This past July, Jonathan Blitzer published a piece in The New Yorker called, “A Veteran ICE Agent, Disillusioned with the Trump Era, Speaks Out.” The article implies that, for moral reasons, many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) employees have adopted the sanctuary mindset. The source of this information is supposedly an experienced ICE employee – working in immigration since the Clinton administration – who has become disillusioned under President Trump. (He’s never identified, so we’ll call him “Agent X.”) However, the exposé is so riddled with errors that it makes one wonder: Do these complaints really come from a street-level ICE employee? Or someone higher up the food chain with a stake in the Clinton/Obama approach to immigration?
Supposedly, Agent X came forward because, “…with Obama gone…,” he saw “long-standing standards being discarded and basic protocols questioned.” But that assertion doesn’t make any sense at all. It was the Obama administration that abandoned established operational principles and kept ICE employees from engaging in good immigration police work. The Trump administration has merely said, “Enforce the INA as written” – allowing ICE employees to finally do their jobs again.
Agent X also claims that he fears being sued. But immigration officers enforcing federal law, as written, and in good faith, are protected from personal lawsuits by a longstanding legal principle known as qualified immunity. Of course this agent’s fear seems to stem from the fact that he sees his job as preserving the best interests of illegal aliens and criminals, rather than protecting the American people by enforcing the INA.
The truth is, however, that Agent X is more likely to wind up the object of legal action based on his assertion that he and his like-minded colleagues are “trying to figure out how to minimize the damage” flowing from the Trump administration’s policies. Immigration agents who refuse to enforce the INA typically wind up being fired. Those who actively impede its enforcement are subject to prosecution for crimes ranging from harboring illegal aliens to corruption. It’s no wonder he doesn’t want to identify himself.
Some readers might wonder if average ICE employees are really like Agent X. Rest assured they are not. The vast majority of the dedicated men and women working enforcement-level jobs at ICE understand what the mainstream media and the Democratic Party don’t seem to get: Americans are tired of illegal aliens and alien criminals getting a free pass. That’s why the ICE agents’ union sued the Obama administration over its prosecutorial discretion policies. In an organization as large as the Department of Homeland Security, there are bound to be a few Agent X’s. But their patriotic colleagues pay far less attention to them than the whining cultural elites in the mainstream media. Agent X got his 15 minutes of fame…while his fellow agents were getting down to business.