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Summary
Cartels trafficking drugs into the United States rely on individuals using stolen identities to transport and distribute their illegal product. Identity theft, the criminal act of assuming another person’s name, address, social security number, and date of birth in order to perpetrate fraud, allows illegal aliens to fraudulently obtain valid state driver’s licenses. But more police are being trained to identify these “identity imposters.”
This week, James Scott, a retired Massachusetts’ police officer, joins Parsing Immigration Policy to talk about a highly successful program he has developed to detect certain types of ID theft, about which he trains law enforcement officers around the country. He notes that driver’s licenses should not automatically be accepted at face value, and has developed protocols and indicators to help law enforcement officers pick up on likely imposters involved in crime.
A Gloucester, MA parent teacher organization held a fundraiser at their elementary school — and one of the members decided to make an ugly political statement. An unnamed parent at West Parish Elementary School brought a Halloween-themed bean bag game decorated with tombstones. The one in the center bore the name Don Trump.
Ask a liberal to describe his ideal society, and you won’t have to wait long to hear about everyone attending a four-year college and being subsequently rewarded with a high-paying job in the professions, or the high-tech or service industries (and commuting to work via public public transit, of course). No place in the country is this closer to reality than Massachusetts, which is, unsurprisingly, where many of the people who peddle this vision get started on the path they think everyone else should take. Overall, it’s worked out reasonably well here: the Greater Boston Area may be expensive and the state may be highly regulated, but it out-preforms the nation on a number of economic metrics and is a growing leader in the technology, healthcare, biotech, and education industries; the I-495 corridor is awash in construction, development, and expansion much of it in the aforementioned glitzy industries. We’re not quite Scandinavia, but we try.
Here in New England, it’s hard to get through a news cycle without at least one mention of the region’s opioid epidemic. Every media outlet covers it; governors are creating task forces faster than you can count; and the presidential candidates expect daily questions on the matter, often from parents who lost a child to an overdose. (Notably, Jeb Bush’s daughter has struggled with addiction for years, and Carly Fiorina’s stepdaughter died of an overdose.)