Border Patrol Fights Back U.S. officials are refusing to hand over criminal aliens to California. Matthew Vadum
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269676/border-patrol-fights-back-matthew-vadum
The U.S. Border Patrol is reportedly fighting back against California’s openly seditious statewide sanctuary laws by refusing to hand over illegal aliens with felony warrants to police in California.
This makes perfect sense, according to the law of unintended consequences. It is an appropriate, tactically innovative way to counter California’s ridiculous laws that seek to nullify federal immigration legislation.
Rodney Scott, the chief patrol agent in the Border Patrol’s San Diego sector, previously said that the Golden State’s sanctuary laws were making normal cooperation between his agency and local law enforcement difficult.
This is because California now largely forbids cooperation with federal immigration authorities, a violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. State law there now imposes draconian restrictions on communication between local police and federal immigration enforcement, including information regarding when criminal aliens are scheduled to be released from local jails.
According to the Daily Caller, Scott recently entered into evidence a declaration in support of the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit aimed at California’s reckless sanctuary state laws.
In the declaration Scott recounted several instances in which San Diego sector border agents determined that they could not hand over custody of a criminal alien to local law enforcement because local officials could not be trusted to return the alien to federal custody after processing by the courts.
According to the news report:
“In each instance, the Border Patrol Agent determined it was not appropriate, consistent with his or her federal responsibilities to ensure the enforcement of immigration law, to release a criminal alien to the state and local law enforcement,” Scott said in a court declaration. “This was because, although the alien was subject to removal, if released to California law enforcement, the alien would ultimately be released into the public.”
So now Border Patrol agents, unlike California officials, are putting the public interest first. This effort aimed at the lawlessness of sanctuary jurisdictions is something that patriotic Americans should applaud.
For years jailers in California and other liberal states have been refusing to honor detainer requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE), often with disastrous results.
Felon and serial deportee Jose Inez Garcia Zarate killed Kate Steinle, 32, on July 1, 2015, after then-San Francisco sheriff Ross Mirkarimi (D), a wife-beating, driver license-suspended, gun permit-revoked, illegal alien-loving radical leftist ignored a detainer notice and put the Mexican national back on the streets.
Since Steinle’s untimely death, others have been killed by illegal aliens freed by detention centers that refused to respect ICE detainers, according to a long list compiled by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).
For example, in July 2016, Marilyn Pharis, 64, was raped, tortured, and murdered in her home in Santa Maria, Calif., allegedly by illegal alien Victor Aureliano Martinez Ramirez, a Mexican national, after a detainer was ignored and he was released from jail.
Two months later Danny Centeno-Miranda, 17, of Loudoun County, Va., was murdered by illegal alien Jose Espinosa De Dios, a citizen of Mexico, after the perpetrator was set free when a detainer was ignored.
Meanwhile, some local governments are revolting against California’s sanctuary laws.
After Los Alamitos in Orange County preliminarily approved a local ordinance defying the state law and filed an amicus curiae brief in the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against California, officials in Orange County and other cities say they may also opt out of the sanctuary state law. Officials in Aliso Viejo and Buena Park and up to another dozen localities are also considering opting out.
“This is important for us, for our city, for our community,” Warren Kusumoto (R), the mayor pro tempore of Los Alamitos and author of the ordinance said. “We are a little city in Orange County, but we’re tired of things coming out of Sacramento that just don’t make sense, and now others are telling us they feel the same way.”
Thursday on Fox News Channel, Michelle Steel (R), an immigrant from South Korea who is now a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, blamed Democrats for causing the problem. “Left-wing legislators” in the state capital “created this chaos,” she said.
Kusumoto said state lawmakers are “bullying” city leaders. Outside groups are having people call him at home from Washington, D.C., Wisconsin, and Florida and read from a script, he said.
Antsy Democrats have been slinging invective and abuse at Los Alamitos officials for days. California Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon (D) said the move by Los Alamitos was “a symbolic vote in favor of President Trump’s racist immigration enforcement policies.”
Kusumoto, whose grandparents came to the U.S. from Japan, ridiculed de Leon.
“The bullies on the left—they are out there trying to paint us as racist,” he said. “We’re not. Or they are trying to paint us as anti-immigrant, and we’re not. I come from immigrants—I am not anti-immigrant. That’s the sad part. Those who protest us paint a broad brush and they do it for effect.”
News of the rebellion against oppressive California laws came as the U.S. House of Representatives voted 256 to 167 yesterday to approve an omnibus spending bill that would fund the federal government through the end of the federal fiscal year on Sept. 30. The vote took place less than 24 hours after the text of the fiscal legislation was revealed. At least a brief partial shutdown seems likely because the U.S. Senate isn’t currently expected to vote on the bill until 1 a.m. on Saturday, an hour after the federal government’s legal authority to spend money runs out.
As expected, at a staggering 2,232 pages, the monster spending legislation that only became public late Wednesday forsakes conservatives in a multitude of ways. (The full text of the bill is available here.)
“A more complete betrayal of the electorate I have not witnessed. #omnibus[,]” conservative Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) tweeted soon after the vote.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) urged President Trump to veto the bill that is larded down with left-wing priorities. “Planned Parenthood, Gateway Bridge, Planned Parenthood, trillion dollar deficit, and no wall,” Jordan said.
But barring dramatic new developments, that is not going to happen. President Trump has already thrown away his bargaining power and capitulated on the Democrat-friendly omnibus bill.
“The president supports the bill, looks forward to signing it,” Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney said yesterday.
Why President Trump supports this omnibus measure is unclear. It undermines him.
Its enactment would hand Democrats a spectacular victory by failing to block the flow of federal grant monies to illegal alien-shielding sanctuary jurisdictions like San Francisco that brazenly obstruct federal immigration enforcement. The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Sanctuary cities should be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States every bit as much as the Confederates were when they opened fire on Fort Sumter.
The omnibus bill also provides barely any funding for the construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall that was a centerpiece of Trump’s election campaign. The bill contains $1.57 billion for limited border fencing and improved border enforcement technology, which is barely a fraction of the $25 billion the Trump administration originally sought for border security.
OMB’s Mulvaney said the omnibus bill funds 110 miles of border barriers, only 33 of which cover areas of open border that currently lack walls or fencing.
Last year the president vowed to construct the wall, which would require building on 700 to 900 miles, in his first term, but according to one calculation, at this rate it would take more than a decade to finish the job.
Even though Democrats obviously ran the table on Republicans during the omnibus negotiations, it still wasn’t enough for plenty of Democrats.
“Anyone who votes for the omnibus is voting for the deportation of Dreamers and other immigrants,” whined small-c communist congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) in a press release before the roll call vote.
“You will be voting to take money from law-abiding taxpayers – some of whom are immigrants – and give that money to privately-run prisons that will make a profit off of each and every human being our government hands over to them for detention and then deportation.”
A legislative fix allowing those who have benefitted from the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to receive legal certainty about their status in the country or perhaps an immigration amnesty was left out of the omnibus bill. There are around 700,000 DACA-eligible individuals who came as young people to the U.S. but they are a small subset of perhaps around 4 million or so so-called DREAMers, many of whom failed to apply for relief under DACA but who could conceivably qualify under the kind of amnesty Democrats want.
Although Trump ordered DACA ended back in September, an overreaching leftist judge ordered the administration to continue taking renewal applications under the program from status-holders who failed to meet an October deadline. The constitutionally dubious court order remains in effect.
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