ones we like. War is not glorious, and just because someone is from another country, they don’t lose their human rights. They’re still human beings. Why would we take someone for whom we have no evidence of wrongdoing and then treat them worse than we treat serial murderers, rapists and child molesters in the US?

I can understand the situation that was created in these prisons and it’s completely absurd to blame the front-line soldiers. In the military, there’s a whole other culture, distinct from regular American culture, and there’s a separate legal system and even a different way of thinking about things. For the most part, you do what you’re told, even when things start to spiral into the absurd, because that’s what you get trained to do: follow orders. When soldiers question orders, they’re reprimanded, disciplined and sometimes humiliated in front of their peers. They can lose pay, rank or status. So, there’s a lot of pressure to just follow orders, and I’m sure first-hand experience with public humiliation makes it easier to take the first step towards severe humiliation of prisoners whom your told have no rights and are something less than human.

So, things just get done because that’s what was ordered, and because everyone else is doing it. What I’m describing is just based on what I remember from my experiences in non-combat units. I can’t imagine the added pressures involved in dealing with people that you’re told are enemy combatants. This whole situation seems like something Stephen King would have cooked up for a horror novel, rather than reality. In the end, though, the unit commander should be ultimately responsible for the actions of the unit, both good and bad. A common saying in the Army is that “shit rolls downhill,” meaning from the top of the chain-of-command to the bottom, but it should also roll back up when something goes wrong like this.

Instead of trying to find ways to justify unwarranted violence and illegal torture, our politicians should be finding ways to stop blowing up other countries, defend our own, and fix our financial issues.

A Sad Anchor Baby Story in the Philippines

September 3, 2010 Bradley Farless4 Comments

If you’re not familiar with the anchor baby problem, there’s a part of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution that basically makes it so that any child born on US soil is granted US citizenship. This was put in place to help ensure that the children of former African slaves would be guaranteed US citizenship. Unfortunately, it is now being abused by illegal immigrants who enter the US and ‘drop’ an anchor baby, which can later grow up and bring in the rest of the family legally through regular visa application processes. The problem is mostly with Mexicans, since it’s so easy for them to hop across the mostly unguarded southern border of the US. There are other opportunities and places where foreigners attempt to use babies as an anchor to get into the US though, and I’m going to tell you a story about one such event. This is a story that my wife related to me. I won’t mention any names for the sake of privacy.

An American man was living a happy, regular life in the US with a well paying job, a wife and two kids. Due to the economic downturn he was laid off. Unable to find another job that would maintain the lifestyle he and his family were accustomed to, his wife threw him out of the house and divorced him. Sucks right? So much for “richer or poorer”.

I’m not too clear on the details of how he wound up in the Philippines, but he did, and he got married to a Filipina and had a child with her. She seemed eager to be a good wife, but something just didn’t seem right about her, so he applied for a permanent residency visa in the Philippines and after receiving it told her he wanted to stay indefinitely. He was testing her, and she failed in epic fashion. In an honest relationship, it shouldn’t matter if he wanted to stay here or go back to the US. She should have been satisfied with just being together. That’s what it’s all about right? Instead, she flew into a rage and threw him out into the streets.

Three years further on, this American man is still in the Philippines, working to save up money to allow him to move back to the US at some point and trying to find a way to get custody of his child. He’s still technically married, but has filed for an annulment. Since the wife threw him out of the house, she’s required to pay for it, but she’s stalling. She doesn’t want to go through with it because she wants to use the anchor baby method to try getting into the US.

Luckily, the guy still has some protection from letting this woman carry through with her evil agenda. By birth, the child is American, but only if the father signs off on the paperwork to process it. He won’t do it until she processes the annulment. She won’t process the annulment because it will stop her from using the baby to anchor herself in the US. So, that’s where the problem is. Neither one wants to budge and there’s really no reason why the father should.

Hopefully, at some point the guy will find a way to get the kid back from her and get back into the US with him, leaving the conniving bitch to rot in the Philippines. I’m glad I don’t have this issue.

Counterfeit Goods in Singapore

June 18, 2009 Bradley Farless2 Comments

Prior to just a few weeks ago, I had no idea there was a counterfeit goods market in Singapore at all. During my trip to Kuala Lumpur I saw plenty of counterfeit goods that looked great. When I used to think of counterfeit, or “bootleg” items, I always thought of cheap quality, or of something that didn’t look quite right. The things we saw in Kuala Lumpur were near matches though. You wouldn’t be able to tell they were fake at all. The same could be said of most of the counterfeit items I saw in the Philippines.

Shortly after returning from Kuala Lumpur I stumbled across an article on a blog that was talking about how large the counterfeit goods market is in Singapore. I can’t remember the link for it anymore, though I did find another site called “Havocscope: Global Illicit Markets Indexes” that had the value of the counterfeit market in Singapore pegged at $136.2 million dollars. Who knew?

According to the article I’d originally read, the Singapore government does its best to keep counterfeit items out of stores that are in the downtown, touristy areas. It stated that most counterfeit items are found in the outlying areas.

Now, I’m not entirely sure that what this guy is selling is counterfeit, but the slim, plastic packaging wrapping those DVDs looks very familiar. I’ve seen a lot of counterfeit DVD stalls in Kuala Lumpur and especially in the Philippines. I wasn’t really surprised that he had them, or that he was selling them. What shocked me was that this guy was selling them by the Citibank at Tampines MRT station, along a crowded area where people transferring from the bus to the train pass through. That seems a little dangerous for him.

What do you think?