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This is the vindictiveness, pettiness, and cruelty of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on full display:
The Trump administration’s immigration chief warned Friday that his agents will be making more arrests in California neighborhoods and workplaces because Gov. Jerry Brown signed a “sanctuary state” law.
Tom Homan, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Brown’s decision to sign Senate Bill 54, which offers more protections for unauthorized immigrants, undermines public safety and hinders his department from performing its federally mandated mission, adding that “the governor is simply wrong when he claims otherwise.”
“ICE will have no choice but to conduct at-large arrests in local neighborhoods and at worksites, which will inevitably result in additional collateral arrests,” Homan threatened. But ICE agents have plenty of choices in choosing who to prioritize for arrest, and now they’re threatening an uptick in collateral arrests, a callous term they use to describe when undocumented immigrants who are not the target of a raid are arrested anyway because they happened to be there at the wrong time.
Now, ICE is promising even more unshackled chaos under the false narrative that so-called “sanctuary city” policies make localities less safe, when immigrants actually “commit far less and are far less likely to commit crime than native born Americans.” If anything, it’s the Trump administration that’s ushering in lawlessness by making immigrants so fearful of local law enforcement, that they’re no longer reporting when they’ve been the victim of sexual assault.
Mother Jones:
It’s likely that Brown expected a response like this, as he released a statement yesterday upon signing the bill that stresses that the legislation does not prohibit ICE from, well, anything. “This bill does not prevent or prohibit [ICE] or the Department of Homeland Security from doing their work in any way. They are free to use their own considerable resources to enforce federal immigration law in California,” he wrote. “[T]his bill strikes a balance that will protect public safety, while bringing a measure of comfort to those families who are now living in fear every day.”
At least for now, the state and ICE seem to be in a standoff.
“Despite the severe challenges that this law creates for ICE, we remain committed to our public safety mission,” Homan says in the statement, “and we will continue to do our sworn duty to seek out dangerous criminal aliens and other immigration violators.”
About that—internal ICE communications show emails detailing efforts to highlight only the most "egregious cases" of immigrants arrested in order to justify the administration’s racist narrative of “bad hombres” running amok. But for the most part, the agency had a hard time finding “egregious cases” to exploit because many of the undocumented immigrants they were sweeping up had no criminal record at all.
Now ICE is doubling-down on nativism by threatening to carry out even more arrests because California passed a law to protect immigrant families. Like Trump, this agency doesn’t care about public safety. It’s just about hitting back because you feel you’ve been slighted. This is our tax dollars at work.
