White House Pushes ‘Abolish ICE!’ for November Election

“Abolishing ICE Would Mean Abolishing America’s Borders— and Opening the Floodgates to Crime, Drugs, and Terrorism,” says a statement from the White House.

The campaign-style statement echoes the White House’s political push to persuade voters that Democrats as pro-migration advocates. That task is fairly straightforward because multiple polls show that a large slice of the party’s base strongly supports the exemption of most migrants from the nation’s popular immigration laws.

Democrats are using videos and sympathetic media coverage of migrant children to persuade suburban voters — especially among women — to cast voters against President Donald Trump in the November election. The strategy makes sense, partly because many well-off suburban voters are squeamish about the immigration policies which protect blue-collar neighborhoods from cheap-labor migration, MS-13 recruits, and a flood of children who require expensive specialized help in schools.

However, the White House has not championed immigration enforcement as an economic benefit to white-collar suburbanites, despite the widespread use of cheap-labor, white-collar foreign workers.

The new administration statement provides the numbers for GOP politicians to hang the Abolish ICE! campaign around the neck of their November opponents. It says:

Abolishing ICE would mean abolishing the agency that deports terrorist aliens from the United States.

ICE was created in 2003 to better protect national security and public safety after 9/11 terrorists exploited lax immigration rules to gain entry into the United States and murder thousands of Americans.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks found that many of the 9/11 hijackers committed violations like overstaying tourist visas or attending flight schools without an appropriate visa.

Yet even now— years after the 9/11 foreign terrorists murdered thousands of innocent Americans— the U.S. continues to have hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals that illegally overstay their visa each and every year.

In FY16 alone, roughly 629,000 foreign nationals unlawfully overstayed their visa.

Visa overstays account for roughly 40 percent of all illegal immigration in the United States. Without ICE, all of these foreign nationals unlawfully residing in the United States in violation of their visas would be allowed to remain indefinitely.

ICE protects public safety by removing dangerous criminal aliens from our communities.

During FY17, ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arrested more than 125,000 aliens with criminal records.

Criminal aliens arrested by ICE ERO in FY17 were responsible for:

More than 80,000 DUI offenses
More than 76,000 dangerous drug offenses
More than 48,000 assault offenses
More than 11,000 weapon offenses
More than 5,000 sexual assault offenses
More than 2,000 kidnapping offenses
More than 1,800 homicide offenses

ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) made 4,818 arrests related to gang activity in FY17.

Abolishing ICE would mean illegal aliens, who pose a threat to public safety, would be allowed to roam free instead of being removed from the country – resulting in countless preventable deaths and injuries.

Seizing Deadly Drugs.

Abolishing ICE would mean more dangerous illegal drugs left in circulation, causing thousands to needlessly suffer

ICE plays a critical role in seizing dangerous illegal drugs and combatting the drug crisis facing our nation.

ICE HSI seized more than 980,000 pounds of narcotics in FY 2017, including thousands of pounds of the deadly drugs fueling the opioid crisis.

ICE HSI seized 2,370 pounds of fentanyl and 6,967 pounds of heroin.

ICE HSI logged nearly 630,000 investigative hours directed towards fentanyl.

Abolishing ICE would leave these deadly drugs in our communities to cause more devastation.

The crime-and-drugs pitch, however, ignores the economics of legal and illegal immigration.