“the likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but, standing alone, it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens.”
Tom Tancredo
Gulag Bound
1/10/2012
As part of the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona’s new law, SB 1070, President Obama’s lawyers had an Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement bureaucrat, Daniel Ragsdale, file a brief to the court against the state of Arizona. What Ragsdale said about immigration law enforcement gives the lie both to the Obama lawsuit and to their current attacks on Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
ICE bureaucrat Ragsdale argued that Arizona did not need SB 1070 because the Feds were already enforcing immigration law in the state. He even allowed for some cooperation with local officials. Ragsdale specifically noted that as part of the vigorous federal enforcement operation, “Phoenix …has a fugitive operations team, a robust criminal alien program, and it manages the 287(g) programs in the counties of Maricopa, Yavapai, and Pinal, as well as at the Arizona Department of Corrections.”
The 287(g) program was created by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. It authorized federal immigration authorities to train and deputize state and local law enforcement to fight illegal immigration.
Despite using the success of 287 (g) in Maricopa County (where 58% of the state’s residents live) as a justification for suing to invalidate SB1070, the Obama administration has now revoked the program as part of an all-out assault against Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
The justification for revoking the agreement comes from a 22-page letter written by Thomas Perez, the head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department…
…he [Perez] has wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on this Obama witch-hunt. Perez gave Arpaio the option of allowing left wing bureaucrats in the Obama administration to micromanage his department, or face litigation…
The complete article, with video, is a Gulag Bound.
Update: Obama Installs Former La Raza VP to Head Domestic Policy
…The National Immigration Forum, which supports providing a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, applauded the Muñoz appointment while saying it underlined the need for Obama to take action.
“With this move, the pressure is on the president to move forward with an aggressive domestic policy agenda” on immigration,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. He said this agenda should include focusing enforcement on security threats and not on immigrant workers and families “caught up in a broken system.”
The group later amended Noorani’s statement to call on action by Congress as well.
“While Ms. Muñoz’s appointment is a positive step, at the end of the day, Democrats and Republicans in Congress need to come together to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Noorani said in the amended statement…
Read the whole thing.
Common American Journal welcomes readers from Blazing Cat Fur!
