A South Jersey man's 2013 shooting rampage in a crowded airport terminal is just one incident that begs the question.
To where would Donald Trump deport Paul Anthony Ciancia?
Ciancia is the 23-year-old former Pennsville resident who offered a guilty plea Thursday to killing a Transportation Security Officer at Los Angeles International Airport on Nov. 1, 2013. He wounded three others with his semi-automatic rifle, and was himself shot by authorities.
The Associated Press reports that because he will switch his court plea to "guilty," Ciancia will avoid the death penalty and spend life in prison.
His attack on LAX and its federal security personnel sent frightened passengers scurrying through a terminal. It's precisely the kind of event that reminds us of foreign terrorists responsible for carnage at airports and train stations worldwide. But it was committed by an all-American young man, a graduate of prestigious, private Salesianum High School in Delaware. Former neighbors and local police agreed that Ciancia comes from a "good family."
So, here's the conundrum posed by Trump's immigration speech Wednesday night: If Ciancia had entered the United States illegally, or had affirmed loyalty to radical Islam, the GOP presidential candidate would likely have cited the 23-year-old as someone who should never have been on our soil. Yet, American citizens, even those with a warped view of America, have a right to be here.
The motives for Ciancia's rampage aren't verified. But he carried a note stating that he "wanted to kill TSA," signed "Pissed-off Patriot." In other comments cited in press reports, he called TSA screenings "Nazi checkpoints" and described his actions as '"water(ing) the tree of liberty."
We should all feel compassion for the relatives of slain Americans who shared the stage with Trump on Wednesday to speak about how immigrants who were here illegally did the horrific crimes. Clearly, the immigration system, the criminal justice system, or both, failed the victims and their families.
But it's beyond comprehension how the widow and two children of Gerardo Hernandez -- the TSA agent killed by Ciancia -- feel any less pain because he was murdered by a domestic "liberty seeker," not an ISIS terrorist or Mexican national.
Right-wingers once went into an uproar when former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said armed-to-the-teeth homegrown radicals posed a bigger U.S. security threat than al Qaida forces from the Middle East. She may have exaggerated the scale, but cases like Ciancia's prove that she wasn't totally wrong.
Let's patrol our borders better and stop losing track of visa holders. Understand, though, that no one would have dared require that Timothy McVeigh take a loyalty oath to U.S. government, pre-Oklahoma City, in order to stay here. No one had a right to question Paul Ciancia, pre-LAX, about how much he loved federal law-enforcement screeners. It's clearly unconstitutional.
We should indeed try to send immigrants convicted of serious crimes back to their original countries. The full scope of Trump's immigration plan, however, makes a false assumption that we'd be markedly safer as a nation. You can't deport away crime when most of the people who commit it have no place else to go.
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