Chicago’s mayor has declared war on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and again vowed to hamstring raids to deport illegal aliens who have been ordered to leave the country.
The obstruction of justice Mayor Lori Lightfoot (shown) confessed at a press conference with “immigration advocates” on Wednesday reiterated what she said last month when Trump announced raids that he canceled.
Chicago officially stands for illegal-alien anarchy, and won’t help ICE enforce duly-passed immigration laws.
No Cooperation With ICE
Lightfoot charged ICE with “terrorizing” and “traumatizing” immigrants, and said the city had “taken measures over the past few weeks to ensure the Chicago Police Department will not cooperate with ICE.”
In late June after Trump announced the raids, the Chicago Tribune reported, she “moved quickly … to assure residents that the Chicago Police Department would not give federal immigration agents access to police data or participate in any raids amid news of potential immigration sweeps in Chicago and other major cities.”
Trump canceled the raids, but then rescheduled them to begin on Sunday. Thus did Lightfoot appear at a news conference with subversive open-borders advocates to assure illegal aliens she would not permit Chicago cops to help ICE to deport them.
“They will not team up with ICE to detain any resident. We have also cut off ICE access from any CPD databases and that will remain permanent,” the mayor vowed. “Chicago is and will always be a welcoming city that will never tolerate ICE tearing our families apart.”
Lightfoot, of course, conflated “immigrants” with illegal aliens, a typical leftist scare tactic.
Open-borders advocates don’t think she’s doing enough, the Tribune reported yesterday, and want Lightfoot to sign an executive order to officially block the cops from sharing information with ICE, an inadvertent admission that raids will target illegal-alien criminals in police databases.
“What we are working on is doing everything we can to push back against what the Trump administration is doing,” the mayor said.
Lightfoot, the Tribune reported, believes that “there are very few of us that have been actually naturally born here,” and thinks that Trump “targeted every single community that doesn’t stand for the same values that he has.”
Lightfoot also explained why she wants to subvert the law: “I’m a black lesbian married with a wife and child…. Every demographic that I am and that I care about has been under attack for the last 3½ years.”
Other Agencies
The problem for Sanctuary Chicago is this: Although it might have blocked ICE from access to its databases, other federal agencies such as the FBI still have access and can share what they get with the federal immigration agency.
In June, when the raids were announced and Lightfoot promised to obstruct justice, a spokesman for the cops told the Tribune that ICE can still get what it wants.
“All other federal agencies still have access to these systems,” the spokesman wrote in an e-mail, “as sharing this information is crucial to active criminal investigations in which we are partnering with federal agencies along with intelligence sharing functions that are vital to national homeland security functions.”
Raids Begin Sunday
The raids to begin Sunday will hit 10 cities and target 2,000 illegals who have been ordered to leave the country, the New York Times revealed yesterday.
Many of those targeted are “families” who jumped the border and enjoyed catch and release, but then failed to show for court proceedings to determine their eligibility to stay in the country. Thus, they were ordered removed in absentia.
About 30 percent of so-called families are fakes, DNA testing shows, which might explain why 90 percent of said “families” fail to show for court after immigration authorities release them.
But the administration won’t just have a problem with subversive leftists such as Lightfoot. As the Times noted, once the raids begin and the illegals are detained, leftist open-borders lawyers will immediately file lawsuits to appeal the deportation orders and likely delay removal indefinitely.
If that happens, Trump will have just one choice: ignore the courts and deport the illegals anyway.
Numbers
As for what the administration faces in terms of numbers, Customs and Border Protection reported this week that border agents apprehended 104,344 illegals in June, a 27.7-percent decrease from the 144,273 that crossed in May, but still more than crossed in March.
The June figure brings the official total of illegals who have jumped the border since October to a little less than 800,000, a figure likely reached after the first few days of July given the rate at which illegals are entering the country.
That figure is nearly 3,500 per day.
Photo: AP Images
