What the ACLU won’t tell you about the people crossing our border
Hudson Crozier
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No matter how weak the southern border is under President Joe Biden, “immigrants’ rights” activists at the American Civil Liberties Union still want it to be weaker.
The organization demanded yesterday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “dismantle the mass detention system” for illegal immigrants by shutting down “far more” of its facilities. It also called for reducing the help of local law enforcement to catch illegal immigrants.
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“Local police have helped ICE ensnare thousands of people in an indiscriminate deportation dragnet — the opposite of the limited approach the Biden administration initially promised,” the ACLU lamented.
The group, as usual, acts as if efficient enforcement of immigration law has no benefit and is a net negative. It had nothing to say about Miguel Genao, an accused murderer in the Dominican Republic whom ICE deported after he had remained in the U.S. illegally since December 2021. Police officers doing their everyday jobs arrested him for driving without a license, and in the process, found out about his criminal background and helped ICE catch him.
The ACLU also does not acknowledge many more dangerous examples, including murder convicts and record numbers of suspected terrorists crossing our porous border. Out of those whom the government manages to catch in the first place, we can’t firmly expect it to hold on to them due to bureaucratic issues.
A report this week exposed how the Border Patrol mistakenly released someone on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist to roam free for weeks before apprehension. The FBI had found the person on the list but emailed the wrong Border Patrol address about it, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Border Patrol also failed to respond to an inquiry from the FBI, blaming an overwhelming “flow of migrants,” the DHS found.
But the ACLU would rather focus on stopping “racist sheriffs,” citing its 2022 analysis on the topic. Its supposed proof of widespread anti-immigrant “xenophobia” includes a Maryland sheriff’s statement that too much illegal immigration would make America “a Third World country.” It bizarrely claims that the partnership between the federal government and police is racist because former President Donald Trump once told sheriffs to “turn in the bad ones,” referring to illegal immigrants who are gang members.
The ACLU’s demands for oversight of prison systems and due process for immigrants are valid as a human rights concern. But the lopsided focus on “immigrants’ rights” and sympathy for lawbreakers threatens any meaningful improvement to our historically bad situation. Borders are not oppressive. They protect people, and America isn’t a country without one. Basic and efficient applications of the law are necessary to sustain them. That involves more, not less, detainment and giving the federal government all the help it can get.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.