An illegal alien from Mexico charged with sexually abusing an 8-year-old girl has racked up nearly $1 million in medical bills, courtesy of the American taxpayer.
In fact, 49-year-old Gerardo Valerio-Romero’s tab for cancer treatment has all but bankrupted the local jail in Utah County, where he’s being held awaiting trial for six counts of assaulting his own young stepdaughter, along with eight felony charges for forgery and one count of illegally possessing someone else’s I.D. -- all while getting free medical treatment on the taxpayer's dime.
The Washington Post reports:
Even at a discount, Valerio-Romero’s cancer treatments have drained the county jail’s medical budget. His case is set for trial early next month, and he’s caught the interest of federal immigration officials who will look at possibly deporting him if he’s acquitted. Until then, he’s in Utah’s court system, where his case is stalled and costs from his treatment continue to climb.
Valerio-Romero was arrested back in March of last year, but his trial was postponed twice after he requested a new lawyer and again when he turned down a plea deal, the Post reports. In the meantime, he's managed to cost the county nearly a million bucks in cancer treatments.
The criminal alien’s medical bills have threatened the county jail’s bottom line so bad, in fact, that Sheriff Jim Tracy announced he was resigning effective August 3, largely thanks to budgetary stress stemming from having to fork over Valerio-Romero’s medical costs and figuring out which governmental body bears responsibility for paying it.
Now, the County Commission is scrambling to shift tax dollars around from other public services so they can cover this one inmate’s mounting expenses – despite the fact that he shouldn’t even be here in the first place.
Keep in mind (if you can stand to hear it) that this is just one illegal alien inmate in a sea of similar stories across the country. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates illegal aliens make up roughly 28 percent of all federal inmates. Given there are about 183,800 total inmates in our federal prisons, this puts the illegal alien population at about 51,500 individuals.
According to the Federal Register, each of those prisoners costs an average of $31,977.65 per year, meaning that illegal alien felons alone cost American taxpayers about $1.6 billion annually.
And this doesn’t even begin to count those being held in state prisons and local jails, including Valerio-Romero.
But leave it to the poor folks in Utah County to pick up the tab for a serial child molester’s chemo rather than boot him back to Mexico so they can deal with their own creep. After all, what are Americans if not the rest of the world’s pocketbook?