The Trump regime has temporarily shut down a three-week-old campaign designed to shame undocumented immigrants and sanctuary cities—because the geniuses fucked up so much of the information included in the reports:
The weekly reports listed the crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants and shamed the local law enforcement agencies that supposedly didn’t notify ICE they had these alleged criminals in custody or didn’t cooperate with “detainer requests” that hold immigrants after they’re released so they can be picked up for deportation.
“These [sanctuary] jurisdictions have caused immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our Republic,” Trump wrote in the executive order signed five days after he took office in January.
Several police agencies questioned the accuracy of the reports. Since ICE started publishing the reports last month, they’ve issued eight corrections, an apology, and are now ceasing the report until an undisclosed amount of time.
"As ICE comes under increased scrutiny, people will be shocked to find how incompetent, unaccountable and rogue they are," immigrant rights leader Frank Sharry told USA Today. The multiple counties and law enforcement agencies Trump and his administration falsely attacked in the publications would probably agree:
The first report, issued March 20, confused three different Franklin counties in Iowa, New York and Pennsylvania. It incorrectly blamed Williamson and Bastrop counties in Texas for refusing ICE detainers even though the suspects in question had been transferred to other jurisdictions. And it falsely accused Chester County, Pa., and Richmond County, N.C., of not complying with detainer requests even though neither county had custody of the suspects in question.
The report also accused 10 local law enforcement agencies of being "non-cooperative" with ICE but did not document a single instance of those agencies refusing a detainer request.
"I don’t know how the hell we made the list," Montgomery County, Iowa, Sheriff Joe Sampson told The Des Moines Register.
One Trump-supporting commissioner in Pennsylvania initially thought the reports were a super duper idea ... until his department was falsely accused of being uncooperative:
Dave Keller, chairman of the Franklin County Commission in Pennsylvania, is a Trump supporter who said the weekly reports could be beneficial to spur local support for federal immigration enforcement. Yet his department was falsely named in the first report as being uncooperative, prompting a call from Keller to complain. ICE apologized and removed Franklin County from the next two reports.
You sorry yet, Dave? As America’s Voice notes, the premise of Trump’s nasty anti-immigrant crusade was “inconsistent with federal law” to begin with:
Purportedly, Trump is trying to call out and bully cities and localities where local law enforcement won’t hold undocumented immigrants for ICE to pick up for deportation. But federal judges have held that localities cannot hold immigrants if they have committed no crime.
Trump may love spending time in court, but local law enforcement departments have better things to do, like, you know, keeping their communities safe and building trust. Trump just needed a way to shame both undocumented immigrants and cities that have enacted pro-immigrant policies while they simultaneously follow federal law. So any victory when it comes to something like this is a victory for immigrants. Here’s hoping being "temporarily suspended" goes on for a long time.
