KPLC 7 News, Lake Charles, Louisiana |Immigrants Running Free

Immigrants Running Free

February 23, 2005
Reported by Rhonda Kitchens

As a 27-year-veteran of the Border Patrol, Charles Kothmann says he knows all too well restrictions being placed on todays agents, "They don't want you going on job sites. They don't want you going to places of residence. The only place they want you to get them is if they're in transit going back and forth between someplace."

And even then Kothmann says, the only way the aliens are held is if they are felons already convicted of a crime, "If the State Police stopped one driving down the highway with a load of dope in the back end who had hijacked the car back in Orange, TX and beat somebody up and taken the automobile and he gets arrested and put in the Calcasieu Parish Jail, if he could find a bondsman or someone to post his bond then he walked it didn't matter if it was a violent crime or not. If he hadn't been convicted yet, he walked. I turned lose illegal aliens like that. They don't know where they're going. They don't know what they're doing, and you're turning them lose in the United States and you're handing them a piece of paper that saying well when you get where you're going send this card back and let us know where you are so we can send your papers for your deportation hearing and the guy's like yeah right."

Although there was nothing he could do about the system Kothmann says he did try to warn the public, "I would drive them down to the Lake Charles Civic Center at three o'clock in the afternoon turn them lose in the parking lot. I turned them lose down Common street. I would go to the rest areas on the interstate and turn them lose. High visibility areas to try to let the public know what was going on you couldn't tell them or you would be fired."

And the illegal aliens would be right back to work by the end of the day. "Countless tens of thousands of them are all over the United States right now we don't even know who these people are. There was never a tracking system in place and there just trying to get a handle on this now," said Kothmann.