Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) will introduce Tuesday what is arguably the sharpest official rebuke yet attempted of the “Abolish ICE” movement in the form of a scathing Senate resolution, Breitbart News has learned.
In the resolution’s crosshairs: Antifa and other left-wing activists involved in attempts to obstruct U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and encourage harassment campaigns against ICE employees. More pointedly, the resolution condemns by name the Democratic politicians who have made common cause with them.
Mentioned by name is Portland, Oregon, Mayor Ted Wheeler, who the National ICE Council, the Portland Police Association, and others have accused of ordering his police officers to stand down and ignore federal employees’ requests to help keep their workplaces open and protect them from leftists following them home from work. Cassidy’s draft resolution calls on Wheeler “to immediately resign so that a leader committed to protecting all law-abiding citizens and public servants from harm can assume the duties of Mayor of Portland.”
Also specifically named are New York Democratic candidates Cynthia Nixon and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, running for New York Governor and the U.S. House, respectively, and both ardent supporters of the Abolish ICE movement.
The Hollywood Reporter learned this month that Ocasio-Cortez, riding the wave of popular attention from her winning her party’s nomination over long-time incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY), made common cause with one of the most radical groups working to undermine federal immigration enforcement, holding a fundraiser with Occupy ICE LA. She made the decision to do so after the same group used its Facebook page to call ICE Enforcement a “genocidal ethnic cleansing machine” and liken its employees to Nazi Germany’s Gestapo.
More seriously, Occupy ICE LA has also posted the names and photographs of ICE employees in Southern California, urged its followers to share these images, and asks their supporters to “LET THE GESTAPO KNOW: GET OUT OF LA!”
In response, Cassidy’s resolution “expresses solidarity with the men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement who bring human traffickers, drug traffickers, gang members, and violent criminals to justice” and “condemns the doxxing and targeted harassment of all officers and employees of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the violent threats they continue to endure from leftwing activists.”
No other senators have thus far announced plans to sign on to Cassidy’s resolution.
A previous attempt at a congressional resolution to support ICE in the face of the Abolish ICE movement, which on its own terms would effectively end systematic interior enforcement of American immigration laws, passed the House of Representatives in July. Senate Democrats, led by Wheeler’s fellow Oregonian and anti-immigration enforcement stalwart Sen. Jeff Merkley, shot down a companion resolution in the Senate before it came to a vote.
The votes above forced elected nearly 200 elected Democrats to explicitly oppose condemning abolition of ICE, showcasing the growing, open support for abolishing ICE among more than simply left-wing outsiders like Ocasio-Cortez and Nixon. The street activists of the extreme left have long called for ending all immigration enforcement, but have been ignored by the mainstream Democratic Party, whose voters remain deeply opposed to such a policy.
With this most recent outpouring of “Abolish ICE” enthusiasm, however, elected Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), perhaps feeling they knew which way the political winds were blowing, rushed out onto a limb to endorse the movement. Even veteran left-wingers like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) were reluctant to cave to the immense activist pressure to join them.
With Sen. Cassidy’s resolution, the Senate GOP may be setting up yet another sounding of the Democratic benches on the issue, seeing how many will stand with the Abolish ICE movement and how many, if any, will break ranks with their colleagues who have already thrown in with the activists working to obstruct and harass federal agents.