Here's a classic mega-sniffler headline from the Associated Press: Mexicans deported from US face shattered lives (August 24, 2008).

Oh, the horror of Mexicans forced to live in Mexico! Is there any more abominable cruelty?

The AP apparently believes not, as it notes every tear on every tiny cheek of every illegal alien child. Dreams are being crushed, families are forced to live apart and returnees must sleep on mattresses strewn on cold cement floors — all because of Americans' stubborn insistence on law and sovereignty.

Actually, only a small percentage of Mexicans and other illegal foreigners are self-deporting and being repatriated by ICE—an 11 percent decline in illegal residers since last August according to the numbers crunchers at CIS. While welcome in these quarters, the movement does not yet amount to a major re-population of Mexico with its outsourced citizens.

The towering black gate opens silently to an alley with walls of corrugated metal. Scrawled in large white letters on one wall is: "The End."

For those deported from the United States, the words are an unnecessary reminder. Nearly every hour of the day, guards unlock this gate that leads back into Mexico, clicking open the padlocks hung on each side, in each nation.

Every time the gate slams shut, it wipes out a dream, divides a family, ends a life lived in the shadows of the law.

Of course, there is no need for families to be separated. It's only the Mexicans' greed for American freebies that causes parents to be split from their kids. No one in the US government is keeping any dad or mom from taking little Jose Jr. back to the beloved homeland when the parent is deported.

After the obligatory recitation of sob story stuff, a few relevant statistics are revealed:

U.S. deportations have jumped by more than 60 percent over the past five years. Mexicans accounted for nearly two-thirds of those deportees, helping to roll back one of the biggest migrations of recent history. All along the border, shelters once full of people trying to cross into the United States are now home to thousands of deportees who sleep on mattresses strewn inches apart on cement floors. [...]

There are also criminals. The U.S. does not break down figures by country, but it has deported about 55,000 prisoners so far this year. One man walked through the gate in slippers with 80 cents in his pocket, after being picked up by police during a violent fight with his wife in their backyard.

Typically, even criminals are given vaguely sympathetic treatment by the AP, as seen in the previous paragraph. No kudos to ICE for deporting dangerous people, whose repatriation may prevent some terrible crime, like the San Francisco murders of three member of the Bologna family by a previously arrested MS-13 gang member and an illegal alien from El Salvador (Edwin Ramos).

I'll say it: Thanks, ICE, for deporting 55,000 bad guys. Let's have lots more of same!