Sheriffs storm Capitol Hill to demand border wall, ICE funding
Richard Vogel/AP
Angered with efforts by House and Senate Democrats to cut funding for President Trump’s border wall and ICE facilities that hold criminal illegal immigrants, dozens of U.S. sheriffs are storming Capitol Hill Monday to more money to enforce immigration.
“We are at wits end on this,” said Bristol County, Mass. Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson. “This really is a catastrophe,” he said of the anti-Trump proposal backed by Democrats including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Hodgson is one of 60 key sheriffs meeting with the House Freedom Caucus on the steps of the U.S. Capitol today before hitting individual House and Senate offices to lobby for wall and ICE funding. He spoke to Secrets from the bus transporting him and sheriffs from Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts and Ohio to the Hill.
Over the weekend, Secrets reportedthat two national sheriffs groups, the National Sheriffs’ Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America,delivered letters to House and Senate immigration negotiators to warn against Democratic efforts to put a cap on the number of criminal illegal immigrants that can be held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The groups said that about 8,300 criminal aliens would have to be immediately released if the cap went into effect. They also said that about 90 percent of all illegal immigrants held by ICE in the nation’s “interior,” versus border facilities, have criminal records.
The issue is one that has stalled negotiations, threatening a second government shutdown later this week.
Both sheriff groups are meeting in Washington this week.
Hodgson said that his jail holds some 200 criminal illegal immigrants and he bluntly said that if any were to be freed, they would go out and commit more crimes.
“We’d have to release these people to go out and commit more crimes,” he said.
He also charged that threats to ICE funding, made by lawmakers including Ocasio-Cortez, and cuts to the cap on how many criminal illegal immigrants can be held, is a bid by Democrats to please their liberal base of supporters.
“They put our people at risk just to take care of their political agenda,” said Hodgson, a leading spokesman among the nation’s 3,000 sheriffs for immigration enforcement.
A similar charge was made by Republicans. National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Bob Salara emailed today, "House Democrats have become so deranged by their hatred of President Trump that they've found ANOTHER reason to shut down the government. This time, three weeks after voting for a funding bill that placed no restrictions on detaining criminal illegals, they're demanding a cap on the number of criminals ICE is allowed to detain for deportation."
Hodgson expressed dismay that ICE would be required to stop arresting criminal illegal immigrants once a cap of 16,500 was met. He said that no other class of criminals is subject to an arrest cap, and that it endangers the country.Critics on Capitol Hill of ICE, he said, “ought to be ashamed of themselves. And that’s why we are mobilizing.”
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