This is just the latest chapter in a story that we've been hearing far too often lately, particularly in the past few years. A man named Jean Torres-Roman was arrested this month for robbing a Denver jewelry store, pistol-whipping and threatening the lives of two female employees in the process. Making matters worse, Torres-Roman turned out to be a member of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. (They would have known this if anyone had bothered to pull his shirt collar down a bit and look at his tattoos.) The nasty icing on this unpleasant cake came when it was revealed that Torres-Roman had already been arrested in Chicago but was released by a judge there despite the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a detainer for him and asked that he be held until he could be picked up and processed for removal as a criminal illegal immigrant. The judge ignored the request. (NY Post)

A member of Venezuela’s notorious Tren de Aragua gang was released by a Chicago judge despite a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain him — just a month before he was charged in a violent jewelry store heist in Dever, The Post can reveal.

Jean Torres-Roman was arrested this month in the shocking caught-on-camera robbery from June 25, in which two female staffers at a Denver jewelry store were pistol-whipped and threatened with death. Authorities have since identified the 21-year-old as a member of the Venezuelan prison gang.

But just a month earlier, Torres-Roman was arrested over 1,000 miles away in Chicago and charged with unlawful use of a weapon after he was caught trying to stash a stolen gun, according to CWB Chicago.

According to ICE, Torres-Roman crossed the border in El Paso illegally in October of last year. He did not come to America "for a better life." He immediately went back to work with his fellow gang members who had already been relocating to the United States in alarming numbers. Fortunately for him, Chicago is a sanctuary city, so the judge in his case ignored ICE's request to hold him over. To the surprise of nobody, he failed to appear for a mandatory court appearance on May 13 and he had been in the wind ever since until last week.

Torres-Roman did not act alone during the Denver jewelry store heist. He had seven accomplices, but he was the only one that authorities were able to identify and pursue. This was not a simple armed robbery. This was a gang attack. It's shocking that the two female store clerks managed to escape with their lives, but they can't be sleeping very well at night knowing that the other seven gangbangers are out there somewhere on the loose.

If this were some isolated incident outside of normal patterns, that would be one thing. But it's not. This has been increasingly becoming the norm. Venezuela is not sending us their best and their brightest. They are flushing out their prisons and their gang members are seeking "new opportunities" in the United States. People like Jean Torres-Roman have been "pardoned in place" by the Biden administration for nearly four years now. Of course, "pardon in place" is something that Joe Biden made up out of whole cloth in violation of our existing immigration laws, but that hasn't slowed him down.

When we do manage to get our hands on one of these Venezuelan gangbangers, liberal, leftist judges in sanctuary cities ignore ICE requests and detainers and simply cut them loose again. Keep in mind that as recently as in 2018, then-Senator Kamala Harris called for the defunding of ICE and asked her fellow Senators to reject Donald Trump's request for funding to hire additional Border Patrol personnel. Since becoming her party's presumptive nominee this year, Harris has begun to change her tune slightly, suggesting that "more needs to be done" about the southern border. But this is all simply too little, too late. She showed us who she was during her time in the Senate and as our complete failure of a border czar. We should have believed her.