enforcement

MARION COUNTY, OR (KPTV) - A Marion County deputy responding to an emergency was killed in a crash, leading to the death of a passenger in the other car six years ago.

The driver of that car remains on the loose today.

Deputy Kelly Fredinburg was hit and killed on Highway 99 E north of Gervais on Sunday, June 16, 2007. Fredinburg was 33 years old.

Investigators said Fredinburg was driving to an emergency call at 11:30 p.m. that night when his patrol car was hit head-on by a car driven by Alfredo De Jesus Ascencio.

Fredinburg's car caught fire and he was pronounced dead at the scene. Oscar Ascencio-Amaya, 19, was in the other car and he died the next day at the hospital. A second passenger received minor injuries.

De Jesus Ascencio turned 26 in January. He was treated for critical injuries at the time of the crash. Investigators later learned he fled the U.S. to Mexico around the time of his indictment for criminally negligent homicide in August 2007.

Investigators believe he remains in Mexico. He was last thought to be in the area of Puacuaro, Michoacan, Mexico.

Last year, Fredinburg's family announced the Oregon Officer Reward Fund. Its purpose is to help find suspects wanted in connection with officer injuries or deaths in the line of duty. The reward in this case is $20,000.

Crime Stoppers is offering an additional $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

For more information about the Oregon Officer Reward Fund, go to www.oorf.info.
  Read more about Local deputy killed 6 years ago, suspect remains on the loose

"Don't count on the House stopping this bill," retiring Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) warns about the immigration reform proposal in the Senate. "Because this is what's going to happen: The Senate is going to pass a very bad bill. The House will pass what will sound like a pretty good bill. But I’m just here to tell you, it's a Trojan horse."

"It will be a Trojan horse bill that says 'we're here to secure the borders.' So all the Republicans will vote for this bill -- for securing the border. Those bills will go to what's called a conference committee," Bachmann told World Net Daily.

"The good guts of the Trojan horse bill will be pulled out. The very bad amnesty provisions will be put in the bill. The bill will go to the House floor and it won’t be Republicans that pass it. It will be Nancy Pelosi leading all the House Democrats to vote for it. And just enough Republicans, probably committee chairs and subcommittee chairs will be voting for the bill, and you'll have amnesty and it will all be done in six weeks," she said.

Hear Bachmann explain her idea.

  Read more about Bachmann: "Ruling Class" Will Pass A "Trojan Horse" Immigration Bill In House

COQUILLE — After 25 years of battling crime, the area’s multi-agency anti-drug task force could run out of money in a little more than a year.

Running out would force the South Coast Interagency Narcotics Team to depend on already cash-strapped local governments.

Cal Mitts, SCINT’s director, said the team has enough grant money to continue operations for approximately 14 months.

The team, which borrows detectives from local police agencies, leads anti-drug investigations by its member agencies. It relies on federal and community grants to pay its staff.

“We’re 100 percent grant-funded,” Mitts said.

The problem? Grants have dried up. And the financial crunch is coming at a time when use of both methamphetamine and heroin is rebounding in the area.

“They’re both up considerably,” Mitts said.

Combating meth has been one of SCINT’s primary missions throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. One of the most noteworthy victories came in 2005, when SCINT and other agencies arrested 15 people in the Barview area in a project named Operation: Black Ice.

The number of meth labs in the area shrank after state legislators moved a key precursor chemical behind pharmacy counters. Starting in 2006, any psuedoephedrine purchase required a prescription.

But shutting down the labs didn’t stop meth. Mitts said criminal drug trafficking organizations in Mexico have filled the gap.

In May, a task force of state and federal law enforcement agencies arrested more than 30 people in Klamath County suspected of operating a meth-trafficking ring.

The Oregon Department of Justice said it had found links between the traffickers and Mexican cartels.

“I would comfortably say 90 percent — basically all of our drugs — are coming from south of the border,” Mitts said.

While methamphetamine is seeing a resurgence in the area, its nothing like what’s being experienced with heroin.

Despite popular perceptions, Mitts said heroin has a long history in the area.

“In the ’80s and ’90s, there was a lot more of it,” he said. “It was black tar as opposed to powdered — or ‘gunpowder.’”

Still, Coos County District Attorney Paul Frasier — who once served as a special prosecutor for the team — said arrests for the drug were relatively uncommon.

“In the seven years I was there, I could probably count on both hands and my toes the whole number of heroin cases we had,” Frasier said.

But the epidemic of prescription painkiller abuse that hit the nation in the past decade brought with it a new generation of heroin users.

“With the safeguards that have been put in place since that rise, the people who cannot obtain the pain pills that they could in the past are looking on the street,” Frasier said.

Both Mitts and Frasier said heroin is now cheaper on the South Coast’s black market than prescription opiate-based painkillers.

“It’s alarming to see the age demographics,” Mitts said. “They keep getting younger.”

The veteran officer said he’d be hard-pressed to name anyone the team had arrested recently over the age of 30.

Over the past decade, the team has relied heavily on community and federal grants to pay its salaries.

Congressman Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said that from 2003 through 2010 — the year before the House Republican leadership banned all earmarks — he managed to secure more than $1 million to fund the team. The last earmark was the biggest — about $600,000 — and SCINT has lived on it ever since.

“Unfortunately, the Republican ban on earmarks remains in effect, to the detriment of programs like SCINT, but I will continue to fight to fund it in any way I can,” DeFazio said.

Mitts said the team supplements federal money with smaller community grants, including one from the Coquille Indian Tribe.

Mitts said if the agency can’t secure more outside funding, its only option will be to turn to the county and its partner city governments for help.

“What we’re going to have to see is the different municipalities stepping up,” he said.

But Coos County Sheriff Craig Zanni said his agency is already exceeding its commitment to SCINT.

“We already house the team and fund it by providing staff out of the department,” Zanni said.

More money?

“Unless the commissioners hit the Powerball jackpot, I doubt it,” he said.

In its heyday, SCINT had four detectives, an administrative aide, an intelligence analyst, a director and a special prosecutor. Mitts said he’s currently operating with two full-time detectives.

A few years ago, the team hit its lowest point: a director and one detective. It could return to that level if the grants aren’t renewed within 14 months or so, Frasier said.

In the meantime, SCINT continues to pursue its mission with the resources it has on hand. Mitts said a recent operation targeting a low-income housing development in Empire netted a number of heroin arrests.

The veteran officer said for investigations like that to be successful, the public has to provide information — and then testify in court.

“We can only do so much with anonymous information,” Mitts said.

What about asset forfeiture?

While SCINT today relies on grants for its survival, it wasn’t always that way.

Coos County District Attorney Paul Frasier, who formerly served as a special prosecutor for the team, said that in SCINT’s early days, the team subsisted primarily on asset forfeitures from drug arrests.

In those days, drug task forces nationwide commonly supported themselves by selling cars, homes and other property seized in raids.

Marijuana not methamphetamine, was SCINT’s cash cow.

“The meth cases generally did not generate a lot of forfeitures,” Frasier said. Chemical contamination makes former meth labs unappealing to potential buyers.

In the late 1990s, Oregon voters passed two ballot measures that would inhibit the team’s ability to profit from asset forfeitures.

The first was Measure 67 in 1998, better known as the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act. Because so many marijuana growing operations are being conducted under the auspices of the act, prosecutions and subsequent seizures prove difficult, Frasier said.

Then, in 2000, Oregon voters passed Measure 3, which prevented law enforcement from retaining the proceeds from forfeited assets.

“With the lack of funds being available for SCINT to operate, it basically went into a shutdown mode,” Frasier said.

The Legislature loosened the law in 2008, allowing police to keep as much as 63 percent of forfeiture proceeds. But Frasier said the continued difficulty in prosecuting marijuana growers means the process remains relatively unprofitable.

Lack of options for treating opiate addiction

Increasing opiate addiction on the South Coast is straining the resources of treatment providers.

The area badly needs residential services and increased access to Suboxone for detox purposes, said Diedrie Lindsey, director of ADAPT Counseling and Treatment Services. ADAPT provides drug and alcohol treatment services to people on parole and probation through Coos County Community Corrections.

“With opiate addiction, people get three days into the seizure and they’ll hurt so bad they’ll go out and use,” she said.

Suboxone is a drug containing the semi-synthetic opiate buprenorphine and a chemical called nalaxone, which blocks opiate receptors in the central nervous system. Lindsey said the drug is one of the most effective ways to help patients detox, but he knows of only one provider in the area.

Lindsey said ADAPT sees 16-20 people on parole and probation as part of its contract with Coos County, and about 260 people total. Read more about Drug fighters run on fumes

The 90 percent apprehension goal set by Senate and House bills seeking to rein in illegal immigration while establishing a path to citizenship for those crossing into the U.S. from Mexico is based on fuzzy math, according to critics.

The goal, which is supposed to give teeth to legislation some view as amnesty, would depend on a Department of Homeland Security formula for determining the success rate of catching illegal border crossers. That formula requires visual or physical evidence for determining someone got past the border patrol, evidence that simply isn’t left behind in most cases. The result, say critics, is a wildly exaggerated success rate for catching illegal border crossers.

“To calculate it, border patrol officers go out and look for physical evidence of crossings… you know, ‘I saw this person cross and I didn't get him.’ Or, ‘I saw footprints in the sand,’” John Whitley, an economist who analyzed such statistics while he served as the director of the DHS’s Program Analysis & Evaluation department under President Bush, told FoxNews.com.

The problem is that, no matter how hard border patrol officers try to find physical evidence of successful illegal crossings, they can’t find everything.

“We know that this method of calculation understates the number of successful crossings, because you're excluding anyone you don't have physical evidence for,” Whitley said.

Using that method, Department of Homeland Security data already indicate a border security effectiveness rate of 84 percent -- close to the 90 percent target.

Some congressmen are concerned about the numbers.

“To just look for footprints and have a guesstimate – that would be outrageous,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, told FoxNews.com.

“We can't go along with a bill that says, ‘Hey, we have a 90 percent requirement for security’ – when there is no way to verify whether or not the 90 percent is accurate.”

In addition to not being accurate, the DHS methodology presents other problems, according to critics. For instance, an administration looking to artificially inflate the border effectiveness rate could simply call Border Patrol officers off from looking for signs of successful crossings and assign them to other tasks.

“There is no way we could trust this Department of Homeland Security to verify,” Gohmert said. “And there are independent sources that we could trust. We could have drones and other monitoring where we can find out exactly how many make it across without being apprehended.”

Other methods of estimating border crossings show a much lower apprehension rate.

“Survey data, recidivism data, and press reports about the Vader radar system all put it in the 50 percent range,” Whitley said, referring to the DHS’s new airborne Vader radar system which, during a test last winter in the Sonora Desert, indicated that the Border Patrol caught 1,874 people but missed 1,962 who successfully crossed.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.

But groups that support more immigration said that border enforcement should not be a priority in the first place.

“Government obsession with the particulars of border enforcement metrics misses the point,” said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration analyst at the CATO institute. “We know from experience that increasing legal immigration opportunities, especially for lower-skilled guest workers, is the best way to eliminate unlawful immigration. Border Patrol should operate as a funnel to channel would-be unlawful immigrants into the legal market rather than an agency that separates willing workers from willing employers.”

Policy questions aside, the formula some say is flawed makes the pending Senate bill being touted by Marco Rubio R-Fla., and others problematic, according to sources on Capitol Hill.

“It doesn’t make sense if you’re allowing the Department of Homeland Security to judge themselves,” a GOP Senate staffer told FoxNews.com. “They can game the system, game the statistics, and then end up meeting the requirements.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., announced Tuesday that he would introduce an amendment that would put Congress, not the DHS, in charge of making the determination about whether the border is 90 percent secure.

“My amendment requires Congress to vote every year on border security. If Congress votes that the border is not secure, elements of immigration reform will cease to go forward and visa programs will be slowed," Paul said in a press release.

As of now, the 90 percent goal remains only that, a goal – and the path to citizenship provisions for illegal aliens would be implemented even if the 90 percent target were not met. The only consequence of not meeting the target is the creation of a government committee that would issue a report with recommendations for meeting the target.

Gohmert says he does not want the bills to pass.

“Let's secure the border. And then we can get a deal worked out very, very quickly after that. But not until the border is secure.”

The writer of this piece can be reached at maxim.lott@foxnews.com or on twitter at @maximlott
  Read more about Border apprehensions wildly exaggerated in formula behind Senate bill, say critics

Oregon Republicans seem to have missed a key lesson of the 2012 election, and are embarking on a symbolic campaign that will succeed only in further alienating Latino voters.

When Republicans fared worse than expected at the polls last November here and nationally, some soul-searching rhetoric from within the party suggested the GOP needed to reach out more effectively to Latino voters who rejected their message. A bipartisan immigration reform effort is still working its way through Congress despite vocal opposition from some in the GOP.

A key element of that reform bill would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in this country.

Oregon Republicans, meanwhile, continue to oppose measures designed to allow those immigrants to better contribute to the state's economy. GOP lawmakers opposed two such bills that ultimately passed the Legislature and will become law.

One permits the children of parents who brought them here illegally to pay in-state tuition at public universities as long as they live in Oregon and graduated from high school here. The other will allow undocumented residents to obtain a permit to drive legally in Oregon.

After the driving permit bill passed and Gov. John Kitzhaber signed it, Republican Reps. Sal Esquivel of Medford and Kim Thatcher of Keizer launched a referendum to overturn the law — despite the fact that the state's 14 GOP senators split evenly on the bill on final passage.

If the two, aided by the group Oregonians for Immigration Reform, can gather more than 58,000 signatures from registered voters within 90 days of the Legislature's adjournment, the referendum will appear on the November 2014 ballot. The new law, scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, would be put on hold until after the vote.

Supporters of the new driving permit law argue it will make the state's roads safer by encouraging undocumented residents to purchase insurance and have their driving skills tested. Opponents say residents who came here illegally should not be rewarded with driving privileges.

Despite the bipartisan support for the bill in the Legislature, the Oregon Republican Party has endorsed the referendum campaign, warning of voter fraud and "subversive terrorist acts," in the words of GOP Chairwoman Suzanne Gallagher — although the driving permits may not be used to vote, board a plane or purchase a firearm.

We're not convinced the driving law will do what its backers say it will, but it's unlikely to do any real damage — except to the image of the state's Republicans among Latino voters.

  Read more about Missing the boat

DENVER (AP) — Immigrants living illegally in Colorado will be able to get driver's licenses under a bill signed Wednesday by Gov. John Hickenlooper, adding the state to a handful of others that provide a legal way for immigrants to use the roads.

The issue has picked up momentum this year, with Oregon and Nevada passing laws in recent weeks, and Connecticut's governor expected to pass a measure that lawmakers approved last week.

Hickenlooper said he saw the proposal as a step toward changing the nation's immigration laws.

"I'm not trying to tell Congress what form that takes, any of the details, but we are moving in that direction, and this is something that's a first step," the Democratic governor said.

The bill was signed in private, before the governor signed several other bills in front of lawmakers and the media. But Hickenlooper's office said the private signing was simply because one of the lead sponsors was out of town.

"We weren't trying to downplay it," spokesman Eric Brown said.

Supporters of the bill argued that everyone on the roads should know the rules and be insured, regardless of their immigration status.

The licenses would be labeled to say they are not valid for federal identification and can't be used to vote, obtain public benefits or board a plane. Hickenlooper said immigrants should have licenses that allow them to drive to work, get insurance, and be identified in car accidents, while at the same time making clear they are not U.S. citizens.

New Mexico, Illinois and Washington state already grant driver's licenses to immigrants who are in the country illegally. Utah grants immigrants a driving permit that can't be used for identification. Nevada's bill, signed into law last week, requires immigrants to prove their identity with a passport or birth certificate, and the "driving privilege cards" must be renewed annually.

In Colorado, immigrants pass a driver's license test and prove they're paying state and federal taxes. They also must show an identification card from their country of origin. The licenses would be renewed every three years.

But opponents argued there's no way to verify the identities of immigrants with certainty, and they worried the licenses wouldn't necessarily lead to more people having insurance. Republican Sen. Kevin Lundberg said he worried the proposal would encourage more people to come to Colorado illegally.

Colorado's bill takes effect Aug. 1, 2014. Legislative analysts who worked on the bill estimate that more than 45,000 immigrants will apply for licenses the first year. Read more about Immigrant driver's licenses signed in Colorado

Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) on Tuesday vetoed a bill that would have required Florida hand out driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, a sign he is taking a stand against the left in favor of conservatism.

“Florida is home to immigrants of many nationalities, who add to the cultural fabric of our great state, and whose productivity and hard work have contributed to our economic turnaround,” Scott said in his official letter to Florida Secretary of State Kenneth Detzner announcing the veto. “Still, our nation struggles with immigration issues every day, as Americans seek to reconcile the fact that at one point our families were immigrants who came, as many do today, to work and live the American dream with the fact that the federal government has failed at enforcing the nation’s laws on this topic.”

Scott went on to detail the inconsistencies of immigration policy coming out of Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security and President Barack Obama’s administration at large.

“Despite the federal government’s inability to enforce the nation’s current immigration laws or to find common ground on how to change them, the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in a June 2012 memo the immediate establishment of a ‘Deferred Action Process for Childhood Arrivals,’” Scott wrote. “Through this process DHS provides that a young person illegally brought to the United States as a child will not be subject to removal if the individual meets certain criteria."

"Qualifying for deferred action status does not confer substantive rights or lawful status upon an individual; it does not create a pathway to a green card or citizenship; nor does it extend to any family members of the person granted the status either," he explained. "Deferred action status is simply a policy of the Obama Administration, absent Congressional direction, designed to dictate removal action decisions using DHS agency discretion. It was never passed by Congress, nor is it a promulgated rule.”

The institutional left and Florida Democrats are furious that Scott would make such a move. Democrat state Sen. Darren Soto called Scott’s veto an “anti-Hispanic bomb.”

“Make no mistake about it: This will be an anti-Hispanic bomb if he vetoes this bill,’’ Soto, a sponsor of the legislation, said before Scott officially vetoed the bill according to the National Journal. “The vast majority of my peers understand we need to encourage immigrants to become working members of our society. It makes no sense that the Scott administration would veto something it’s already doing.”

The Florida House Democrat who also sponsored the bill, Rep. Randolph Bracy, tried to argue Scott’s veto foils plans to move the national Republican party as a whole toward amnesty. “I thought the party was moving in that direction and was behind this bill, and then the governor just comes out of nowhere and does this,” Bracy said according to National Journal. “Republicans have been talking as a party about Hispanic outreach, and this was only a small step.” Read more about Rick Scott Vetoes Bill to Give Illegal Immigrants Driver's Licenses