Trump’s game of chicken
The first and last mission of the Department of Homeland Security is to keep Americans safe, enforcing the nation’s immigration laws as an essential piece of that puzzle. All Americans should take alarm at the agency’s sure and steady perversion under President Trump into a force deporting immigrants indiscriminately and, what’s worse, ineffectively when it comes to the hardened criminals who should have no place in this country.
“We have some bad hombres here and we’re going to get them out,” promised candidate Trump.
Yeah, right. One by one by one, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is plucking for ejection upstanding immigrants, pillars of their communities, because at some point a judge or customs agent deemed them deportable — as dictated by Trump’s January executive order to prioritize “removable aliens” for deportation.
Last week it was beloved Indiana restaurateur Roberto Beristain, shipped back to Mexico — a heartbreak to his American wife, a Trump voter who had believed the President meant he would only toss dangers to society.
The week before, it was Drs. Pankaj Satija and Monika Ummat, who had been treating children in Houston for 15 years and got a temporary reprieve, but no guarantees, from orders to leave the U.S.
Thank goodness, Juan Vivares of Colombia is for now back in the Bronx with his U.S. citizen wife and baby, after an asylum glitch left him an open target for ICE.
By the same perversity, ICE is proving itself far more committed to demonizing so-called sanctuary cities like New York as friendly hosts to savage criminals than it is to actually finding a way to purge those criminals effectively.
Cooperation, not confrontation, is the key to ejecting dangerous illegal immigrants — if only Trump & Co. would go that route.
ICE each week releases a report compiled for the purposes of preparing to withhold federal funding from cities that refuse to honor federal requests, known as detainers, to hold individuals for up to 48 hours so that ICE may pick them up.
New York City cooperates with such requests only when they concern individuals previously convicted of one of 170 serious crimes, and where accompanied by a warrant from a federal judge. Which is to say almost never, so high is the bar, to ensure against arbitrary arrest and shield the city from liability in case ICE fingered the wrong guy.
So far this year, the NYPD and Department of Correction have received upwards of 150 requests and complied with precisely none.
Meanwhile, actual bad guys are bound to elude customs officials’ grasp because tough-guy Trump ditched a workable alternative President Obama devised — which enabled cities to alert ICE to a dangerous crook’s release.
Instead of doing the smart thing, ICE piles up the detainers sky high, all to make the case that New York and other sanctuary cities deserve defunding. Wise up. Please.