Whatever President Bush says about the “family values” of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale.

On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her bedroom, Mary Nagle, 42, a wife and mother of two children, readied herself for a tennis match. Later, a prosecutor said, what police found in the bedroom was reminiscent of the Manson murders, “a scene out of a horror movie.” Herrera slashed Nagle with a green-handled box cutter, cutting off a piece of her earlobe, and nearly amputated a finger as she tried to defend herself. Hanks of hair lay about the blood-spattered scene. Herrera raped Nagle for 30 minutes, beat her “almost beyond recognition,” one newspaper reported, and mutilated her genitals. Then, he changed into her husband’s clothes and, using her cell phone, called 51 of her friends and relatives to threaten them or describe the deeds in pornographic detail.

Mary Nagle was just one victim of illegal-alien criminals that year. Two others were children. In December, in Fontana, California, an illegal alien kidnapped, raped, and sodomized a four-year-old girl, then tossed her over a six-foot wall. The Press-Enterprise of Riverside reported that, in addition to suffering three facial fractures, “the child required surgery to repair damage caused by the rape and sodomy.” In Gainsville, Florida, in June that year, an illegal alien, whose nom de crime is “Revolver,” raped and strangled four-year-old Esmerelda Nava.

Illegal aliens are also partial to gang rape, as an 18-year-old woman in Immokalee, Florida, found out in October 2005. Fourteen illegal aliens dragged her from her home into a residence across the street. They choked her until she passed out, then awakened her by pouring alcohol into her mouth. After the feral gang raped her, they pushed her out the door. They arrogantly stayed at the scene until police arrived to arrest them.

In 2002, a gang of illegals raped and sexually tortured a woman for three hours near Shea Stadium in New York before police interrupted the attack. They ravaged her like a “pack of wild wolves,” she wrote in a letter to New York Supreme Court Justice Randall Eng.

And in Klamath Falls, Oregon, in August 2002, an illegal immigrant, Maximiliano C. Esparza, attacked two nuns as they were walking along a bike path, praying the rosary. Head-butting one of them, he used their rosaries to choke them while he raped them. When he was finished killing Sr. Helen Chaska, the sacramental was embedded in her neck. Liquored up at a strip bar before the crime, Esparza, like many illegals, had a record of violent crime and had been deported. Just months before Esparza raped and murdered Sister Helen, the Border Control had detained and released him.

In town after town, city after city, state after state, these are the sorts of crimes that illegal aliens commit on a regular basis, along with drunk driving, hit-and-run homicide, robbery, and murder. Yet, even as local newspapers and television stations file near-daily reports, the national news media ignore the trend.

Deborah Schurman-Kauflin of the Violent Crimes Institute conducted a year-long study of 1,500 illegals who committed sex crimes between 1999 and 2006. Assuming an illegal population of 12 million, and using immigration and prison records, she calculated that two percent of apprehended illegal aliens are sex criminals, meaning some 240,000 illegal-alien sex criminals are now in the United States. And “this translates to 93 sex offenders and 12 serial sexual offenders coming across U.S. borders illegally per day.” The 1,500 criminals attacked 5,999 people, about four victims each. If 240,000 illegal-alien sex criminals are here, with four victims each, Kauflin calculates 960,000 victims over the seven years studied. In short, thanks to our government’s failure to enforce immigration laws, illegal-alien sex fiends likely victimized one million people between 1999 and 2006.

Thirty-five percent of the criminals were child molesters, 24 percent were rapists, and 41 percent were sex and serial murderers. Eighty-one percent were on booze or dope when they committed their crimes. And, in 22 percent of the sex crimes, illegal aliens attacked the physically and mentally disabled.

More maddening is that almost all these crimes were preventable, had the federal government done its constitutional duty. Sixty-three percent of the illegal-alien sex fiends Kauflin studied were deported for another offense, and “there was an average of 3 years of committing crimes such as DUI, assaults, or drug related offenses prior to being apprehended for a sexual offense.” In short, elected federal officials, including Chief Executive George W. Bush, are responsible for this crime wave.

If those numbers aren’t disturbing enough, consider this: Since its “Operation Predator” began in 2003, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau has arrested more than 9,300 child molesters nationwide. In March 2005, for instance, ICE collared 21 illegal-alien sex criminals in White Plains, New York. One was an illegal-alien Mexican who raped a 14-year-old girl. Another Mexican stalked a 13-year-old, and a Guatemalan illegal attempted to rape a 7-year-old. About 85 percent of the nationwide total, ICE reported, were “foreign national sex offenders whose crimes make them removable from the United States. To date, more than 5,000 of these predators have been deported.” This is hardly a victory in the war against sex crimes. If Kauflin’s data are correct, the government has at least 235,000 to go, most of them Mexicans.

Among the deportees was Domingo Penaloza-Cabrera, a Mexican who jumped the border in 1999. In 2001, this caballero offered to drive a woman home from a Minneapolis night club. Instead, he took her to a party she did not want to attend, then drove her to the Mississippi River and raped her. “Penaloza-Cabrera then grabbed a metal pipe,” ICE reported,

dragged the woman from his vehicle to the river and repeatedly struck her in the head with the pipe, yelling, “I want to kill you. You are going to die.” Penaloza-Cabrera then held the woman’s head under water four times. The fourth time, the woman went limp, feigning death. Penaloza-Cabrera left her in the river and fled . . .

Amazingly, the victim survived, but this tale again suggests the magnitude of the near-crisis with which state and local authorities, not to mention American citizens, are contending. “Between Oct. 1, 2005 and March 31, 2006,” the agency said in its release on Penaloza-Cabrera, “ICE deported 1,423 illegal aliens from the five-state area” of Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa.

Of that number, 627 had criminal convictions in addition to being immigration law violators. During fiscal year 2005, ICE deported 3,060 illegal aliens from the same geographic area, 1,368 of them with criminal convictions.

And, compounding the insult to U.S. citizens, many illegal aliens are registered sex offenders, meaning the authorities have released them, instead of deporting them, when they finished their prison time.
The obvious question is why so many illegal aliens, Mexicans in particular, are disposed to commit sex crimes. The problem isn’t just miscreant Mexicans; it is Mexico’s twisted, macho-misogynist culture of drinking and rape.

Recall Kauflin’s report that more than 80 percent of the sex offenders were drunk or high. Then, add federal data and several investigative reports that show that the number of DUI arrests among Hispanics is disproportionate to their numbers in the population—a fact that Mothers Against Drunk Driving, police, and Hispanic observers themselves attribute, not surprisingly, to Mexican and Latino cultural attitudes. Many Hispanic men are problem drinkers.

Mary Jordan, a reporter for the Washington Post, covered the topic of rape and Old Mexico in a Pulitzer Prize-winning story published in 2002, “In Mexico, an Unpunished Crime: Rape Victims Face Widespread Cultural Bias in Pursuit of Justice.” Mexico abides a quaint little cultural practice called rapto—kidnapping a woman or girl to rape her. In Mexico, Jordan reported, stealing a cow is more serious than raping a woman. Even Mexican police gang-rape women and get away with it; a 16-year-old girl committed suicide after one such case. “In 90 percent of the cases of rape,” the girl’s mother said, “the Mexican police blame the women. In the few cases where they know the man is guilty, they let him ‘fix’ it with money.”

“A review of criminal laws in all 31 Mexican states,” Jordan reported,

showed that many states require that if a 12-year-old girl wants to accuse an adult man of statutory rape, she must first prove she is “chaste and pure.” Nineteen of the states require that statutory rape charges be dropped if the rapist agrees to marry his victim.

In short, raping a 12-year-old south of the border is just fine, as long as you “love” her, because “laws in most Mexican states define rapto as a case where a man kidnaps a woman not for ransom, but with the intent of marrying her or to satisfy his ‘erotic sexual desire.’” When Jordan asked some small-town “elders” in the Mexican state of Guerrero about rapto, they feigned ignorance, then laughed when she explained it to them. “A rapist would probably get a few hours in the local jail, or he might have to pay the victim’s family a $10 or $20 fine,” they told Jordan. But “all would be forgotten if he and the victim got married.” One Mexican legislator called it “romantic.”

Many of his brothers who have crossed the border share this opinion. And too few in the open-borders lobby, not least their Gran Patrón at La Casa Blanca, are willing to admit it. That would amount to “racial profiling,” you see. We used to call it good police work (and, technically, it’s cultural profiling), but, whatever you call it, importing millions of illegal aliens means importing their cultural practices, habits, and attitudes, which, for women and children across the United States, has meant not only the savage embrace of an illegal alien, or a gang of them, but the searing pain of a metal pipe or the murderous slash of a box-cutter.

Yet these are the people and culture our President wants to import because of their “family values.” One wonders what Mary Nagle would think of Herrera’s “family values.”

Too bad we can’t ask her.

R. Cort Kirkwood is the author of Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire (Cumberland House).

This article first appeared in the April 2007 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.