By CHRIS POWELL
Dozens of immigration arrests in the Danbury area last week sent Connecticut’s Democratic leaders into fits of hysteria and hypocrisy.
Governor Lamont complained that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “are not trying to coordinate with us. They’re just picking people up.”
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The governor seemed to have forgotten that with his support the state enacted a law forbidding its police officers from cooperating with ordinary immigration enforcement.
The governor issued a statement detailing the rights of illegal immigrants and how they should act if arrested. He has yet to issue a statement saying they should obey immigration law, nor a statement informing them that the federal government will pay them $3,000 and arrange their transportation if deport themselves. Deportation doesn’t have to be cruel and abrupt for those who want to obey the law.
State and municipal officials and opponents of immigration law enforcement complained that illegal immigrants were scared by the arrests. But why shouldn’t people be scared of breaking the law?
Danbury Mayor Roberto L. Alves, who is also Democratic state chairman, said he and other Democrats were “demanding accountability” from ICE and wanted to know what it was doing in the Danbury area. But they knew very well what was going on. ICE was “demanding accountability” from people in the country illegally.
The governor and other Democrats also complained that ICE was not limiting immigration enforcement to “violent criminals.” This complaint approached the heart of the matter.
For while the governor and other Democrats will never put it plainly, their position is that people who enter the country illegally and reach Connecticut should be forgiven their lawbreaking and left alone unless they are caught committing another crime. State government’s position to that effect is well known — thanks to state government’s granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and its law forbidding state and municipal police from assisting ordinary immigration enforcement. So Connecticut is understood to be a “sanctuary state.”
That is the origin of the cruelty being complained about. For Connecticut invites people to take their chances breaking immigration law rather than to try to enter the country through the normal legal procedures. Connecticut invites them to gamble that eventually the federal government will lose its will to defend the country and instead will grant a mass amnesty to illegal immigrants — that it will open the borders retroactively.
ICE has serious defects. Among them, its officers are not identified by name and badge number and the agency fails to provide prompt public identification of those it has arrested.
But those defects are not why the governor, Mayor Alves, and other leading Democrats are so upset with the agency. They are upset most because they don’t want any ordinary illegal immigrants deported, as they make clear frequently when they say they welcome all immigrants, always failing to distinguish between the legal and illegal, and as they made clear in July when they objected to the arrest in West Hartford of an illegal immigrant who had violated a final order of removal for many years of repeated lawbreaking.
Ordinary immigration law enforcement like last week’s in the Danbury area will impair the national Democratic scheme to use illegal immigrants to rig federal and state legislative districting in the party’s favor. The problem is not, as President Trump hallucinates, that illegal immigrants are likely to try voting in great numbers soon. The problem is that most illegal immigrants are drawn to the “sanctuary” jurisdictions Democrats have established for them and will be counted in the federal censuses on which congressional and state legislative districting is based, thereby increasing the number of solidly Democratic districts at the expense of Republican and competitive districts.
There is also cruelty here to legal Connecticut residents — great financial costs, especially in housing, already in short supply and high in price, and in the education of thousands of children who don’t speak English. The Democrats never frankly appropriated for these costs, for that would have required being honest about them.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 