The acting Homeland Security Inspector General has reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers are facing increasingly violent attacks from illegal immigrants. The report shows that ICE agents are being attacked at the highest rate in a decade. The Border Patrol is also seeing an increase in the number and ferocity of attacks by illegal immigrants.
ICE agents are in charge of deportations, and the CBP patrols the border between the United States and Mexico. While the report concerns itself mainly with what it considers incomplete data sets and diversions in reporting methods between the two immigration enforcement agencies, the numbers it reports are alarming.
Along the border, CBP is reporting 856 assaults in 2017, the highest number in a decade. Twenty-eight assaults occurred for every 10,000 detentions. In the interior of the country, ICE reported 48 assaults on agents in 2017, nearly double the number from 2016.
The report itself concedes that the number of assaults reported may low. “[T]he officers do not always report acts of physical resistance or attempted assaults, even when required to do so. In addition, the definition of assault differs for CBP and ICE.”
At least one of the ICE assaults was the direct result of a local government’s refusal to cooperate with federal authorities regarding immigration. In 2017, New York police ignored a request from ICE to keep Lester Sadict Cruz-Garcia, an immigrant from Honduras, in custody following his arrest for domestic violence. ICE officials were forced to track Cruz-Garcia down in the community. When they found him, Cruz-Garcia refused to cooperate, fighting and kicking agents and even biting one agent.
On the border, the increased assaults correlate directly to the surge in illegal immigration over the past few years. Border Patrol agents are generally targeted with rocks and other projectiles during these incidents but other weapons such as bombs, clubs, knives, guns, and laser pointers have been reported as well.
Not included in the inspector general’s report but obvious to anyone with a brain, is the fact that the increase in violence from illegal immigrants also correlates directly to the increasing demonization of immigration control efforts from leftists and the mainstream media. The recent calls to “abolish ICE” are feeding a new anti-law enforcement in the illegal immigrant community.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old socialist darling who is running for the seat in New York’s 14th Congressional District, is one of the main voices calling for ICE to be abolished. Her platform included doing away with the agency, ostensibly for its involvement in the so-called family separation crisis at the border between the United States and Mexico.
But lest you believe that Ocasio-Cortez is a lone leftist lunatic calling for the abolishment of ICE, her insanity has spread to the Democrat Party as a whole. Representative Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) is in the process of drafting legislation to do away with the agency. “From conducting raids at garden centers and meat-packing plants, to targeting families outside churches and schools, the president is using ICE to tear apart families and rip at the moral fabric of our nation,” Pocan wrote in July.
In the Senate, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have both come out for the abolishment of ICE. Warren wrote in late June, “The President’s deeply immoral actions have made it obvious that we need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our values.”
Make no mistake, the calls for the abolishment of ICE from Democrats have nothing to do with compassion toward downtrodden and impoverished immigrants who wish to improve their lives by coming to America. For Democrats, it’s all about prospective votes.
One may ask, so what? Maybe it would be a good thing to do away with one of the many alphabet agencies that the federal government has created.
But if ICE is abolished, a giant hole in immigration enforcement will be created. Who will fill that hole? State and local governments, in most cases, are reluctant to do so. To replace one alphabet agency with another seems counterproductive at best.
But the calls to abolish ICE and the demonization of any border controls do serve to embolden those who would break the law by living in the United States illegally. So do the hundreds of so-called sanctuary cities across the United States which refuse to cooperate with immigration laws.
The increase in violent attacks against CBP and ICE serve to demonstrate one thing. When politicians such as Ocasio-Cortez, Pocan, Warren, and Gillibrand vilify immigration enforcement, they have the blood of the attacked immigration control officers on their hands.
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