Tom Homan announced this week that ICE will be surging agents into New York City following Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to end New York’s 287G agreements with the agency. Those agreements had allowed a single ICE agent to arrest and process a criminal alien being released from a local jail, a process that is safer for the detainee, safer for the agent, and safer for the surrounding community. Ending them means ICE now has to send entire teams to locate people in the community who could have been processed efficiently at the point of release.
Ron Vitiello, former US Border Patrol chief and former ICE director and the only person ever to have led both major components of the Department of Homeland Security, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the policy and its implications.
Vitiello said he agrees completely with Homan’s characterization of both the practical consequences and the political motivations. He said what Hochul and similar officials in Illinois and other sanctuary jurisdictions are doing is straightforward nullification of federal law, restricting ICE access to local jail systems, driver’s license records, and other public data that any private citizen could obtain, all for the purpose of preventing the removal of criminal aliens who have been arrested by the very local jurisdictions now protecting them from federal enforcement. He said it ruins the quality of life for the communities where these people live and commit crimes.
On the permission structure that produced the chaos outside Delaney Hall in New Jersey over Memorial Day weekend, where professional agitators with documented funding and coordination threw objects, used gates as weapons, threatened specific ICE officers by name, and were joined by Democratic elected officials who spent Memorial Day at an ICE detention facility rather than at war memorials, Vitiello said the politicians granted a permission structure for that lawlessness and demonstrated where their priorities actually lie. He said they showed us their lack of patriotism and lack of reverence for those who gave the final measure defending the country, in favor of illegal aliens being lawfully detained pending removal.
Proft raised the situation in Northern Ireland, where a Sudanese asylum seeker nearly decapitated a Scottish man on the street before bystanders intervened, followed by approximately two hundred men in black clothing vandalizing and burning homes believed to house asylum seekers. He asked whether that kind of vigilante response is what you get when people lose faith in the equal application of the rule of law regarding immigration. Vitiello said yes, and that unchecked immigration, whether at the southern border or anywhere in the world, sponsored or tolerated by government, ruins the quality of life of the communities where it occurs, burdens schools, hospitals, and public health systems, drives crime, and erodes the assimilation that historically made immigration beneficial to receiving countries. He said he fears a return to the Biden paradigm under a future administration would undo the gains made extremely quickly, as the surge under Biden demonstrated how fast conditions can deteriorate when the policy signals change.
On the concrete progress made under the current administration, Vitiello cited a ninety-five percent decline in illegal border crossings, more Border Patrol agents on duty than at any point in the agency’s history, 110 new miles of border barrier including waterborne barriers on the Rio Grande that the federal government had never previously deployed, and the seventy billion dollar funding bill that just passed the House and will provide three years of stable funding for ICE and Border Patrol, ending the cycle of government shutdown threats that have repeatedly disrupted DHS operations and personnel pay.
On Pritzker’s response to a question about why Illinois spends billions providing services to illegal immigrants while declining to fund a Bears stadium, in which Pritzker argued Illinois was responding to a humanitarian crisis created by Governor Abbott busing 55,000 migrants to Chicago, Vitiello said the argument lacks common sense and does not match reality. He noted that if Abbott sent 55,000 people on buses, the question that demands answering is how many millions more arrived on their own two feet and are now a burden on Illinois schools, neighborhoods, healthcare systems, and public safety. He said Pritzker declared Illinois a sanctuary state, championed open border policies, and then when confronted with the consequences insisted the problem was inflicted on him by someone else. He also noted that Pritzker never called on Biden to secure the border to stop the buses, the root cause he now blames for everything. He said Pritzker still defends not turning criminal aliens over to ICE upon completion of local sentences in Cook County and elsewhere, which means he is still choosing criminal illegal aliens over the citizens of Illinois who bear the consequences.