IN THE PIPELINE:’Stunning degree of arrogance’

Last week I wrote about an issue that’s brought together both Republicans and Democrats in a rare show of united effort: the fight to free Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who are both serving more than 10-year prison sentences after being convicted for shooting a fleeing drug dealer at the Mexican border. Huntington Beach’s Rep. Dana Rohrabacher has been leading the charge to have the men freed (via a presidential commutation of sentence) and when I spoke to him recently he explained with passion and conviction why he is fighting so hard on behalf of the two agents. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and others have joined key Republicans in this matter, which seems to be picking up more momentum every day.

In the course of arranging the interview with Rohrabacher, I met someone else on his team who seems equally fired up about this issue, to a point where she has adopted it as a personal cause. Her name is Tara Setmayer, who is Communications Director, and shortly after I interviewed the congressman I chatted with Setmayer. Refreshingly blunt and direct, she picked up the story where Rohrabacher left off, and she may even be madder than he is about this.

“These two men took a million dollars in drugs off the street — everyone seems to forget that — and for a clerical error they’re rotting away in jail,” she said.

Setmayer describes how the gloves came off after the White House flat-out ignored Rohrabacher’s questions, charges and inquiries. All her team wanted, she explains, was to keep the men out of jail until additional hearings could be arranged. But no dice. Then she met Ramos’ mother, who touched her heart while igniting even more fire in her.

But the defining moment for Setmayer came during a visit to Yazoo, Miss. Accompanied by Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, Setmayer visited the jail where Ignacio Ramos was supposedly beaten mercilessly. At first the jail keepers acted as if nothing was wrong, giving the pair a tour of the facility as if that’s why they were there.

“No sense of urgency,” Setmayer recalled. “They knew why we were there, though, and they chose to stonewall, just like the administration has so far on every level of this case.”

When they finally were granted an audience with Ramos, they were disgusted at what they saw. He lifted his shirt to reveal severe boot marks on his back and purple, red and yellow bruises over his torso — telling evidence of his beating at the hands of about six other inmates.

And just how did the other inmates know that Ramos was among them? They had been allowed to watch the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” more specifically an episode that revealed the story of Ramos and Compean.

“Can you believe the vulnerable situation it put Ramos in? Letting them watch that show, knowing he would be on there,” Setmayer said. “Were it not for the Good Samaritan actions of another prisoner, he may have been killed. That prison has just one officer to watch over 147 prisoners, it’s almost totally unsupervised, so Ramos never had a chance.”

Seeing Ramos changed Setmayer’s life. She vowed at that moment to do anything and everything she could to help he and his partner get out of jail, so now Rohrabacher’s team has a new fighter from within. (She adds that after the beating it still took four months of “collective carping” from her and others to have Ramos moved to an Arizona jail where he now opts for solitary confinement, like Compean.) Today, both men are entitled to just one phone call every 30 days, for just 15 minutes each.

Setmayer and Rohrabacher stress the importance of writing the White House to demand pardons for both border patrol agents.

Rohrabacher sees the entire episode as a “complete abuse of power and stunning degree of arrogance by the federal government.”

In my opinion, even if these men were perhaps a bit sloppy in the reporting of this case, the punishment does not fit the crime. As well, the federal government has allowed the border to became such a chaotic, hopelessly dangerous place, that I’m not sure it has full rights to all of a sudden stick to some extreme letter of the law. Perhaps if they’d been enforcing laws all these years, the case could be made that agents must be letter perfect. But they haven’t. And so they’ve put agent’s lives at more risk than ever. These men took care of their country. I think it’s time their country — our country — took care of them.

Based on what you know, do you support Rohrabacher’s efforts to free the two border patrol agents?