American voters widely agree that criminal illegal aliens should be removed from the country. Even former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton acknowledged this consensus and advocated deporting criminal aliens during her failed 2016 campaign. “My priorities are [to]deport criminals — violent criminals — as fast as we can,” she said. “[We should] deport anybody that we think even has a possible link to terrorism.”
However, that line of thinking is considered too extreme now that Donald Trump is president. Lawmakers like Representative Lou Correa (D-CA) claim that recent efforts to detain immigration violators have “caused fear and uncertainty for many constituents,” and wants to know what the “agency’s priorities for removal” are. Protests have broken out across the nation from Texas to Wisconsin deriding what the media is condemning as immigration “raids” sanctioned by President Trump.
The so-called “raids” have focused primarily on illegal aliens with previous criminal convictions. Of the arrests made during the increased efforts, 75 percent have been of aliens with felony convictions. This isn’t stopping open border proponents from searching through the arrests for poster-cases to vilify the efforts, focusing on stories like the apprehension of a 35-year-old mother who used a fraudulent Social Security number after entering the United States illegally – a felony conviction.
Despite the unprecedented outrage over immigration officials doing their jobs, operations like this occurred during the Obama administration as well. In fact, the current series of arrests were organized before president Trump took office. According to David Marin, a Los Angeles field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the raids are business as usual. “This operation was in the planning stages before the current administration issued its executive order,” he said. “We do these operations two to three times a year. This is on par with past operations.” So those calling for heads to roll should be directing their frustrations at former president Barack Obama.
Nevertheless, organizations like the ACLU are responding by creating guidelines on how illegal aliens can skirt law enforcement and avoid arrest. Under current law, ICE can inquire about a person’s immigration status without a warrant if the situation makes obtaining a warrant impractical. However, this doesn’t allow officials to enter the residence of a suspected illegal alien without a judicially-issued arrest warrant, so the ACLU is telling illegal aliens to not answer the door if they suspect it’s ICE. Furthermore, they suggest immigration officials are dangerous by saying “it is safer to speak to ICE through the door.”
The about-face on prioritizing criminal deportations shows that many lawmakers were never serious about immigration enforcement at all, but simply say whatever is required at the time to get elected. This shouldn’t surprise anyone considering many of them continued defending “sanctuary city” policies for criminal aliens even after American citizens lost their lives.