My name is Thomas Hardman, and I ran in the last elections for MD District 19 Delegate. I lost. A major part of my platform was "no driver's licenses for illegal aliens". I am running again, this time for Montgomery County Council District 4's seat, vacated by the recent untimely demise of Marilyn Praisner, a lifelong and dedicated civil servant who was the longest-serving council member ever.
There's a lot of competition for her seat, but I believe that I am the only person who will come right out and say "I will not vote a cent for CASA of Maryland".
I have been traveling to Annapolis to testify on this and related issues since 2002. The attacks of September 11 2001 made it absolutely clear that documentation security is an essential prerequisite of national security. Yet Maryland continues to give driver's permits and state ID to persons who are illegally present in the US. Furthermore, the county policies in places like Montgomery blatantly put out the welcome mat for illegal aliens, and embolden the unscrupulous employers who intentionally pass over legitimate potential employees so that they can pad their own pockets with ill-gotten gains while foisting the social costs of onto the taxpayer and society.
I live in Aspen Hill. I have attended a variety of CEO "Ike" Leggett's Town Hall Meetings and have asked him directly about these day-laborer centers, especially after he slapped one into place in Gaithersburg under slipshod and questionable process which skirted the law.
When we questioned him about what he would do about the crowd of a hundred or so day-laborers pestering people in the parking lot of Aspen Hill's Home Depot, he said (I paraphrase) "that's the best argument for CASA's centers, it provides orderliness and regularity". But it took a full year, and repeated complaints from both Home Depot and their customers -- victims of aggressive panhandling etc -- before Mr Leggett evidently comprehended his own words enough to order the County's finest to start acceding to public (and Home Depot's) opinion and enforcing the law against criminal violations by day-laborers such as public urination and public intoxication, aggressive panhandling, and criminal trespass on Home Depot's property.
In the course of this sustained police action -- for which I have agitated many years in the course of my involvement in the civic and community affairs of Aspen Hill -- actual progress has been made. The crowd of a hundred morning meanderers has at last been dispersed.
Part of the progress is that the police themselves have come to understand the nature of the problem.
I have been informed off of the record that when the police started checking the credentials of various persons driving vehicles seeking to pick up day-laborers, a very significant percentage of those drivers did not have valid permits. I was not informed about the percentage of such persons whose names were run against the NCIC wants-and-warrants database and came out positive as fugitives, but I also suspect that it was also high.
At long last, from having to deal with this as a syndrome, rather than dealing with it as individual criminal violations scattered across their districts, the police seem to have actually understood the problem. At Home Depot, at least, over the course of 18 months, they watched an actual invasion, one that took over the parking lots of a 7-11 and then a Home Depot across the street from the 7-11.
This is already a dangerous intersection and traffic is restricted from turning, and often in the morning you would see a line of police officers ticketing people who had made illegal turns to enter the parking lot to pick up "day laborers" who were likely illegal aliens. And so the police officers were there to watch the numbers grow and grow and grow, because the word had gone out that the police would do nothing because their orders from the top down were to do nothing to interfere with the day-laborers, so long as they didn't personally witness gross violations of non-immigration law.
Here are photos from the very early days of "the migration":
Astute observers and quick wits will note that my long involvement with and interest in this area included agitating for that fence and keeping it clear. Illegal aliens, thanks to my efforts and those of PEPCO and some elements of the County, will not be sleeping in those woods. Mostly I think they rent rooms in the houses nearby... in my neighborhood.
One officer mentioned ("off the record") that one illegal said "run us off, we will just rob people". And there is a robbery problem here in Aspen Hill. It was here before the gathering at Home Depot and perhaps it will remain. Worrisomely, last summer there was a string of muggings in the area, which weren't widely publicized. Yet in a mere 25 days there were some 70 robberies, mostly of Latin-American men believed to have just cashed checks. This was the so-called "amigo shopping" string of robberies. I do not in any way support violence against anyone, and think that there are much better ways to deal with the fact that for every foreign "day laborer", there's a poor black local citizen who won't be getting that work. Unemployment is practically pandemic in certain local sub-communities and that both contributes to temptations to crime and violence, and outrages me... and many others, as well.
If Elected, I will always vote for order, against crime, and will have only the bare humanitarian tolerance of illegal aliens, and will vigorously oppose those who profit from them.
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