President Joe Biden’s administration is enabling the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to banish the union representing 6,800 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Last week, the Washington Times‘s Stephen Dinan reported that the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) — representing about 700,000 federal government employees — was given the green light by Biden’s Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) to eliminate the National ICE Council from its membership.
“It is clear that the AFGE Council 118 remains steadfast in their desire to no longer be a part of AFGE or the broader labor movement,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said in a July statement. “As a result, we have made the difficult decision to disclaim interest in this unit.”
Now, the thousands of ICE agents once represented by the union will have no collective bargaining agreement with the DHS.
The union-busting comes, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) notes, as the National ICE Council had filed a Department of Labor complaint against AFGE alleging “misuse of funds, sexual harassment, and other wrongdoing.”
“There is no doubt that ICE and DHS leadership worked in unison with corrupt union bosses to make this happen,” National ICE Council President Chris Crane told the Times:
DHS and AFGE leadership both wanted desperately to silence ICE Council whistleblowers. Without a union, it’s doubtful those whistleblowers will have jobs much longer. [Emphasis added]
Oppositely, former President Donald Trump’s administration had majorly empowered the National ICE Council. As Trump was leaving office, his DHS officials sought an agreement that would have allowed the union to negotiate ICE policy with agency leadership.
For ICE agents, the union-busting is only the latest move by the Biden administration to cripple their abilities as an immigration law enforcement agency. Biden’s so-called “sanctuary country” policies, challenged in court, helped gut ICE arrests and deportations of illegal aliens, including known convicted criminals.
In fiscal year 2021, for instance, fewer than 60,000 illegal aliens were deported.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.