By CHRIS POWELL
Even people who want federal immigration law enforced and who voted for Donald Trump for president in the belief that the open borders policy of the Biden administration and the Democratic Party was national suicide should be aggravated with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
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ICE often seems to forget that government’s obligation to account publicly for arrests goes back eight centuries to Magna Carta and English common law and was assumed by this country’s founders to be a principle of decent government and so was incorporated into the Constitution.
But this month news organizations, the state’s highest elected officials, and community leaders could not induce ICE to account for its arrest of a Cheshire High School student from Afghanistan who had been legally admitted to the country. Eventually a federal judge concluded that the young man’s detention was the result of a clerical or typographical error in the expiration date of his authorization to remain in the United States. He remained in detention but further proceedings should release him.
This sort of thing compromises all immigration law enforcement.
But then opposition to ICE, especially in Connecticut, is aggravating too. While protests in support of other ICE-detained immigrants are frequent, they seldom show any interest in the circumstances. That is, was the arrested and detained person in the country legally or illegally? The protests brazenly assume — as Governor Lamont and most other leading Democrats in the state do — that anyone who enters the country illegally or remains illegally when a visa expires and who reaches Connecticut should be exempt from immigration law enforcement.
That was the case the other day when a hundred people gathered at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven to demand the release of a nursing student who had recently been arrested by ICE and taken to a detention center in New Hampshire.
Fortunately this time ICE responded publicly within a few days. The student, ICE said, was a young woman from Ecuador who had entered the country in 2021 on a six-month tourist visa. That would make her an illegal immigrant for more than the last four years. ICE added that she twice had been charged criminally, though the charges don’t sound serious.
Of course visa overstays are a common form of illegal immigration, signifying the illegal immigrant’s confidence that even when your lawbreaking is a matter of record, the government isn’t likely to bother you. In most cases that confidence has been justified but now things are changing.
The protesters at Southern chanted: “Say it loud, say it clear, immigrants belong here.” But legal or illegal immigrants or both? The protesters more or less answered with another chant: “No borders, no nations, stop the deportations.”
John Jairo Lugo, the director of Unidad Latina en Accion, an open-borders group in New Haven, urged the crowd to join a national strike on May Day to bring the country’s economy to a halt in protest of immigration law enforcement. Lugo concluded with obscenity that has become a big part of such protests.
A few days earlier dozens of students at Hamden High School left their classes and walked to Town Hall to demand an end to immigration law enforcement in their town.
One student carried a sign reading, “We’re skipping our lessons to teach you one.” But just whom did the students presume to be teaching? For nearly everyone in state government and municipal government in Hamden supports open borders and opposes immigration law enforcement. Indeed, while the school administration cautioned students that their walkout was not approved, school Superintendent Gary Highsmith said afterward that no one would be disciplined for it. That sure sounded like approval.
Maybe someday a few brave and enterprising students at Hamden High will stage a walkout for a politically incorrect cause to see if the precedent set by the superintendent still holds or is suddenly reconsidered. After all, forgiveness of school walkouts implies that, despite the huge expense of schools, students who skip classes don’t miss anything important.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 