ICE Catches Numerous Illegals Convicted of Child Sex Offenses After Sanctuary Cities Set Them Free
It was a perfect picture Thursday of liberalism in America.
With Democrats and the establishment media in the nation’s capital obsessed with a new round of impeachment fever, it might have been be easy to forget about some of the real, actual crises the country is facing thanks to liberal intransigence.
But, according to Fox News, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Matthew Albence had a stark reminder during a White House briefing that included law enforcement officers from around the country.
Albence was announcing an ICE operation that had taken 1,300 illegal aliens off the streets after they had been released by “sanctuary city” policies that keep local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
As a result of those policies, according to Fox, the ICE arrests this week included about 100 individuals who had been convicted of sexual offenses — and about half of those had committed their crimes against children. They would have been behind bars already if local agencies had honored ICE detainer requests, Fox reported.
At the White House briefing, Albence said local officials are endangering their own citizens when they fail to help enforce immigration laws.
“It’s time to publicly call out those who have put politics over public safety, those who make our communities less secure, who create safe havens in which criminal aliens and gangs are allowed to flourish and can victimize innocent people with impunity,” he said.
“Who are these sanctuary cities really protecting?” he said. “The answer, sadly — and often tragically — are criminal aliens.”
The briefing drew far less attention than the testimony of acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, who was appearing before the House Intelligence Committee at the same time.
One of the questioners appeared to suggest the event was actually an attempt by the White House to divert attention from the Ukraine controversy, but Albence explained that the briefing had been planned to coincide with the end of the arrest sweep.
“We wanted to do it concurrent with the end of the operation,” he said. “As you can imagine, a large-scale, criminal-alien operation, where we’re targeting several thousand criminal aliens, takes time to plan.”
“We’ve done surveillance, we’ve done investigations, we’ve gotten information where we think these targets are located. We need to act upon that.”
WATCH: As Joseph Maguire testified on Capitol Hill, the White House held a briefing on sanctuary cities with the acting ICE director, Matthew Albence.@Yamiche asked about the timing of the briefing.
Albence: “We started planning this several weeks ago.” pic.twitter.com/jrlHSSaMgV
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) September 26, 2019
Still, he was asked, “is it urgent to do it now?”
“I think it’s urgent, every single day, to get people that continue to victimize their communities, out of their communities,” Albence said.
If any message was going to get out of that White House briefing, that should have been it.
A federal operation that results in more than 1,000 arrests of criminal illegal aliens should be big news — especially if those arrests involve dozens of criminals who’ve sexually preyed on helpless children.
It should be even bigger news that many of those criminals were walking the streets freely because liberals in local jurisdictions had decided that virtue signaling and “sanctuary” for criminals was more important than safety for the innocent.
But the attention of the nation was diverted instead to Capitol Hill, where Democrats are cooking up another empty case to try to rid the country of a president who was duly elected by American voters.
The Democratic dog-and-pony show in the House dominated the news, while the liberal mainstream media mostly ignored the announcement of a small amount of progress in a national problem — a problem Democrats are doing their best every day to make worse for average Americans.
No, it wasn’t as novel as watching partisans spar over “impeachment” in the House, but as a picture of warped liberal priorities, it was tough to beat.
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