Blue Governors, Mayors Protect Fugitives from Justice

Border Czar Tom Homan has been consistent in his summary of the illegal immigration population. Homan says that about 70% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests involve illegal immigrants with serious criminal convictions on their records. The remaining 30% are also lawbreakers but, having entered the United States illegally, are guilty of a civil violation—a misdemeanor. The rhetorical question that Homan always asks is why governors like California's Gavin Newsom, Illinois' J.B. Pritzker, and Massachusetts' Maura Healey, as well as Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, don't support the removal of violent felons.

In Los Angeles, a hotbed of anti-ICE sentiment, the Department of Justice federally charged 12 defendants in three criminal complaints with engaging in violence and civil disorder against law enforcement officers, as well as property damage, during immigration enforcement actions in Southern California earlier this year. All 12 defendants are charged with federal crimes, alleging they committed violence against law enforcement authorities and property. Among those charged were members of VC Defensa, a volunteer group whose members chase, agitate, and impede federal agents enforcing immigration laws. They arrived in and around the area of Glass House Farms, where VC Defensa "Rapid Response Network" members also conduct surveillance of DHS office buildings and alert the community to the presence of federal agents within their neighborhoods. According to the complaint, Virginia Reyes stopped her car in front of one of the exits to the farm, partially blocking federal agents' vehicles and slowing them down as they left the site. Other protesters, including Reyes' brother Isai Carrillo, then threw rocks at the government vehicles. At least four vehicles were damaged, and glass shards injured one federal contract employee. The suspects are charged with conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, a felony punishable by up to five years in federal prison. Until she surrendered, the court considered Reyes a fugitive from justice—individuals who can be removed at any time.

The vigorous enforcement practices that DHS has put in place are a necessary and direct response to the Biden administration's policies that ushered in millions of inadmissible foreign nationals through more than a dozen parole programs, all of which Congress identified as illegal. Roughly one million aliens who weren't properly vetted were also released into the country using a newly created CBP One phone app, also an illegal program.

In the first ten months of the Trump administration, DHS has removed not only criminals but also about 1.6 million people who self-deported under the new Project Homecoming, which uses chartered flights to return individuals and families, including young children, to their home countries. They received travel assistance and a $1,000 stipend. The DHS Secretary Kristi Noem promised that departing through Project Homecoming would preserve the possibility that they could one day return to the United States legally.

Organizations like VC Defensa make the most noise and get the most publicity. But in a survey of minorities in major cities that have been overwhelmed by illegal aliens' criminal activities, the reaction to deporting them is overwhelmingly positive. In New York, a resident from Jamaica said, "Get them the hell out of the street so people don't have to walk in fear. Take the damn bad ones away!" In Chicago, black Americans are disgusted that Mayor Johnson has abandoned them to cater to illegal immigrants. And in Boston, citizens are fed up with Mayor Wu's pandering to the illegal alien community.

Trump, Homan, and Noem are political lightning rods. But the critics should envision what four more years of Biden/Kamala Harris would have brought. Millions more illegal aliens would be present and disrupting communities across America.

Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst. Contact him at jguzzardi@ifspp.org