It appears that over 200 illegal immigrants in Northern California ignored the warnings of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, who warned on Twitter of impending ICE raids.
Federal immigration officials concluded Wednesday a days-long sweep of Northern California in the days since a warning of their raid was blasted out by a public official — a move which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says “created another magnet for more illegal immigration.”Since Sunday, 232 individuals who violated federal immigration laws were arrested in the San Francisco Bay Area, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a news release Thursday.The arrests were part of a four-day targeted operation that ran from the Bakersfield area to the Oregon border.Officials said that of the 232 people arrested, 180 of them “were either convicted criminals, had been issued a final order of removal and failed to depart the United States, or had been previously removed” from the country and came back illegally.
I sure hope the employers had all their postings in order before the raids started.
Officials project that several hundred illegal immigrants may have heeded Schaaf’s warning.
“The Oakland mayor’s decision to publicize her suspicions about ICE operations further increased that risk for my officers and alerted criminal aliens — making clear that this reckless decision was based on her political agenda with the very federal laws that ICE is sworn to uphold,” ICE’s acting director, Thomas D. Homan, said in a statement Tuesday.Speaking on “Fox and Friends,” Homan added that the mayor’s warning helped an estimated 800 “criminal aliens” avoid capture. He also said federal authorities were examining her actions.”What she did is no better than a gang lookout yelling ‘police’ when a police cruiser comes in the neighborhood, except she did it to a whole community. This is beyond the pale,” he said.
Reviewing Schaaf’s warning during an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former Bush White House official John Yoo indicated that the Oakland Mayor was coming close to “obstruction of justice“.
Yoo, who served in the Justice Department and now teaches at the University of California-Berkeley, said that “state officers cannot obstruct federal law,” noting that “we had a civil war over this.””You have mayors who are encouraging the subversion of federal law,” he said.Yoo added that Schaaf and others like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) are “coming very close to obstruction of justice.”
Despite the setback caused my the Schaaf’s tweet, the hyperbolic reaction from illegal immigrant advocates in the state suggest that the raids are having an impact.
“This is retaliation from an administration hostile to immigrants,” said David Huerta, President of the Service Employees International Union United Service Workers West. “Fruit is going to die on the vine this year because of this administration. This government does not understand the contribution of immigrant labor to whole industries, and their failure to see that will have its consequences.”
The only produce that is dying on the vine is the fruit of the tree poisoned by policies that do not protect America’s legal citizens.
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