Hot Air is reporting that ICE has been hard at work enforcing the Immigration Laws with a renewed vigor not seen in quite a long time, apprehending and deporting illegal aliens who have been convicted of other crimes, such as rape, assault and drug offensives, besides violating the immigration laws. 114 have been picked up from New York City alone. However, that operation is just the beginning of what ICE has planned. Officials of so-called sanctuary cities have better beware.
The acting head of ICE proposes arresting officials of ‘sanctuary cities’
Thomas Holman, the acting head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, is mulling charging city officials in so-called “sanctuary cities” for violating federal anti-smuggling laws. Certain cities, such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, have made it a practice of releasing illegal aliens who have been charged with crimes without first informing ICE so that it might want to pick them up and deport them. One such illegal alien shot Kathryn Steinle to death in San Francisco, causing a nationwide scandal.
Hot Air also cites Federal Law that makes it makes anyone who “conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor or shield from detection, such alien in any place” subject to a felony charge.
Many of the practices of governments of “sanctuary cities,” which includes barring ICE agents from courthouses and access to criminal databases, would seem to be in violation of that law.
The political fallout would be grand
Holman’s musings set up the delicious possibility of ICE agents arriving at a number of city halls and putting mayors in cuffs and perp walking them for the edification of the TV cameras.
People who have become weary of the flagrant disregard on the part of some local governments to the immigration laws will no doubt love it. President Trump will especially be exuberant. However, nothing that the Trump administration has done so far will be more designed to outrage a certain sector of the American population, the media certainly.
Such an action would be almost if not entirely without precedent. No clear record exists, for example, of the feds arresting local government officials who defied civil rights laws, the last case the United States has of widespread defiance of federal authority on the part of state and local governments.
What happens now?
So far the idea of arresting city officials, including mayors and chiefs of police, is just in the thinking about phase. However, it looks like that Holman has served notice that city governments defiance of federal law may, at last, severe consequences.
