Yesterday I discussed the new report that ICE will be releasing weekly that will show which cities and counties refused detainers on illegal aliens in custody from ICE, meaning that they were let go rather than temporarily held. These are not good people. Every single one of them on the list were convicted of a serious crime. Yet, here’s the NY Times Editorial Board having a hissy fit
President Trump’s Reckless Shame Game
President Trump’s Homeland Security Department turned its immigration purge — and assault on the Constitution — up a notch this week. It posted the first of what it says will be weekly online reports identifying state and local law enforcement agencies that decline its requests to keep immigrants in jail to give federal agents time to pick them up.
The idea is to name and shame these agencies, accusing them of recklessly loosing dangerous aliens onto the streets. The report, on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, trumpets itself as a “Public Safety Advisory.†It includes a grim warning from the acting ICE director, Thomas Homan, about the agency’s requests, called detainers: “When law enforcement agencies fail to honor immigration detainers and release serious criminal offenders, it undermines ICE’s ability to protect the public safety and carry out its mission.â€
The accusation is dishonest. The report is a sham. And the claim of protecting public safety is ridiculous — dangerously so.
Dishonest! A sham!
When local authorities decline to honor ICE detainers, they can have any number of good reasons for doing so. A likely one is the Fourth Amendment, which forbids imprisoning anyone without justification. If a police department is about to release someone who posts bail, it can’t prolong the detention — in essence, arrest that person again — just because ICE asks it to. Federal courts have repeatedly ruled that the local police cannot be forced to honor a detainer in violation of the Constitution. That is, without an arrest warrant from a judge. Which an ICE detainer is not.
Without justification? How about that they are unlawfully present in the United States, and that the federal agency, tasked with enforcing immigration law which has roots in the Constitution, is asking to hold people who have been convicted of such crimes as domestic violence, driving under the influence, forgery, assault, drugs, traffic offenses, homicide, arson, cruelty towards wife, burglary, forgery, identity theft, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, kidnapping, indecent exposure to a minor, sexual offense towards a child, hit and run, and rape, and a few others.
Those are the people the NY Times is attempting to defend.
Beyond the constitutional problems lies an argument about public safety, which also finds the Trump administration on the wrong side of the facts, in service of a campaign of fear. Mr. Trump has been trying to make Americans fear unauthorized immigrants. He has succeeded in making these immigrants terrified of him, having declared open season on the undocumented, in effect making every one of 11 million people a priority for deportation. Nobody — not parents of citizen children, not students, not those with clean records and deep American roots — is above suspicion or safe from arrest.
Go back to the list of crimes. They should be afraid.
And now, with his ICE detainer bulletins, Mr. Trump wants local law enforcers to be afraid of him, too. He wants them to fear being publicly blamed for crime by immigrants, to have second thoughts about releasing anyone who might give the administration an excuse to brand them as complicit.
If cities, counties, and states are releasing illegal aliens with serious criminal convictions, they should be shamed and afraid. Did the NY Times EB even read the document, which outlines those crimes? Most likely, yes, and they don’t care.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
