California’s Democratic politicians are blocking the deportation of criminals aliens, breaking up anti-drug task forces, and deceiving the public, the director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday evening.
Director Thomas Homan delivered his broadside against Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi in a press call arranged by the White House the evening before President Donald Trump flies out to the state — and eight months before the nation goes to the polls in November.
The blast was aimed at comments from the three Democrats who are defending the state’s effort to shield foreign criminals from being deported The criminals are being protected despite the danger they pose to Americans and the low-wage illegal immigrants who are recruited to provide cheap services to the state’s upper-income professionals and business executives.
Homan cited Pelosi’s March 7 comment that “President Trump decided to terrorize innocent immigrant families in the Bay Area with his unjust and cruel raids … [We] will fight all cowardly attacks on our immigrant communities.”
“First of all, we don’t arrest innocent people — either they are here in violation of federal law, or they’ve had their due process, ordered removed, and they ignored a judge’s order,” Homan responded to the reporters. He continued:
I want to remind everyone that the L.A. [enforcement] operation we did last month, 88 percent of everybody we arrested were convicted criminals. If you look at what we did in the state of California last year, 81 percent … were convicted criminals … How dare she say we are terrorizing immigrant communities!
You know what is terrorizing immigrant communities? The four people we arrested for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon during that operation, the five people who were convicted of carrying concealed weapons, the four people that were arrested for cruelty to a child, the two people arrested for cruelty to a wife, the six people we arrested who were convicted for domestic violence, the one person that was convicted for drug trafficking, [and] the one person who was convicted for lewd and lascivious acts with a minor.
I can go on and on and on … The people that we arrested, the people that weren’t detained by [Californian] local jurisdictions, these are the ones that are terrorizing the immigrant community. Our ICE officers are protecting the immigrant community, in many ways.
Homan also directly slammed Feinstein’s March 7 statements, which said:
The Trump administration continues to attack California in an attempt to score points with the president’s political base. These attacks are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
“We’ve seen time and again that this administration is targeting all undocumented immigrants for deportation. Immigrants who are law-abiding, working and contributing to their communities are just as likely to be picked up as those with serious criminal records and who pose a threat to public safety. It makes no sense.
“These attacks are unacceptable,” Homan responded, adding:
First of all, we don’t arrest law-abiding people. We arrest people in the country illegally and in violation of federal law. Let me be clear. There is no [legal] prerequisite — they [don’t have] to commit another crime for us to enforce immigration law. That is what we do. That is what Congress has empowered us to do — enforcing immigration law. law. If people don’t like it, people like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein can certainly change the law. They are legislators.
Feinstein, said Homan, “voted for the very laws that we are enforcing.”
Homan also put the boot into Gov. Brown, who said March 7:
We’re not protecting criminals. We have a law that says exactly the opposite. And any time [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions or Immigration [and Customs Enforcement] wants to work to help deport criminals in this state, we’ll be glad to help him.
But new laws championed by Brown try to block Homan’s ICE agent from picking illegals up when they are detained at state jails.
Homan responded:
If he really believes that, we would have full access to his jails. They’ve locked [illegal immigrants] up, they’ve took their freedom away, they obviously are a threat to public safety, [so] give us access to those people.
Homan said that California politicians have also barred state officials from sharing data about gang membership with federal officers. That means ICE agents can’t create task forces with state officials to break up drug gangs that include many illegal immigrants, he said. “If they really care about criminal justice, why did the block our access … we no longer that any more … This isn’t [just] about immigration enforcement.”
Brown, however, spotlighted the Democrats’ unspoken economic rationale for keeping millions of illegal immigrants in the state, which now leads the nation in relative poverty and the economic distance between the rich and the poor. He said:
[Sessions and ICE are] going after men, women, and children — some who have worked 10 or 20 years picking our food, washing our dishes, building houses.
The Democratic-led elite which runs the state is fully vested in protecting their wage-lowering population of illegal-immigrant service workers. In her March 7 statement, Pelosi declared:
The people of California will not be bowed by the Trump administration’s brazen aggression and intimidation tactics. Californians will continue to proudly keep our doors open to the [illegal] immigrants who make America more American. We will fight this sham lawsuit and will fight all cowardly attacks on our [illegal] immigrant communities.
Pelosi’s charge of cowardice also prompted a blast from Homan.
To call what we do “cowardly attacks on immigrant communities” — she is talking about law enforcement people that get up every day and leave the safety of their secure homes and their families, and strap a gun to their hip every day, to defend this nation. That is the farthest thing from cowardly you have ever seen, so her quote was just beond the pale.
Democratic pressure groups are cheering and prodding Democratic leaders to oppose any and all enforcement operations by Homan’s agents, despite the economic and law-enforcement gains by Americans and legal immigrants. In New York, for example, Democratic leaders are conducting a similar legal blockade agast ICE to protect their restaurant industry’s supply of very low-wage workers, while progressive business leaders use their media influence to argue that Americans do not want to work.
A 2013 poll by Gallup showed that at least 138 million people worldwide want to migrate to the United States, partly to escape terrible conditions in their home countries, partly to help their children and families, and partly to get decent jobs. Without ICE to deter such mass migration, the huge inflow would aid investors by raising property prices, and aid employers by dropping American wage levels.
Immigration polls which ask people to pick a priority, or to decide which options are fair, show that voters in the polling booth put a high priority on helping their families and fellow nationals get decent jobs in a high-tech, high-immigration, low-wage economy. Those results are very different from the “Nation of Immigrants” polls which are funded by CEOs and progressives, and which pressure Americans to say they welcome migrants.