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Tuesday, August 03, 2010

CASA de Maryland Expands Its Political Advocacy Arm

CASA de Maryland has decided to start a political action committee so it can endorse pro-Hispanic candidates who promise to defend its politically untouchable stream of public funds. CASA has been using the money to beat back any citizen challenges to Maryland's current sanctuary status.

The CASA in Action PAC will build upon CASA's past success in making Maryland taxpayers pay to watch their state and local officials fall all over each other to provide the most services to people with no legal right to be in the United States. So this latest venture into partisan politics is hardly new. The PAC just makes it official.

Since 2005, the open-borders group has hauled in at least $7.6 million in the form of outright subsidies, community development tax credits, government-issued bonds, grants and heavens knows what else. It's used tax dollars to fund day laborer sites, organize a protest against Arizona's new immigration law, and even file a lawsuit against a Frederick County sheriff for arresting a woman wanted on a deportation warrant.

Even while they were staring at a $2 billion budget deficit earlier this year, state legislators defeated, by a lopsided vote of 47-89, an amendment offered by House Minority Leader Anthony O'Donnell, R-Calvert, to strip CASA of yet another $200,000 the group was allocated from the state's capital budget.

CASA in Action has already raised $45,000 from 5,000 dues-paying members, according to Kim Propeack, director of community organizing and political action. CASA organizers say they hope to harness the "enormous unrealized potential of the Latino vote" in Maryland, where, thanks in large part to political pressure from CASA, local elections officials cannot demand proof of citizenship and election judges cannot even demand to see a voter's ID.

The PAC's current agenda includes issuing Maryland driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, fighting efforts to make English the official state language, lobbying for more funding for nonprofits like CASA, and stopping raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

Evidence of CASA's political clout was recently on display. Despite deep budget cuts that forced some county employees to take unpaid furloughs, the Hyattsville-based group was miraculously spared.

It received $2.1 million from local governments ($1.3 million from Montgomery County alone) even though its other sources of revenue include deep-pocketed billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute and Citgo, Venezeula's state-owned oil company.

Read more at the Washington Examiner

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

why are my tax dollars supporting an organization like this? if the beaners want help use their tax dollars! oh yeah that's right they don't pay taxes!

Anonymous said...

Stop buying gas from Hugo is a start.

Concerned Retiree said...

And no one knows where to start cutting the Budget? Cannot blame anyone but the Democrats for allowing this. Anyone who tries to thinks MD Tax Payers is to stupid to know MD has alwys been a Liberal / Demcratic State politically.