“Heavily armed men in uniforms, breaking into private homes before dawn, seizing people without probable cause … routine behavior of immigration agents during raids … without warrants or other authorization …”
All this appeared in the first two paragraphs of Albor Ruiz’s article, “Study Shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids leave dissenters cold” in the New York Daily News. The article hypes a recent report on ICE released this week by the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.
Ruiz continues using terminology that includes “racial profiling”….”seize residents without legal basis”….”imagine the terror of children and parents who wake up at dawn to find their homes invaded”…. and, well, you get the idea. At least, you get the idea that Ruiz wants you to get, which is that ICE agents are out-of-control rogue cops.
He doesn’t stop there, also wrongly trashing the 287(g) program “for blatant profiling and human rights violations.”
If that was not enough, he also includes a disappointing quote from Barack Obama, when he was hot in the middle of campaign politics during the 2008 presidential campaign, to the National Council of La Raza a year ago: “When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it.”
ICE’s response was,”We do our job professionally and humanely,” adding that the agency recognizes the impact its actions have on people’s lives.
Not surprisingly, Ruiz does not mention anything about officer safety, the professionalism of the ICE officers, or the precautions the officers take to insure not only their safety, but the safety of all they encounter during an enforcement action.
Nor does Ruiz mention the direct effect ICE actions have on public safety every time they apprehend a criminal alien, or how each and every detained alien is read his/her rights and referred to a service that will provide free counsel if they cannot afford it.
Getting the facts straight is very important — all detained aliens receive due process of the law with the right to appeal their case to an immigration judge. And, what is most importantly neglected in this article, is that ICE officers do routinely get injured when enforcing the law. The processes to which ICE agents strictly adhere are those that have been developed by professional law enforcement over the years to ensure not only the safety of the agents but also of the individual being arrested and the community at large.
