A coalition of mayors from Mexican border cities recently made a jaw-dropping, absurdly out-of-line request for the United States to stop deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes to their cities.

Turns out they aren’t welcome in Mexico any more than in the United States, but the point is that they shouldn’t be OUR problem.

The astounding numbers cited by the mayor of Ciudad Juarez highlight the need for the U.S. to focus even MORE sharply on finding illegal-immigrant criminals and deporting them in increased numbers.

Of the 80,000 people deported to Juarez in the past three years, 28,000 had U.S. criminal records, including 7,000 convicted rapists and 2,000 convicted murderers. Surely that has something to do with more than 2,200 murders that have been reported in Juarez this year alone.

The Juarez mayor understandably doesn’t want criminals landing in his city, but we don’t either.

As we’ve pointed out before, border crime is a confounding problem for the U.S. because our state and federal governments are severely constrained by policy makers and judges about what they can do to fix it. Drug cartels have piggy-backed on the illegal immigration flow that has become almost unstoppable, and are now importing their violence north of the border, as well as in cities like Juarez.

The Mexican government is culpable in the violence that occurs in border cities to an extreme degree, starting with an undeniable corruption problem created by brutal intimidation that can either turn mayors into criminals or corpses. A simple Google search for “Mexico beheadings” turns up an eye-popping list of recent news stories. You can also find deaths by stoning and all other manner of brutality.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico who are prosecuted for crimes in the United States do usually serve their terms in American prisons, but afterwards they are typically bused back to Mexican border cities. The border city mayors want them deported into the interior of Mexico, at U.S. expense. If they want them elsewhere, then they need to make that happen.

“It’s almost perverse that foreign officials would blame us for sending their criminals back to their country,” said a representative of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Sovereignty entails responsibility. The (U.S.) needs to take responsibility for its own criminals and other countries — Mexico included — need to take responsibility for their own criminals and deal with them.”

It’s as simple as that.