A surge of Central American illegal-immigrant children and families, as well as nearly 500,000 visa overstays, is making some border-patrol agents question public safety. Why are they concerned? Because there is so great a backlog of illegal immigrants that it’s making it difficult for officials to conduct timely background checks on everyone that comes through the system.

Fox News has the story:

“We don’t know who we’re releasing and we don’t know what they’re capable of,” said Shawn Moran, a Border Patrol agent in California and a member of the union. Fellow agent and union representative Art Del Cueto echoed, “You can’t find out if they’ve murdered, you can’t find out if they’ve molested minors.”

The immigration rush isn’t just at the southern border. According to the Department of Homeland Security, almost 500,000 immigrants who entered the U.S. legally last year overstayed their visa. Yet, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency removed fewer than 3,000 overstays, or less than 1 percent.

“Over 40 percent of the illegal entries, illegal people that stay in the United States come in by visa and just plain overstay,” said Aguilar. “So the ability to locate them, to identify them and put them in removal proceedings and very critically remove them as quickly as possible from the country is critical.”

Our immigration system is a wreck and federal pressure on states to look the other way on the issue is endangering public health and safety in very real ways – whether that means unlicensed illegal immigrants getting behind the wheel and causing fatalities or previously deported illegal immigrants taking advantage of so-called sanctuary city policies and murdering innocent bystanders like Kate Steinle in California. Click here to help Tea Party Patriots urge lawmakers to enforce our immigration laws!