Here is some important information about illegal aliens in the country:

• There are approximately 12.5 million known illegals in the U.S., and there are others who have evaded authorities.

• Approximately one million illegals enter the country each year.

• Roughly 80% of illegals processed and given a date for a hearing fail to show up.

A letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015 to various members of the Obama administration cited these data:

• Of the 36,000 criminal aliens released from ICE custody in FY 2013, 1,000 have been reconvicted of additional crimes in the short time since their release.

• No fewer than 121 immigrant convicts were charged with homicide following their release from ICE custody between 2010 and 2014. It also noted that in 2014, ICE released 2,457 immigrant convicts because of the Supreme Court ruling prohibiting detention of deportable foreign nationals beyond six months.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) allows some individuals, about 800,000, who were brought to the United States illegally as children to receive special consideration. DACA members have achieved a high level of sympathy because they were brought here by their illegal alien parents as young children, and thus should be given the benefit of the doubt and not treated as illegals.

However, a report titled “Undocumented Immigrants, U.S. Citizens, and Convicted Criminals in Arizona” deflates the glowing image of this group. The report says: “Unfortunately, if the goal of DACA is to give citizenship to a particularly law-abiding group of undocumented immigrants, it is accomplishing the opposite of what was intended. As Table 8 shows, DACA age eligible undocumented immigrants are 250 percent more likely to be convicted of crimes than their share of the population. Those too old for DACA status are convicted at a ‘relatively’ [emphasis added] low rate (45.7 percent more than their share of the Arizona population).”

Brietbart News reported last September that 2,139 of the 800,000 DACA recipients, deemed “DREAMers” by the open-borders lobby, have had their temporary protected status revoked due to crimes, including: “A felony criminal conviction; a significant misdemeanor conviction; multiple misdemeanor convictions; gang affiliation; or arrest of any crime in which there is deemed to be a public safety concern,” according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency.

The USCIS stated that the majority of crimes by DACA recipients include: “Alien smuggling, assaultive offenses, domestic violence, drug offenses, DUI, larceny and thefts, criminal trespass and burglary, sexual offenses with minors, other sex offenses and weapons offenses.”

Now, of course, the Left argues that these people are merely looking for a better life, and we should help them. For the sake of discussion, let’s accept the idea that most of them are “good” people, despite their criminal entry into America. However, some of them are drug dealers, human traffickers, gang members, rapists, murderers, convicted felons, deportees who have come back several times, and other unsuitable people.

The list of Americans who have been raped, robbed, murdered and otherwise victimized by illegal aliens is long, indeed. Which begs the question: How many Americans have to be murdered, raped, assaulted, etc., before people realize the seriousness of the immigration problem?

How many murderers, drug dealers and other criminal illegal aliens should we allow here? The answer to that question is a loud and firm “Zero!”

Just how much do the American people spend each year in supporting illegals?

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) issued a report last September listing the following information: At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens. That amounts to a tax burden of approximately $8,075 per illegal alien family member and a total of almost $116 billion. The total cost of illegal immigration to U.S. taxpayers is both staggering and crippling.

In April of 2017 the Pew Research Center reported that there were eight million “unauthorized” immigrants in the U.S. workforce, about 5% of whom are working or unemployed and looking for a job.

Pew further said that “a rising share of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the U.S. for at least a decade. About two-thirds of adult aliens in 2014 had been in the U.S. at least that long, compared with 41 percent in 2005.”

The preceding data help us to understand the extent of the illegal alien problem and also demonstrates that more than a few of those who come here illegally are bad people. This information further emphasizes the need to secure the southern border and carefully control entry into the country. This situation has existed far too long, and both Democrat and Republican administrations share the blame.

President Donald Trump is trying to address this serious problem, but there is strong support among those on the Left to maintain the status quo, who seem to think illegals in the country are a good thing, as well as laws, policies and legal interpretations that make cleaning up this immigration mess more difficult.