President Biden’s nominee to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Texas Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, opposed ICE raids to deport illegal aliens during the Trump administration.
On Tuesday, the White House announced Gonzalez’s nomination. The current sheriff of Harris County, Texas, who was re-elected in 2020, had previously worked 18 years with the Houston Police Department’s hostage negotiation team and homicide division. He later served on the Houston City Council before becoming sheriff.
In his current office, Gonzalez positioned himself against ICE raids, aligning himself with more than 2,000 illegal aliens.
“I do not support #ICERaids that threaten to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom do not represent a threat to the U.S.,” Gonzalez tweeted in July of 2019. “The focus should always be on clear & immediate safety threats. Not others who are not threats.”
As Bloomberg News reports, Gonzalez ended cooperation with a federal program to train law enforcement to identify the immigration status of those in police custody so that those who are illegal could be turned over to ICE. The Obama administration scaled that program back, but the Trump administration encouraged its continuation and growth.
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Should he be green-lighted by the Senate, Gonzalez would be the first confirmed ICE director in years, as the Trump administration relied on a series of heads of the agency who were only acting directors.
The prospect of Gonzalez leading an agency he has openly worked against has already elicited push back from those favoring enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.
“ICE exists to enforce immigration laws in the interior of the country. Nominating someone who will prevent the agency from doing its job at a critical time not only threatens public safety, but incentivizes wayward employers to hire illegal aliens,” said RJ Hauman, head of government relations for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “Any senator who votes to confirm Ed Gonzalez should be voted out of office.”
The nomination of Gonzalez is in line with Biden’s approach to immigration, which has been one of less forceful enforcement than under the Trump administration. The current White House has even gone so far as to reject use of the term “illegal” to describe border crossers, preferring instead the term “undocumented.”
One of Biden’s early efforts was to try to impose a 100-day deportation moratorium on deportations, though that was blocked by a judge in response to a Texas lawsuit. Since then, however, ICE has issued guidance limiting its enforcement priorities, causing arrests to plummet by 65 percent.
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that many illegal alien inmates who have been released under the Biden administration have been charged with or convicted of crimes such as homicide, assault, child abuse, domestic violence, rape, and kidnapping.
“That’s who’s in custody. When you’re telling them to release them, it’s not some hapless individual who got arrested by ICE for a broken taillight. Those are not the cases in custody. It’s the most egregious cases that ICE is being forced to release,” Vaughn said, adding that “Their case load of criminal aliens in detention is always the worst of the worst.”
Also on Tuesday, the Biden administration announced that federal agents would no longer be allowed to arrest people in or near courthouses for most immigration violations — a reversal of Trump-era policy.
In a statement, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas argued that such arrests interfered with public safety. “The expansion of civil immigration arrests at courthouses during the prior administration had a chilling effect on individuals’ willingness to come to court or work cooperatively with law enforcement,” Mayorkas declared.
Democrats have signaled that they want to use the border crisis as justification to involve the UN in American domestic affairs. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said last year: “We should do what any other country does, by dealing with this situation in a serious way. So we have to bring in the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees — an agency that has the expertise and the training to handle massive flows of refugees humanely.”
Mass migration allows the communists to import a new pro-big government electorate while ceding American sovereignty to globalist bodies such as the UN. Both of these aims have the finality of destroying the nation as we know it.
