Don Rosenberg was anxious hearing the recent news about a 33-year-old immigrant in the United States illegally who is accused of threatening to kill passengers aboard a crowded Greyhound bus bound for Chicago.
“I’m always concerned when these kinds of cases happen that people get the wrong impression about illegal aliens and crime,” Rosenberg told Chicago City Wire. “The bigger issue is all the crimes that happen day in and day out by people in this county illegally. That’s a much bigger story than just one issue.”
Rosenberg speaks from pained experience. In 2010, his 25-year-old son, Drew, was killed in a crash in San Francisco that involved a Honduran immigrant who had entered the country illegally but had been granted temporary immigration status.
Margarito Vargas-Rosas
Ever since then, Rosenberg has been on a crusade to change immigration laws.
“Too often we focus on an incident, the tearjerker story," he said. "I would hope that doesn’t continue to happen. That’s not the story. The bigger part of the story is was the guy involved caught before, was he deported, did he come back in the country. That’s the bigger part, that it should have never happened. Why was he even capable of being there?”
In the Greyhound incident, Margarito Vargas-Rosas faces a felony charge of making terroristic threats, among other charges, and is being held without bond.
Rosenberg argues there can really only be just one verdict.
“There’s really no choice but to make them all leave,” he said of illegal immigrants. “I know that’s not what’s going to happen, but it should be the goal.”
Rosenberg likens the situation to one where a patient is given a jar of prescription drugs and told there’s a chance one pill may kill you, one may make you violently ill and one may make you sick, but given no indication which is which.
“You’re gonna dispose of them all,” Rosenberg said. “If you can’t separate them out, you’re not going to take a chance figuring out I probably didn’t get the bad one.”
Rosenberg said the man charged in his son’s death wasn’t a career criminal or known to be a violent person, but in the end, none of that mattered.
“How do you do a background check on a guy who’s lived 25 years in Mexico and 10 years in the U.S.?” he asked. "You don't know."
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