Attorney General Jeff Sessions put into effect one strategy for fighting “sanctuary” policies by suing California in federal court, while a retired immigration enforcement supervisor offered another tactic Thursday — camping outside jails and arresting illegal immigrants as they are released from jail.
Claude Arnold, who ran the Homeland Security Investigations field office in Los Angeles, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that employing that strategy would prevent California jails from cutting loose illegal immigrants and forcing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to track them down on the streets.
“What I would do is I would place command centers and detention buses outside of every major jail in the state of California, and I would staff them 24/7,” he said. “And, you know, every morning, I would have an ICE agent go up and say, ‘Look, we have a record of this list of people who we believe are here illegally in the country detained in your facility.'”
Arnold added: “They kind of do this, they do this with paper, but be out there at the door.”
Doing so would put California jailers in an awkward position. They either would have to comply and hand over the prisoners or risk criminal charges if they lie about having the prisoners.
“You just have to put on the pressure and then hold them accountable — civilly, like they’re doing with this lawsuit, or criminally.”
“You just have to put on the pressure and then hold them accountable — civilly, like they’re doing with this lawsuit, or criminally,” he said.
Sessions traveled to California Wednesday to explain why his department is suing California, arguing that the Constitution reserves exclusive responsibility over immigration matters for the federal government.
Arnold said more elected officials in California should read the founding document.
“I think they should send one to every politician in the state of California, because this isn’t a war on California; this is a war on the Constitution,” he said.
Arnold said there are huge numbers of illegal immigrants in California who have committed other crimes.
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“Of course, it’s no surprise that there’s such a huge percentage of people with very serious — including violent criminal histories — among these people [who] are being sought in California,” he said. “I mean, California probably has the highest population of illegal aliens in the country. So it stands to reason that they, too, would have the highest population of criminal illegal aliens.”
Arnold argued that there is a huge disconnect between politicians and their constituents on immigration. He said his experience is that even immigrants want criminals removed.
“When I was a street-level agent and we would be out arresting, you know, these criminals and gang members in those communities — those people would be cheering us on,” he said. “They would say, ‘Well, it’s about time you came and got these guys out of our neighborhood. They cause so many problems.'”
PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
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