Federal immigration sweeps more about intimidation than enforcement?

Sometimes, the schoolyard bully beats up on someone merely to show everybody else that they can.
 

Are we really safer because 30 picked up by ICE sweeps?

That´s about how I perceive the latest round of sweeps done by federal immigration officials this week – the ones that they´re boasting resulted in some 498 arrests of individuals from 42 countries now living in the United States without a valid visa.

NOBODY OUGHT TO think our society is any more safe, or that our federal immigration policy is any less of a bureaucratic mess, just because Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials felt the need to do the mass sweeps during a four day time period this week.

I’m not even swayed by the fact that immigration officials claim that 317 of the people they arrested this week have criminal records – which they’d like for us to believe means those particular individuals should never have been in the country to begin with.

The fact is that if we consider these sweeps that took place in cities across the country that have designated themselves as sanctuary cities as somehow representative of the immigration ¨problem,” I’d say what they proved is that the problem isn’t anywhere near as significant as the nativist ideologues amongst us would have us all believe.

Federal officials said that 30 of the people who were picked up in the sweeps were busted in Cook County. That’s really not a significant number – particularly when you contemplate the number of people who actually live here, the large percentage who have ethnic origins in other countries and the significance of those who could have been picked up.

EMANUEL: Lawsuit got fed ct to back sanctuary cities

IN A STATEMENT to the Associated Press, acting immigration Director Tom Homan said that sanctuary city policies – such as what exist for both Chicago city and Cook County goverments – create “magnets for illegal immigration.”

And since the policies of the Chicago Police and the Cook County Sheriff’s departments are that they don’t turn over data on every single person they encounter who may (or may not) have uncertain immigration status, it means the federal officials want us to see they’re not going to be thwarted.

Immigration, Homan says, is “forced to conduct at-large arrests in those communities.”

DART: Won't hand over jail inmates to ICE

Which means that immigration officials were out-in-force in recent days, actively looking for people they could come up with busts for – similar to the days of old when local police would decide they needed to do something to appear busy, so they’d raid a few “dens of inequity” and make some cheap criminal busts.

THE “FEDS” WANT us to know that they’re going to make arrests amongst the significant ethnic populations of Chicago, even if they’re not getting the cooperation of the local police and sheriff, whom they wish would notify them every time they’re about to release somebody whose immigration status is suspect.

Then, the immigration officials could be waiting for them at the county jail – perhaps making their “bust” just as the inmate was hoping to catch a bus on California Avenue to get out of the area and try to get back to their local “homes.”

To me, the sad part of all this is that it means we have people devoting their time and effort to trying to pick up as many people as they can, and complain about all the hindrances they face.

We’d all be better off if we had such effort and devotion being paid to the idea of trying to make sense of our federal immigration boondoggle – a collection of policies that are in serious need of reform so as to clarify who exactly is worthy of being able to live in this country and whom amongst the ranks of the undocumented do we have legitimate reasons to fear.

 

TRUMP: Are ICE sweeps his response?

THE PROBLEM IS that, to the nativist element, they want to fear all. Their idea of immigration “reform” is deportations in as mass a group as they can put together. Which really is a waste of our time to try to achieve, and most likely impossible to think we can get rid of the tens of millions of people living here without that visa.

Particularly how in most cases, there was no legitimate reason to deny those individuals a visa – except that the bureaucracy made it difficult to impossible for said visa to be obtained.

Which is the ironic part of the immigration reform debate, as far as I’m concerned. The conservative ideologues who all too often rant that government is too big and burdensome and interferes with things getting done (Ronald Reagan famously quipping, “Government IS the problem”)?

When it comes to immigration policy, they may be right. It’s just a shame they can’t listen to their own rhetoric and try to do something about it for the betterment of us all.

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