Pirate's Cove

What a shame, ICE has had their political shackles taken off and have been allowed to do their jobs in arresting people who are in violation of duly passed federal law. This has given the Washington Post a sad

ICE arrests of ‘noncriminal’ immigrants double under Trump

(the web front page had the above headline. In the story it reads “Trump takes ‘shackles’ off ICE, which is slapping them on immigrants who thought they were safe”)

A week after he won the election, President Trump promised that his administration would round up millions of immigrant gang members and drug dealers. And after he took office, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers surged 40 percent.

Officials at the agency commonly known as ICE praise Trump for putting teeth back into immigration enforcement, and they say their agency continues to prioritize national security threats and violent criminals, much as the Obama administration did.

But as ICE officers get wider latitude to determine whom they detain, the biggest jump in arrests has been of immigrants with no criminal convictions. The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The category includes suspects facing possible charges as well as those without criminal records.

Arrests of those with criminal histories has not gone down during this period. It has gone slightly up. But, hey, unnamed critics have issues

Critics say ICE is increasingly grabbing at the lowest-hanging fruit of deportation-eligible immigrants to meet the president’s unrealistic goals, replacing a targeted system with a scattershot approach aimed at boosting the agency’s enforcement statistics.

Or, they could simply be arresting illegal aliens when they catch them. Quite a few of them are illegals who were already ordered deported years ago by federal judges after exhausting the legal system. Many were ordered deported during Obama’s years.

A Virginia mother was sent back to El Salvador in June after her 11 years in the United States unraveled because of a traffic stop. A Connecticut man with an American-born wife and children and no criminal record was deported to Guatemala last week. And an immigration activist in New York, Ravi Ragbir, was detained in January in a case that brought ICE a scathing rebuke from a federal judge.

“It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust,” said U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, reading her opinion in court before ordering ICE to release Ragbir.

“We are not that country,” she said.

Perhaps Judge Forrest should take a gander at federal statutes and use them as the basis of her judgements, rather than her feelings. Because each of those people are unlawfully present per federal law as passed by the Legislative Branch and signed into law by the Executive Branch head.

Here’s the money line

Immigrants whose only crime was living in the country illegally were largely left alone during the latter years of the Obama administration. But that policy has been scrapped.

The Washington Post just admitted that they are living in the country illegally. What more needs to be said? You can bet that all the people who support these law breakers would be rather upset if people were living illegally in their homes or on their properties, even if they had committed no other crimes. They’d be calling the police to have the squatters removed.

“As someone who has practiced law for 20-plus years, I find strange the idea the longer you get away with a violation, the less stiff the punishment should be, and that your continued violation of the law is basis for the argument that you shouldn’t suffer the consequences of that violation,” said Matthew O’Brien, director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which backs Trump’s approach.

So many of those who are being picked up and having the media be all sympathetic have been here a long time. They’ve gamed the system and run through all legal options, and been ordered deported. It’s really simple.