In the latest chapter of the great illegal immigrant sob story, turns out the post office hasn't bothered to deliver a number of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewals on by the tight Oct. 5 deadline set by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. At first glance, it looked like another activist dance from the lawyers lobby representing some sad-sacks who just can't quite follow the rules. Thirty-three applicants out of 122,000 did not have their mailed applications into the hands of the immigration authorities on time.

But the New York Times story does show that the DACA recipients' complaints have merit. The DREAMers they cited really did mail their renewal applications in on time, sometimes three weeks ahead of time. They had tracking and certified mail evidence. They followed the procedures they were asked to follow, in good faith, using a U.S. government service. The fact is, they did get stiffed by the post office which never bothered to deliver their paperwork in the time needed to fulfill the bureaucratic requirement. Welcome to Honduras.

Yet now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is the bad guy for having any rules at all. Just as America is to blame for the actions of the DACA recipients' parents, so now the immigration bureaucrats are to blame for the lousy service of the post office, according to what's implied in the Times report.

Except that it really is the post office that's the problem. And its incompetence affects all of us, not just illegals. As anyone who sells eBay or uses the postal service frequently knows, the post office not only delays packages, it loses them, and sometimes steals them. It questionably alters timelines on tracking as items move through the system to cover its keister. And if you complain, they will tell in a form email that you you didn't put a return address on your package, no matter how irrelevant to the case, even if you have photographic evidence that you did. In the most egregious cases, where the postal service has clearly lost a package, they do not bother to compensate. It's all on you, the consumer. They never make mistakes and they are never held accountable.

Which raises the question: Why does it take complaints from DACA recipients to draw any media attention to the pervasive problem of incompetence at the post office, which has accelerated its slide downhill since the Obama years? Where are the stories of lost and stolen mail, the lack of transparency on the bad personnel committing it, the discontent of the good employees whose work is sullied by the unpunished miscreants? I see these stories in the local press occasionally but nothing in the mainstream news. It's a national problem but it gets no attention without DACA.

In a way, it's a nice prospect to imagine the leftwing La Raza lawyers squaring off against the incompetent Democrat-aligned postal service in a fine case of leftwing-on-leftwing rage. But it's not happening that way. The blame is going to the immigration bureaucrats instead, and they are the ones being asked to alter their way of doing business, not the post office. The post office should be on the spot, but the Times and the activist lawyers it quotes would have you believe the problem is the immigration service's rigid deadlines and the wicked, heartless Jeff Sessions who set them. It wouldn't dream of blaming the leftwing, unioned up, Democrat-supporting postal service whose problem hubs are located in one-party cities such as Chicago, and which have been making life miserable for all postal customers as a result. What's more, the press rarely ever reports on the obvious problems of corruption and incompetence the post office has slid into otherwise. It takes DACA, that shibboleth of the left, its beneficiaries for whom no service or favor should be denied, to draw any attention to the festering ongoing problem of bad postal service Americans have been enduring for years.

Do I feel sympathy for the DACA renewal applicants who got stiffed by the post office? Yes, I do. Do I think they should be shown leniency in the wake of this incompetence. Yes, probably. But what really needs attention is reforming how the postal service does business. Hard reforms are what's required most of all, and a hoseout of dishonest and incompetent personnel. If DACA's recipients' issus are the only way to do it, well then, let's roll. But why does it take DACA sob stories to get any spotlight onto such a universal and long-festering problem?