In his never-ending attempt to exempt illegal aliens from the consequences of their crimes, President Barack Obama demanded local and state police forces stop enforcing immigration law.
The demand came in the form of a report issued by the President’s task force on policing set up in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, MO.
“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security should terminate the use of the state and local criminal justice system, including through detention, notification, and transfer requests, to enforce civil immigration laws against civil and nonserious criminal offenders,” the task force said.
Obama’s convoluted reasoning is enforcing federal immigration law means local and state police forces won’t be trusted by the populace they serve. If they don’t seek to enforce immigration law, illegals will have less to fear from local or state police and thus be more likely to cooperate.
This report is just makes Obama’s hands-off illegals policy more official. Obama’s executive action on illegal immigration had already made many of these changes permanent.
As part of those changes, ICE scrapped its Secure Communities program, which trolled prisons and jails looking for illegal immigrants to be deported, but which angered dozens of police departments that said they worried they were being asked to hold people for pickup, making them complicit in enforcement.
ICE is replacing Secure Communities with what it calls the Priority Enforcement Program, which will continue to scour prisons and jails but will assert probable cause, according to draft documents obtained by advocacy groups.
Ignoring crimes is rarely the best way to ensure compliance with the law. Illegals are now basically empowered to ignore the law in cases which have nothing to do with their immigration status.
That didn’t make sense to some. Lance LoRusso, a former police officer and Atlanta lawyer, said the immigration part of the report was “a political statement, not a law enforcement statement.”
He said an illegal immigrant who is arrested for a charge that the federal government deems not to be serious and who gets bonded out of jail is less likely to show up for legal proceedings because the person is in the country illegally.
The task force report said its recommendation about halting recruitment of state and local police for immigration enforcement stemmed from testimony by Maria Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, an advocacy group.
A case could be made that local and state law enforcement agencies should not be involved in enforcing federal immigration law. However, since Barack Obama is so bent on ignoring the clear statutes regarding federal immigration law, many states and localities are reduced to doing the job Obama won’t do.
