Kathryn Cramer

The Missouri Breaks in the 21st Century: "All bounty hunters push the limits and break the rules - that's how you get the job done,"

This AP article sums up just about everything that is wrong with the crazy US system of using bounty hunters as an adjunct to law enforcement. The bounty hunter system is a hangover from 19th-century Wild West days.

You get nutcases running around thinking that they are the Feds or the CIA or something: Calif. Man Accused of Impersonating Feds

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - A bounty hunter charged with impersonating federal agents says he was only doing the government's work - arresting fugitives wanted for immigration violations.

Federal agents say Jeremy Christian Brickner went too far, identifying himself as a U.S. immigration agent when he captured three people earlier this year.

Brickner, 30, now faces up to six years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty and was released Friday from jail after posting a $100,000 bond, federal authorities said on Monday.

``All bounty hunters push the limits and break the rules - that's how you get the job done,'' Brickner said Monday in a telephone interview.

Brickner operates ICE Warrant Detail from his Sacramento home, according to a search warrant affidavit filed in Sacramento by an agent with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Francisco.

Brickner is charged with falsely identifying himself while detaining one immigrant overnight Oct. 23 and while holding a mother and her 10-year-old daughter on May 11. The woman's estranged husband was trying to have her deported so he could keep custody of their son, according to the affidavit.

Brickner is charged with carrying a gun, handcuffs, a badge and business cards identifying him as a ``deportation agent.''

Brickner said he has worked cooperatively with federal immigration authorities for three years, turning over 188 fugitives in at least eight states. He said, ``We're serving them up on a silver platter.''

Brickner has been in trouble previously. Twice last year, he pleaded guilty to carrying weapons illegally, the affidavit said. In one instance, he was carrying a loaded gun and a Taser while using an illegal red flashing light to pull over a motorist in California.

On the two occasions last year, he flashed identification saying he was a fugitive-recovery agent, the affidavit said.

The use of bounty hunters by law enforcement should be banned. Anyone who thinks the use of bounty hunters is still a good idea should see Marlon Brandon in The Missouri Breaks, again.

The Missouri Breaks [DVD] (1976)
Violent, offbeat western with Marlon Brando as a bizarre hired gunslinger who employs any means necessary to quash a band of horse thieves terrorizing a rancher. Along the way he tangles with the rustlers' former leader (Jack Nicholson), who has given up his life of crime for the rancher's daughter. Co-stars Randy Quaid, Frederic Forrest, Harry Dean Stanton; Arthur Penn directs. 126 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtrack: English Dolby Digital mono; Subtitles: English, French.
Category: Westerns    Director: Arthur Penn
Cast: Luana Anders, Richard Bradford, Marlon Brando, Frederic Forrest, Sam Gilman, James Greene, Kathleen Lloyd, Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid, John P. Ryan, Harry Dean Stanton

Adventures in the "Immigration Issue" from My Past

I have ducked the "immigration issue" thus far, partly because of strong feelings left over from many years ago when I imported my high-school boyfriend who later helped found Microsofts's  International Sales Division and went on to become a Microsoft exec and Microsoft's first "Evangelist."

I had been an exchange student in Germany my senior year in high-school. And after I came back to the US, we didn't really want the relationship to end. He came to visit during the spring of my freshman year of college. And on whim, I married him. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

I was really appalled by the whole experience with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but most notably by the arbitrariness. When nineteen-year-old me finally tried to get her husband a Green Card, I had one of the more insulting conversations I'd ever had in my life with the woman at the INS who wanted to know if I'd ever met my husband before. We walked straight from the offices of the INS to the offices of the ACLU in Seattle's Smith Tower where I peppered the ACLU guy with all kinds of questions about whether immigration officials had any right to behave that way. He explained to me in tiresome detail that, actually, yes they did.

A few months later, when my mother got fed up with the situation and hired us a lawyer, it was a whole different experience. We were seen right away rather than having to wait a couple of hours. Only the most perfunctory questions were asked of us and our lawyer and the INS guy spent pretty much the whole time talking about hunting and retirement. It helped that my husband was German and not, say, Chilean. And he spoke pretty good English by the time we got in there. (I'd spent months honing my skills in simultaneous translation prior to that; but even before he spoke fluent English, he could spell it better than I could because at the Gymnasium in Braunschweig he'd taken Greek and Latin.)

Thus, when I first heard it, I found Richard Shidell's song "Fishing," subsequently recorded by Joan Baez, quite uncanny. I could see in retrospect that there was a kind of game being played in that conversation I had labeled as an icon of upper-middle-class privilege: there was a whole other trajectory than conversation could have taken in which the would-be Green Card holder becomes the quarry.

But we dodged that. Somehow. I'll never really know how. At the time my husband was a professed Communist (though he never joined die Partie); he became a Republican shortly after joining Mircosoft, something I found quite bewildering. (Me, I'm a hereditary Democrat.) Funny how his revolutionary fervor was coopted so easily; to be replaced by evangelism for Microsoft's plan for World Domination.

In the last presidential cycle, my ex-#1 gave two grand to George W. Bush. I thought it was terribly unfair that he had taken all the Wolf Biermann and Franz-Joseph Deganhardt records, given that he'd gone and become a Republican, but I attributed this contradiction to the fact that he was a Prussian: it was never about philosphy; it was about control. Trust is good, he said once over dinner. Control is better. He was quoting Stalin, though he didn't say so.

Back when I was young and naive and he lectured me about Marx and Lenin, I signed up for a philosophy class on the Philosophy of Marxism and I read all that. And then I discovered that his Communism was not about philosophy at all, but about lecturing to a young blonde who hadn't read what he'd read. Once I'd stolen that high-ground and started asking questions about the base and the super-structure, he retreated into computer stuff, which he was much better at than I was.

I took the Fortran course; he got the point. I decided that he was good at computers and I wasn't. He won. I lost. He went to work for Microsoft. I left him and left Seattle. We had a little court battle about whether Microsoft stock options were marital property. He won. I lost. He helped found Microsoft's international sales division. I went to Columbia, though not at his expense.

So how do I see the immigration issue? I see immigration officials as arbitrary bastards with more authority than they know what to do with, without the sense to use it properly, or maybe just without the computer skills or the database. Most of what I have read about the issue has been one kind or another of nonsense.

Finally today I read something that made at least a little bit of sense. Lou Dobbs: Dobbs to President: Do you take us for fools?

President Bush continues to push his guest worker program and amnesty for anywhere between 11 million and 20 million illegal aliens, and he insists still that nothing less than what he calls comprehensive immigration reform is acceptable.

And the lies keep coming from both political parties. This president is not enforcing the immigration laws enacted by Congress, and this Congress is failing in its duty of oversight to demand that those laws be followed.

Only a fool, Mr. President, Sen. Kennedy, Sen. McCain, would believe you when you speak of new legislation. You don't enforce the laws now.

I would modify Dobb's sentiments a little: Whether what Bush was proposing was an actual amnesty program is debatable. But in my experience what there was was class-based and race-based arbitrary enforcement of immigration laws. If the existing laws were enforced and enforced even-handedly, we wouldn't need to have this conversation. Dobbs is echoing what I said to my current husband in the car the other day. There are plenty of immigration laws; plenty of disincentives for people from other countries to come forever to the US. Enforce them even-handedly, THEN find out what other laws are needed. Why make new laws, when enforcement of the current ones is up for sale?