The conservatives and House Republicans are in a roll lately as they try to push and fulfill President Donald Trump's promised to make the "deportation force" even bigger and, potentially, more heavily armed.
The House Judiciary Committee is set to mark up multiple immigration bills, including one from committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte that would facilitate mass deportations. Borrowing from past successful legislation to bolster Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the bill would require deportation officers to have access to not just standard-issue handguns and stun guns, but also M-4 rifles or equivalents.
The little-noticed legislation is one of four immigration-related bills that the Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider, two of them specifically focused on ICE, the third on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the fourth on human trafficking. If passed, they would give the Trump administration more resources to deport immigrants and make it easier to do so.
"As a package, the House Judiciary bills would turbocharge Trump's mass deportation agenda," Frank Sharry, head of pro-immigration group America’s Voice, said in an email. "It seems Goodlatte and fellow Republicans want to go down in history as the Congress that aided and abetted one of America’s darkest chapters."
Sharry, however, conveniently did not say whether this move by the Republicans is illegal or not. He also did not mention that the golden age in US Economy was during the period when they have the adopted the strictest regulation in both race and immigration.
Goodlatte’s ICE authorization bill would add 10,000 officers focused on deportation, 2,500 in detention, and 60 trial attorneys. It would authorize officers to make arrests without a warrant if they had reasonable grounds to believe the person had committed a felony, and would allow ICE to arrest people for civil offenses without a warrant, even if they are not considered “likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained,” which is the case under current law.
The measure would codify the president's new Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or VOICE, office, which has placed all community engagement under a frame of immigrants as criminals, whether crime-related or not, and bans ICE from having a "public advocate." And it would create an advisory council that in the near-term would likely be dominated by immigration hawks appointed by the president, chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees, the ICE prosecutor’s union, and the ICE union that endorsed Trump.
The House Judiciary Committee is set to mark up multiple immigration bills, including one from committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte that would facilitate mass deportations. Borrowing from past successful legislation to bolster Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the bill would require deportation officers to have access to not just standard-issue handguns and stun guns, but also M-4 rifles or equivalents.
The little-noticed legislation is one of four immigration-related bills that the Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider, two of them specifically focused on ICE, the third on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the fourth on human trafficking. If passed, they would give the Trump administration more resources to deport immigrants and make it easier to do so.
"As a package, the House Judiciary bills would turbocharge Trump's mass deportation agenda," Frank Sharry, head of pro-immigration group America’s Voice, said in an email. "It seems Goodlatte and fellow Republicans want to go down in history as the Congress that aided and abetted one of America’s darkest chapters."
Sharry, however, conveniently did not say whether this move by the Republicans is illegal or not. He also did not mention that the golden age in US Economy was during the period when they have the adopted the strictest regulation in both race and immigration.
Goodlatte’s ICE authorization bill would add 10,000 officers focused on deportation, 2,500 in detention, and 60 trial attorneys. It would authorize officers to make arrests without a warrant if they had reasonable grounds to believe the person had committed a felony, and would allow ICE to arrest people for civil offenses without a warrant, even if they are not considered “likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained,” which is the case under current law.
The measure would codify the president's new Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or VOICE, office, which has placed all community engagement under a frame of immigrants as criminals, whether crime-related or not, and bans ICE from having a "public advocate." And it would create an advisory council that in the near-term would likely be dominated by immigration hawks appointed by the president, chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees, the ICE prosecutor’s union, and the ICE union that endorsed Trump.