That collateral damage is courtesy of myopic local politicians focused more on trending social media topics rather than on pragmatic leadership.
(For the purpose of this article, let’s differentiate between undocumented immigrants with notable criminal activity such as prior deportations, DUI, identity theft, domestic violence and other blatantly dangerous misconduct, and undocumented immigrants whose only illegal activity is their presence or employment in the U.S. That is a topic for another day.)
All along, what ICE (a non-political government agency) has needed to do is this: remove criminal aliens from the country by picking them up directly from local jails and prisons upon their release. This requires local law enforcement to notify the feds that they have in custody inmates they seek, and to honor the federal holds of those inmates, such as Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, the man who eventually killed Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier in July 2015. Such cooperation, which has been in place for decades, would make taking custody of the bad guys easier and safer for ICE, and better for all of us, because it is done in the armed, enclosed safety of a lock-up.
Instead of ICE going to our local lock-ups last week, they went to workplaces to audit employers’ payroll records. But as a result, they also wound up arresting hundreds of people, including undocumented immigrants without criminal records (aside from their illegal presence in the U.S.). Good people who woke up in the morning planning to do nothing other than work hard and go home to their families wound up in federal custody because their workplace was visited by federal agents who ironically were not seeking them at all.
To read more of Daniel Guss' article, please click here.
Comments (0)