Punish criminal deportees who illegally return to Canada

Toronto police have just charged Edmund Ezemo, 39, with 26 charge, including fraud, theft and illegal entry into Canada. The alleged fraud is believed to be worth at least $10 million. Police allege the man set up fake companies and paid for merchandise with what were later discovered to be counterfeit certified cheques. The electronic equipment was then allegedly put in rental cars and shipped overseas - to the tune of several million dollars. Police also recovered fake credit cards, driver's licences, passports, SIN cards, health cards and cheque books as well as personal information of about 1,000 potential victims of credit card fraud.

He has been deported eight times from Canada and returns under an alias.

A repeat criminal convicted of killing an Oceanside, California police officer during a 2003 shootout in a bank parking lot was sentenced to death on February 7, 2006. Adrian George Camacho, 28, was convicted of shooting the police officer 13 times during a traffic stop in the parking lot of the Navy Federal Credit Union at 4180 Avenida de la Plata on June 13, 2003. The jury that found him guilty in a two-month trial also recommended that Camacho, be executed.

Camacho, an alleged gang member had previously been deported twice for being in the United States illegally.

Mario Roberto Keen, 25, was killed by police on January 16, 2003 after he fatally wounded a female Norfolk police officer. He was killed by several police outside a sports bar after shooting Officer Sheila Herring, who was responding to a report of gunfire in a nearby bar. Keen had shot the 39-year-old police officer as she approached him in the parking lot shortly before 2 a.m. Keen had moments earlier, shot another man inside the bar.

The cop killer had been previously deported to his native Jamaica in September 1997 because of his drug conviction. Keen had been turned away once trying to get back in the country with an altered passport. How he later made it back in is unknown.

Just hours after it became known that the accused killer of a Houston police officer was an illegal Mexican immigrant, top city officials braced themselves for another round of criticism of the city's policies toward illegal immigrants. Houston, Texas police officer Rodney Johnson was shot four times in the head during a traffic stop in September 2006. Investigators say Juan Leonardo Quintero, a Mexican national living in the United States illegally has confessed to killing Johnson, a father of five.

Quintero had been deported once and crossed the border illegally again.

In March 2006, CNN announced that in the United States, more than 50,000 criminal illegal aliens had been deported to Central America over the previous dozen years. Police and Border Patrol officials said that has helped the gangs in the United States grow larger. The deportees recruit new members in their home countries; then they bring them right across the American porous borders, back into the United States.

I am very concerned that both governments are not being severe enough when they apprehend criminal deportees who slip back into our countries.

The charge of illegally coming into Canada can get you a $100,000 fine and five years in jail. I don’t know of that penalty ever being given to a deportee who has illegally returned to Canada.

It seems to me that the authorities simply take the easy way out and just send them back where they come from. Here is how I think we can solve this problem of criminal deportees returning to Canada illegally.

For first offence, one year imprisonment. For second offence, two and a half years imprisonment. For every offence after that, five years imprisonment. If while they are illegally in Canada, they commit a crime, they must serve that sentence before they begin to serve the sentence for being in Canada illegally.

If the crime they commit is a minor crime, (summary conviction offence—misdemeanor) they must also pay a fine of ten thousand dollars or serve another year in prison. If they commit a serious crime, (indictable----felony) they must pay a fine of twenty-thousand dollars or serve another two years in prison. They can pay off those fines by doing hard labour while in prison.

Deterrence is a factor that cannot be ignored. What criminal fool wants to spend years in prison for simply returning to Canada illegally after he was deported?

Since Edmund Ezemo, the fraud artist who has illegally returned to Canada eight times, he should have another five years added to his sentence for the crimes he’s charged with (if he’s convicted) along with a hundred thousand dollar fine and if he doesn’t pay that fine, then he will serve another five years on top of the first five-year sentence.

Whisper in my ear that you don’t think that this will deter these unwanted scumbags from returning to Canada again.