ICE spokesman quits over Sessions’ ‘false’ statements

James Schwab blasts ‘misleading facts’ on immigrant arrests.

A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has resigned over what he described as “false” and “misleading” statements made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and ICE acting director Thomas Homan.

James Schwab worked out of the agency’s San Francisco office until he abruptly quit last week. He said he had been told to “deflect” questions about the Oakland mayor’s interference with an ICE raid last month and to refer reporters to statements from Sessions and Homan that suggested that hundreds of “criminals” (“criminal aliens,” Homan called them) escaped capture in Northern California because the mayor tipped them off.

“I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts,” Schwab told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time and I quit.”

Sessions, Homan and President Donald Trump sharply criticized Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Democrat, for issuing a public warning in late February about an imminent ICE raid throughout the region. At the time, Schaaf said she wanted to protect “law-abiding” immigrants from “the constant threat of arrest and deportation.”

Schwab also criticized the mayor’s warning as “misguided,” but he told Fox affiliate KTVU after resigning that ICE ended up capturing 232 suspected undocumented immigrants — even more than officials had originally expected. About half of the people picked up had felonies or misdemeanors on their records, officials say.

In the raid’s aftermath, officials in Washington had repeatedly suggested that hundreds of criminals had escaped because of the mayor’s actions.

Homan said in a news release that “864 criminal aliens and public safety threats remain at large in the community, and I have to believe that some of them were able to elude us thanks to the mayor’s irresponsible decision.”

The ICE director went further the next day, according to the Chronicle, when he said “there’s 800 that we are unable to locate because of that warning” — essentially blaming all the escapees on the mayor.

Then, last week, Sessions gave a speech in Sacramento. “How dare you?” he asked the mayor. “Those are 800 wanted criminals that are now at large in that community, 800 wanted criminals that ICE will now have to pursue by other means, with more difficulty, in dangerous situations, all because of one irresponsible action.”

These figures propagated across news outlets. At a campaign rally over the weekend in Pennsylvania, Trump told the crowd that ICE had been prepared to arrest “close to 1,000 people” but got “a fraction” of that, thanks to the mayor — and called Schaaf a disgrace.

As the regional ICE spokesman, Schwab said this week, he had wanted to set the record straight. The officials from Washington had been referring to the raid’s target list of about 1,000 people, he said, but immigration sweeps never net anywhere close to the total number of targets.

“I didn’t feel like fabricating the truth to defend ourselves against [the mayor’s] actions was the way to go about it,” he told the Chronicle.