I wrote recently about the ongoing insubordination at ICE. The most recent flare up involves a dispute over a new memo, Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion Consistent with the Civil Immigration Enforcement Priorities of the Agency for the Apprehension, Detention, and Removal of Aliens. The memo basically prioritizes who should be deported and directs ICE to target criminals and people who pose a security threat over aliens with equities in the U.S. I read the memo, and it is pretty non-controversial.
The ICE Union disagreed and posited that the memo was a backdoor amnesty (this despite the fact that the Obama Administration has been deporting record numbers of illegal aliens and, as these statistics show, has re-prioritized deportations to focus on criminal aliens). Chris Crane, President of the National ICE Counsel, had this to say about the memo and the Obama Administration:
Any American concerned about immigration needs to brace themselves for what’s coming… this is just one of many new ICE policies in queue aimed at stopping the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws in the United States. Unable to pass its immigration agenda through legislation, the Administration is now implementing it through agency policy.
In my prior post, I tried to give the Union the benefit of the doubt, even though their claim seemed unfounded. Now, several immigration experts, including a former general counsel of INS under President George W. Bush, have reviewed the controversial memo. They conclude that the memo is “perfectly consistent with existing law on the use of prosecutorial discretion and serve[s] to guide its sound exercise in immigration law enforcement decisions.”
The experts’ conclusion–and a plain reading of the controversial memo–makes it painfully obvious that the Union’s complaints are baseless. Worse, the attacks, such as the quote from Mr. Crane above, seem blatantly partisan in nature.
It is frankly shocking that ICE and DHS would tolerate this type of insubordination. My guess is that the Administration is too cowed by right wing bullies to do anything about the problem (witness the Shirley Sherrod fiasco). It’s past time for the Obama administration to stand up to this sort of nonsense. ICE should fire the insubordinate agents immediately.
Jason Dzubow, it is clear based on your baseless argument and your ignorance, that you are a second rate journalist. Moreover, you are clearly biased, some Obama minion, who doesn’t have a clue about the rule of law, constitution, role of government, its agencies, etc…
If you are going to attempt bravado with a pen in support of your lack of self-esteem, at least make sure you at least know what you’re talking about, in lieu of adding insult to your competence. It is clearly people like you, that represent everything that is spineless, unethical, immoral, and wrong with the mindset of over privileged little winy fools like you!
B.O. should be impeached for this blatant lawlessness and so should all his underlings that cowardly followed suit.
Well, you can’t just fire federal employees. You have to have a lawful reason and criticizing the President or his policies is not a lawful purpose. Federal employees have 1st Amendment rights.
Second, it is Council, not Counsel. Get your facts straight before you start torching the Constitution.
Third, there is an administrative amnesty being implemented and it is something you support. You cannot fire a federal employee for upholding his oath of office and seeing that the laws of the United States are faithfully executed.
In fact Obama could and should be impeached for his amnesty by executive order. There is no basis for not arresting illegal aliens encountered by ICE. The law says that ICE employees must execute their duties. There are not enough criminal aliens and terrorists in the country to keep ICE agents busy during their 10 hour day at work.
The reason that Obama cannot and will not is that to do so would highlight the violation of his oath of office to see that the laws are faithfully executed.
In the end, ICE has a Table of Penalties that describes misconduct and prescribes the appropriate penalties and there is no penalty for executing one’s lawful duties.
In any event, read the memorandum again and it clearly states that there is nothing to stop any officer from taking any lawful act.
As much as you and your fellow leftists want to create a Stalinist regime where the law does not rule, but the demands of a dictator and his Party, you can’t implement that now. The law and the Constitution stand in your way. But I am certain you and Obama are working day and night to make our Constitution something resembling the Soviet Constitution.
To Federale –
First, I do appreciate when people with opposing viewpoints comment, so thank you for that.
Second, you are right, I did not spell Council correctly. Whether this amounts to not getting my facts straight, I will leave that to the readers to decide.
Finally, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy. When a president is elected, he has legal authority to make policy changes. For the reasons discussed in my post, it is now clear (if it wasn’t before) that the changes made in the Morton memo are within the power of the President to make. Just because the Union does not agree with the policy priorities of the Administration does not mean that those policies are not lawful. And when members of the Union work openly to undermine those policies, they should be fired.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to meet President Obama so we can continue working on our plan to convert the US into a Stalinist regime…