It’s time to update a couple of Liberty Nation articles on moneyed progressives purchasing local law enforcement officials. In December 2018, we told you about a concerted effort by the American Civil Liberties Union, suddenly awash in cash after receiving a flood of donations following President Trump’s election in 2016, to purchase the elections of local county sheriffs who will refuse to work with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to remove criminal illegal aliens from their own neighborhoods.
ACLU Gets a Gold Star
“If you want to see what the future of law enforcement in a progressive United States looks like, have a gander at new Mecklenburg County [NC] Sheriff Garry McFadden cutting the cake during a celebration to mark his first official act in office: ceasing cooperation with [ICE],” we wrote at the time. Upon being elected county sheriff in 2018, McFadden immediately canceled his department’s working arrangement with the federal immigration enforcement agency.
Garry McFadden
The day after he was elected, McFadden called ACLU national political director Faiz Shakir to thank him for the leftist organization’s support. “Shakir told me that he encouraged McFadden to make Mecklenburg into a national model for how a progressive sheriff might run his department,” Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker reported. Assuming office, McFadden stressed that he “declined to do ICE’s bidding.”
One year later, there are disturbing reports of just what that progressive law enforcement model looks like. McFadden is drawing severe heat from ICE and local politicians after his department released on bond a Honduran illegal alien who had been arrested and charged with first-degree rape and taking indecent liberties with a child. Oscar Pacheco, who had already been deported once in 2006, was set loose in the Charlotte area for almost a full two months before ICE located and arrested him again on Aug. 9. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD had arrested Pacheco on June 14 but refused to honor an ICE detainer and then freed him on bond two days later. ICE was not even notified that Pacheco was back on the streets.
An official ICE news release detailed several other instances of illegals roaming free after McFadden refused detainers. Among the cases included illegals charged with rape, sex crimes against children, assault with a deadly weapon, and gun and drug crimes. In one chilling example, ICE reports a 22-year-old Honduran native arrested in March on charges of “assault by strangulation, assault on a female, and communicating threats” was released by the sheriff’s department and remains at large to this day.
Carnage in Philly
In June, we reported on progressive billionaire George Soros’ efforts to elect local district attorneys sympathetic to his criminal justice reform agenda. We related how Soros funded the candidacy of Larry Krasner in Philadelphia to the tune of a cool $1.5 million in 2017. Krasner had no experience as a prosecutor and was renowned for defending radical activists arrested at unruly protests. If elected, he had promised to “end mass incarceration,” “stop pursuing death sentences,” and “protect immigrants.” A self-proclaimed “completely unelectable progressive,” Krasner nevertheless won the DA election thanks in large part to his Soros cash infusion.
Larry Krasner
After six Philadelphia police officers were shot and wounded during an Aug. 14 standoff with a man they were trying to serve a warrant to, US Attorney William McSwain slammed Krasner for endangering police lives with his strident social justice rhetoric. “There is a new culture of disrespect for law enforcement in this City that is promoted and championed by District Attorney Larry Krasner – and I am fed up with it,” a statement released by McSwain read. “We’ve now endured over a year and a half of the worst kinds of slander against law enforcement – the DA routinely calls police and prosecutors corrupt and racist, even ‘war criminals’ that he compares to Nazis,” McSwain asserted.
As with Sheriff McFadden in North Carolina, Krasner is determined to embody a new kind of law enforcement. In a glowing New York Times Magazine feature article in October 2018, Krasner boasted of his desire to avoid prosecuting criminals while serving as DA. “A progressive DA Is not the same thing as a traditional DA,” Krasner told University of Chicago law students, The Times reported. “You might call me a prosecutor with com-passion. Or a public defender with pow-er.”
When Krasner, who had criticized law enforcement in the city as “systemically racist,” won the Democratic nomination for the DA post in May 2017, all but assuring his election in blue Philadelphia, supporters at his victory party chanted “f*** the police” and “no good cops in a racist city.” As the six officers were shot in North Philadelphia on Aug. 14, neighborhood residents taunted, harassed, and threw objects at police on the scene.
Radical progressives flush with money are installing district attorneys who don’t believe in prosecuting crimes and sheriffs who don’t believe in getting criminal illegal aliens out of their communities. Local citizens and law enforcement personnel are having their lives threatened as a result. And it is all being done in the name of “justice.”
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