The ICE Fight Against Criminal Aliens

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as “ICE,” has come under intense media attack for the last week, mostly about “separation of families.” Secretary for Homeland Security Kritjen Nielsen and others explained this policy effectively, but the media paid no attention.

Something else that gets no attention is how ICE helps keep us safe by cleaning house. Here are a few of its recent actions.

On June 11, ICE reported on 91 arrests it recently made in New Jersey. More than three-quarters of the people it nabbed had criminal records, and 70 percent had prior felony convictions:

• A 39-year-old previously deported Venezuelan. Some of his previous convictions: aggravated assault, resisting arrest, distribution of heroin;
• A 46-year-old Bangladeshi: aggravated assault, aggravated sexual assault of a minor;
• A 54-year-old Dominican: kidnapping and aggravated assault;
• A 42-year-old Colombian: homicide;
• A 23-year-old Anguillan, who is a member of the Bloods;
• Six members of MS-13.

On June 14, ICE announced a sweep of 162 illegal aliens in and around Los Angeles. This time, nearly 90 percent had prior convictions, including:

• A 32-year-old member of the “Krazy Ass Mexicans.” Previous conviction for rape.
• A 47-year-old, previously deported El Salvadoran: voluntary manslaughter;
• A 33-year-old Venezuelan: assault on a peace officer, battery of spouse, assault with a deadly weapon, DUI drugs/alcohol causing bodily injury.

In many cases, ICE was arresting violent illegal-alien criminals who were released by “sanctuary” jurisdictions despite ICE requests that they be detained for deportation.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, center, rides horseback with U.S. Border Patrol along the U.S.- Mexico border. (Credit Image: © Lou Maheda/Planet Pix via ZUMA Wire)

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is the wing of ICE that investigates international and immigrant crime. Since its establishment in 2003, HSI has arrested more than 16,000 people just for crimes against children, including production and distribution of online child porn, traveling overseas for sex with minors, and sex trafficking of children. In fiscal year 2016, more than 2,600 child predators were arrested by HSI special agents.

Every day, ICE is working to keep foreign criminals out and deport those who manage to get in. ICE helps keep us from becoming like our neighbors. In Mexico City, the first four months of 2018 were the deadliest four months in the last 20 years. And the capital is not an outlier; homicide across the country is up. In several cities, gun homicides were up several hundred percent over the first four months of last year.

Mexico, with a homicide rate most recently calculated at 20.5 per 100,000 people, is four times as murderous as the United States, and there are worse places in the our hemisphere: El Salvador (109), Honduras (64), Venezuela (57), Jamaica (43), Brazil (27), and Colombia (27). (These are 2015 figures; current rates are probably higher.)

Enoch Powell once said:

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

It does not take statesmanship to notice that immigrants bring their behavior with them. When ICE arrests and deports criminals from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, it is repelling the barbarians at the gates. It deserves our unwavering support.