It’s no secret President Donald Trump is passionate about illegal immigration control. It was one of his biggest campaign promises and has drawn nonstop outrageous criticism from the left. On Tuesday, he emphasized the need for border control while speaking at the annual memorial for fallen officers at the Capitol, and used a catchy sports analogy while he was at it:
“We have a catch-and-release program, too,” he said. “It’s called, we catch them and we release them in the country they came back from. We’re getting them out or we’re putting them in prison.”
Border control and ICE agents are a part of law enforcement that should be remembered too, and Trump talked about Rogelio Martinez, a border control agent who died from injuries received last year near a border town in Texas after he and his partner responded to “unknown activity” there. He said it was the government’s duty to protect its people, and a large part of that job is security of which the border agents and Homeland Security are “on the front lines of this incredible, heroic fight.”
The president stressed the importance of cracking down on sanctuary cities and their “dangerous” laws that put violent criminals back out into the community. As an example, he mentioned the violent MS-13 gang in New York, and their alarming call to start assassinating police officers. According to the New York Post, a member of the Salvadorian gang told an informant they needed to make a “statement:”
“The police have been making too many arrests and it’s time to take the streets back and take out (shoot) a cop like we do in El Salvador,” the memo quotes the suspect saying, according to the informant.
Crimes against law enforcement are escalating. Now more than ever we need our local, state and government law and code enforcement departments to work together – not against each other as is done in sanctuary cities and states.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released its Fiscal Year 2017 Enforcement and Removal Operations Report, which clearly shows how important their efforts are for securing the safety of our nation. Together, with Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), ICE made 143,470 overall administrative arrests, which the report said was the highest amount in three years. A whopping 92% of those arrests were of illegal aliens who had prior criminal convictions or were pending a criminal charge, or were considered an ICE fugitive.
In California alone, the only state to become a sanctuary state, the cost of illegal aliens committing a crime is a staggering $4.4 billion per year. Illegal immigrants in the state made up 75% of federal drug possession sentences and, in jurisdictions near the Mexican border, 40% of all federal crimes were committed by illegal aliens. “Illegal immigrants commit 38% of all murders in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York,” and the left doesn’t think we have a serious problem?
“That is why we are calling on Congress to secure our borders, support our border agents, stop sanctuary cities and shut down policies that release violent criminals back into our communities,” Trump said. “We don’t want it any longer. We’ve had it. Enough is enough.”