EDITORIAL: DUIs, illegal immigration and death a difficult mix

As is so often the case with our government, because there are no simple solutions to preventing tragic deaths like that of a 17-year-old boy last month because of an undocumented drunken driver, it’s unlikely that anything will change, and someone else will be needlessly killed in the future.

Police say Ever Olivos-Gutierrez was drunk March 25 when he slammed his SUV into the car of Juan Carlos Dominguez-Palomino. The boy died at the scene.

Shockingly, it wasn’t the first time Gutierrez, 40, was accused of driving drunk. It was the third time in 14 years that police said he was drunk and was a menace behind the wheel. Gutierrez, who has never had a driver license from Colorado or any U.S. state, has a long list of driving violations. He’s long been an illegal immigrant here. Somehow, he was in the country illegally years before he was granted a 6-month visitor visa in 2003, which he overstayed. Even more shocking is that federal immigration officials failed to get Gutierrez in 2007 when he was arrested in Douglas county on DUI charges and kept in jail there for about a month.

Predictably, ICE officials are investigating, but so far have no idea why his arrest languished. His case is hardly unique, and this isn’t the first time in Aurora where lives were tragically lost at the hands of illegal immigrants with lengthy driving records and run-ins with police. Clearly, because federal lawmakers can’t get past petty, partisan politics and federal immigration officials are simply inept, this probably won’t be the last.

It’s foolish to find fault only with drunken illegal immigrants for tragic deaths like this one. Thousands of Americans are killed because of legal licensed drunken drivers each year.

But the mix of inadequate, useless and harmful immigration laws and policies makes tragedies like this one even more painful. The biggest problem has to do with Americans’ erroneous and antiquated notions of privacy. Because we have no national databases for citizens, other than the hands-off Social Security, we have no way of keeping easy track of criminals, illegal immigrants or other scofflaws. State lawmakers here recently turned down an effort to issue illegal immigrants with a driver license, similar to programs in other states, that would at least give local cops and DAs a fighting chance to hold shadow-citizens accountable if they’re behind the wheel. As it stands, we make it nearly irresistible for illegal citizens to leave crash scenes and find ways to keep under the radar of police.

But because cases like this one aren’t unique, there are no incentives or deterrents for shadow citizens to do whatever they want when it comes to drinking and driving or any other low-level criminal activity. In fact, these scofflaws are afforded a level of immunity that U.S. citizens don’t get.

Three things must change: Congress must create comprehensive immigration reform that deals with the fact that millions of illegal immigrants live here and will continue to do so. We must create national databases of drivers or citizenship that allow police to flag those convicted of drunken driving and similar crimes. And finally, we must take the crime of drunken driving seriously, forcing those caught driving drunk to install disabling equipment in cars or wear bracelets that activate disabling signals when behind the wheel of a car.

None of that will be simple. The crime and punishment behind drunken driving is complex even when citizenship is removed from the picture. But finding justice for crimes like these becomes nearly impossible when shadow residents are part of the problem.

We’ll need leadership from across the political spectrum, something that’s painfully absent right now. As Aurora heads into a congressional and state legislative election cycle, the timing has never been better to test potential leaders on questions like this. Without leadership and change, Aurora and all of Colorado can only expect more of the same.