Editor’s note: This article discusses mature themes.
Grab a drink and get comfortable, because this might take a while.
If you listen to spectacularly dishonest Democrat schemers like Rep. Ro Khanna, immigration- and border-focused federal agencies like ICE, CBP, and the ICE component HSI are storming around grabbing people off the street for no reason but racism and shipping them to the camps for the sake of pure bigotry. When federal immigration authorities arrest someone, what’s happening is a “violation of human rights.”
He’s lying, and he’s lying as a cruel political strategy to create fear and uncertainty.
In Los Angeles last week, a multi-agency task force led by HSI arrested 10 suspects who were allegedly trafficking minors as young as 14 for sex. A grand jury indictment alleges at length that girls who tried to escape were beaten and threatened with death. The violent coercion of teenage girls into street prostitution (often from foster care) is a long-running crisis in the city and some of its neighboring communities, a reality so horrifying that the deeply partisan New York Times has covered it in depth despite the embarrassment to the Democrats who govern the place.
The arrests last week crossed an interesting boundary: While many of those arrested were members of a black street gang, the Hoover Criminals, federal agents also arrested the manager of the motel alleged to have been the center of the trafficking operation, Mukeshkumar Ahir.
The mandate of HSI is to investigate transnational crime, and recent sex trafficking arrests have followed allegations that Indian immigrants are both running and joining trafficking operations and sometimes falling victim to them. If recent indictments got the facts right, American street gangs are forming business relationships with foreign criminal operations. A major sex trafficking bust of Indian-surnamed suspects in Nebraska also alleged that the same ring was dealing drugs and engaging in immigration visa fraud for cash.
So when the ICE agency known as HSI pursues transnational crime, it’s sometimes freeing American children from sex trafficking rings. Remember what Ro Khanna says about ICE: “We cannot ignore their continued abuse and violation of human rights.” He says this as ICE frees children from violent pimps. No traditional conception of limited government anticipates tolerance for people who use violence to force minors to be trafficked for money.
A reporter from The Federalist went to the South Los Angeles motel where 10 people were arrested for trafficking children, hours after the law enforcement raid, and found it open for business. A DOJ spokesman in Los Angeles told The Federalist that county lawyers were working on an “abatement action,” a civil enforcement effort to end the use of the motel for sex trafficking, but Los Angeles County officials have ignored The Federalist’s repeated inquiries about that effort. Federal law enforcement is filling a vacuum left by state and local inattention and ineffectiveness, and local police are joining an effort to solve a problem caused by poor local government.
If you doubt what ICE is up to, look who they’re arresting. Go look for yourself. Sample July 6 arrest: “Uriel Castaneda-Penaloza, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, convicted for lewd or lascivious acts with a minor — under 14 years old in Bakersfield, California.” What a terrible act of abuse to arrest him, right? That poor man.
Here’s what ICE did a day later: “International Crackdown on India-Based Organized Crime Gangs Results in 24 Arrests in U.S., Canada, and Europe.” Read the announcement for yourself. It describes violent Punjabi gangsters who (among many other alleged crimes) risked a street war by allegedly stealing hundreds of kilograms of cocaine from other Los Angeles gangs. Transnational crime is crime, and ICE is one of the agencies policing violence and theft by organizations that cross borders. From the same DOJ announcement, suggesting the size of the transnational problem:
The FBI; the Los Angeles Police Department; the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP); and United States Customs and Border Protection’s Buffalo Field Office are investigating these matters. RCMP is conducting a parallel investigation into South Asian organized crime.
Assistance was provided by Unidad Central Operativa de la Guardia Civil (Spain); Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles; the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles Division; the Regional Narcotics Suppression Program, a specialized multi-agency task force that targets high-level drug trafficking and money laundering organizations operating in Southern California and managed by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; the Brownsburg (Indiana) Police Department; the Pennsylvania State Police; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Philadelphia Field Division; the FBI’s field offices in Buffalo, Sacramento, and San Francisco; and the FBI’s Legal Attaché offices in New Delhi, Mexico City, Madrid, and Ottawa.
It’s a sick joke to call any of this “continued abuse and violation of human rights.” What on earth would Ro Khanna propose as an alternative?
Finally, note that elected officials in blue states and cities constantly demonize ICE and sow fear over its investigations, grandly announcing policies to forbid local police to cooperate with federal agents. In the real world, the local police who work for those blue state politicians routinely partner with DHS law enforcement agencies to stop violence and stealing in their cities.
SNAP fraud makes government bigger and more expensive, stealing from taxpayers and growing a dishonest welfare state. It should be stopped, and the HSI agents who joined this week’s raid on Skid Row weren’t violating anyone’s human rights.
The growth of federal law enforcement power isn’t a reality to be celebrated. In our federalist system, states are supposed to manage their own internal regulation, and the federal government is supposed to exercise limited power over plainly interstate matters. But immigration crosses borders, and law enforcement involving immigration is well within the enumerated powers of the federal government.
The danger of federal expansion beyond its constitutional limits arises from the madness of a senile figurehead president throwing open the border, and from the dismal quality of blue state government. The increasingly obvious willingness of local police to partner with federal agencies speaks to the widely shared knowledge that Democrats are destroying communities. The path back to healthy and balanced federalism runs through the defeat of garbage politicians like Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. In the meantime, the 14-year-olds dragged out of foster care and into a motel run by pimps just need someone to free them.
