Turn down heat before officers, public get hurt
The vilification of law enforcement by activists and politicians is yielding ugly results, and days ago we saw it play out right here in Newburyport.
As the Herald’s Rick Sobey reported, a Newburyport shop owner said said she found a sign hanging over a bridge next to her business Saturday morning that called her and her husband out for being “a danger to our community.” He works for the Department of Homeland Security, and she’s an immigrant from Ireland.
The sign was put up a day before Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids loomed across the country, and followed attacks on ICE facilities, including one in Washington state where police shot and killed a man armed with a rifle who tried to set a migrant center on fire.
“I’m afraid some person may be not all with it, and might take it further,” the shop owner told the Herald Tuesday about the threat. “It has put a target on our backs for radical haters.”
She has good reason to be concerned.
Last year, a Cambridge man offered to pay $500 to anyone who would kill an ICE agent. And that was just weeks after Sen. Elizabeth Warren railed against ICE on City Hall Plaza, calling for it to be replaced with “something that reflects our morality.”
The Newburyport shop owner, whose identity the Herald is withholding, was justifiably dismayed at the threat she had received. “I don’t get why they would target us,” she said. “Neither one of us are a threat to anybody, and we’ve had no qualms with anybody.”
Unfortunately, in 2019, being designated a symbol of evil is often as bad as the real thing — at least in the eyes of radical progressives.
U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton, who represents Newburyport, said in a statement: “Intimidating law enforcement agents is wrong and should be investigated.” That is all well and good, but the statement went on to interlace the work of border agents with immoral practices, saying, “ICE agents enforce the president’s policy, and the president’s policies of family separation, mass roundups and deportations is where people should focus their anger.”
In other words, ICE agents are just following orders. Hardly a full-throated defense.
Nearly every member of the Massachusetts delegation has cast aspersions on our law enforcement along the border, likening their facilities to concentration camps.
When an ICE facility was attacked this weekend, hardly a word of condemnation was heard from our elected representatives in the Bay State, the star-studded “squad” of freshman congresswomen or Democratic presidential candidates.
Detractors of ICE must pump the brakes and hit reverse. But far from slowing down on the divisive rhetoric, Democrats are cynically using the escalating tensions as a tool to collect data and fundraise. “Part of the #Squad?” Rep. Ayanna Pressley tweeted Tuesday. “Raise your hand and tell this racist Administration to #CloseTheCamps:” followed by a link to a “petition” where followers can provide their email addresses to a litany of PACs and Pressley’s own election committee.
All threats or acts of violence against law enforcement must be condemned. They cannot be tolerated or dismissed. ICE is law enforcement just like any other police agency and they must be treated as such.
Disrespect for those who protect us will only serve to endanger communities. It falls upon elected leaders to stop vilifying ICE for political gain. That agency is doing the hard work required to keep our country safe — just as it did during the Obama administration.