Black Helicopters

Federal Raids Spark Outrage, Questions


By Richard Martin, 6-30-07

 
 

Silverthorne Police Chief Joe Russell was out of town last week when he found out that federal law-enforcement officials were conducting a series of raids to arrest illegal immigrants in his town last week. That was the first he’d heard of the sweep. Summit County Sheriff John Minor didn’t find out about the raids until Friday, two days after they began, and “Dillon Police Chief John Mackey also hadn’t heard about the immigration sweep as of June 21,” reports Summit Daily reporter Bob Berwyn.

The raids were part of a renewed nationwide effort to arrest and deport “fugitive aliens” – illegals who are also wanted for other crimes either here or in their home countries. Hundreds were also arrested in California, Oregon, and other states. The “larger crackdown on immigration fugitives … this year has resulted in the first ever decline in their number, to 632,189,” reports Reuters.

It’s hard to argue that undocumented foreigners wanted for serious crimes shouldn’t be arrested and prosecuted. The problem is that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (which is calling its crackdown, begun last year, “Operation Return to Sender") conducts these raids without consulting local officials, and agents feel free to pick up other suspected illegal immigrants (known in agency lingo as “collateral catch,” as if they were porpoises caught in seagoing dragnets) in the process. Often the collaterals are swept away in caged vans, to find themselves on planes to El Paso and then on buses to Mexico, within 48 hours or less. Many of these people have U.S.-born children.

ICE raids earlier this year in San Diego nabs 62 fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants – plus another 297 foreigners suspected of lacking proper documents. “We are extremely concerned that ICE agents have overstepped their legitimate authority,” responded David Blair-Loy, the ACLU’s legal director, “by sweeping far beyond the proper scope of executing an arrest warrant.”

For Chief Russell and Sheriff Minor, the concerns are more fundamental: “The last thing we want are some plainclothes people popping out of an unmarked car, potentially with guns drawn,” Minor told the Summit Daily. “That’s a recipe for tragedy.”

Clearing out the huge backlog of fugitive aliens in this country, along with the pile of FBI background checks for legal residence applicants – part of the 4 million or so immigration and visa applications of all kinds – would be a good thing. “Since 2005, the backlog of legal U.S. immigrants whose applications for naturalization and other benefits are stuck on hold awaiting FBI name checks has doubled to 329,160,” the Washington Post reported earlier this month. That led conservative author and columnist Michelle Malkin to a sensible suggestion: “How about we make legal immigrant applicants the priority over illegal aliens for once? How about we clear the obstructions to the ‘path to citizenship’ for those who followed the rules and came here the right way before we start paving the ‘path to citizenship’ for those who did it the wrong way?”

Conducting armed federal raids, without the knowledge or assistance of local officers, with the clear intent of grabbing dozens of other immigrants without warrants, is not the way to go about it. When you see a bunch of plainclothesmen leap from a dark sedan in your town and start breaking down doors, it might make you think about how broken our current system is – and how infuriating it is that Congress can’t or won’t do something to fix it. 



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