Obama: Immigration enforcement = terror

posted at 7:08 am on July 14, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Barack Obama spoke to the National Council of La Raza and in one sentence managed to do what most Hot Air readers would consider the impossible — he put distance between himself and John McCain on immigration.  Calling the ICE terrorists, Obama made his position on border security and immigration enforcement plain.  He thinks they’re fascist:

When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it.

So now the US government is a terrorist organization? Not only does this demonstrate his demagoguery on immigration, it also shows his cluelessness in the war on terrorists. If he can’t tell the difference between al-Qaeda and ICE, then not only should he not be President, but Illinois needs to answer for his selection as a Senator.

The ICE raids workplaces when they have probable cause to suspect an employer of hiring illegal aliens. They arrest workers who have false IDs and/or cannot prove their identification. The ICE takes pains to find children who have been in school when these raids occur and no other guardian can be found, and unless I missed a news story, ICE agents do not tear babies from nursing mothers’ breasts. Does Obama have a citation for that, or does he just feel like lying to people to make ICE agents sound like Nazi brownshirts?

And if that’s what Obama thinks of ICE, why has he done nothing about them during the three years he’s been in the Senate?

Illegal workers wouldn’t get rounded up and arrested by ICE if they hadn’t entered the country illegally. When people break the law, they’d better be prepared to get arrested. If Obama wants to change that, then let him propose the bill that does it, which thus far in his career he has declined to do. Until then, Obama had better do some studying to learn the difference between American law enforcement and terrorists.

Update: The nursing story turns out to be true, at least partially:

Federal immigration agents were searching a house in Ohio last month when they found a young Honduran woman nursing her baby.

The woman, Saída Umanzor, is an illegal immigrant and was taken to jail to await deportation. Her 9-month-old daughter, Brittney Bejarano, who was born in the United States and is a citizen, was put in the care of social workers.

The story never claims that the baby was “torn” from her mother’s breast though; apparently ICE waited until Umanzor finished the feeding to arrest her. And pardon my indifference, but nursing mothers who break the law don’t have immunity from arrest and detention. (via Bill from Wizbang)

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