Immigration and Customs Enforcement Blasts Failure to Enforce Immigration Laws

June 29, 2013 By Daniel Greenfield


Senator McCain recently slammed Senator Deb Fischer over his amnesty project, saying, “I would just say to the senator from Nebraska, she is so ill-informed, the statement that I just saw, I don’t know where to begin, except to say that if you don’t think this legislation secures the border you haven’t spent any time on the border, certainly not any meaningful time.”

But here’s someone who has spent meaningful amounts of time on the border.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) National Council president Chris Crane on Wednesday debunked the claim from “Gang of Eight” member Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) that the 1,200-page senate immigration bill would end what Rubio calls “de facto amnesty.”
In a letter sent to Rubio obtained by Breitbart News, Crane said that “one of the main points made by you publicly is that the Gang of Eight legislation will stop what you refer to as ‘de facto amnesty.’”
“Millions of dollars have been spent on television advertisements which feature you and call on Americans to support your bill to end the nation’s practice of de facto amnesty,” Crane, an ICE agent himself and former marine, wrote to Rubio. “Yet your bill does nothing to end de facto amnesty, and only guarantees it will continue.”
Crane wrote that de facto amnesty is the idea that there “is a failure to enforce the nation’s immigration laws on the interior of the United States.”
Crane noted that 40 percent of illegal aliens in the United States “did not illegally cross the border, but instead entered illegally with a visa and didn’t leave when it expired.” Crane said that the 40,000 extra Border Patrol agents the new Corker-Hoeven version of the bill provides “will never come in contact with these individuals, as they never attempted illegal entry into the United States.”
…
Crane said that there are currently only 5,000 ICE officers across 50 states, Puerto Rico and Guam. “That’s a force half the size of some police departments covering an area larger than the continental United States,” Crane wrote. “The number of additional ICE immigration officers provided by your legislation to perform interior enforcement and stop de facto amnesty – zero.”

Crane pointed out that systems like E-Verify and entry-exit visa tracking systems may help “identify millions of illegal immigrants and status violators, but ICE officers will not exist to locate and apprehend them rendering the systems useless.”
And most of those overstays will just head to sanctuary cities where nothing will happen to them unless they drive drunk more than three times. E-Verify may intimidate some employers, but that just means more off-the-books work, less taxes paid and more of the same problems that the amnesty reform backers claim that they want to solve.
Serious domestic enforcement would require a sizable commitment. It’s entirely doable in a time when we dump armored vehicles on local police departments for the War on Drugs, but it’s not going to happen. Anyone who supports amnesty does not support enforcement. It’s that simple and it’s always been that simple.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/immigration-and-customs-enforcement-blasts-failure-to-enforce-immigration-laws/