Amerika

The call to “abolish ICE” has been in vogue on the Left for over a year now, and the organization may well soon replace the President himself as the Democratic Party’s favorite punching bag. There seems to be no limit to the vituperative and hyperbolic claims lobbed against it. Last June, Cynthia Nixon — a darling of the Socialist Left — said, “ICE is a terrorist organization.” In November, Senator Kamala Harris, clearly getting ready to mount a Presidential campaign, compared ICE to the Ku Klux Klan.

More recently, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who supports doing away with ICE entirely, tweeted out advice on how to avoid its agents. And as of this month, all this grandstanding and virtue-signaling has turned into outright terroristic violence with Willem Van Spronsen, an antifa supporter, attacking an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington with a rifle and homemade bombs. Luckily, he was shot and killed before he could harm anyone.

My challenge to Leftists is to find a single action ICE has taken that they can deem abhorrent. They regularly publish press releases that cover their activities in great detail, and in looking them over, ICE comes off as absolutely heroic. Here are a few of their actions from just this month.

• Date: July 11, 2019
  Action: Fentanyl Dealer Sentenced to Prison for Seven Years and Two Months

  Joseph Richard Caruso, a resident of Washington state, was getting Fentanyl—the synthetic opioid—shipped to him from China, and then selling it on the darknet. At least one fatal overdose has been traced back to what he was selling, though the total number is almost certainly higher. Remember that in 2017, 70,237 Americans died from drug overdoses and synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl were the biggest contributors to that number.

  Any and every law enforcement agency keeping these poisonous drugs off of our streets is doing God’s work. As of yet, no Democrat has informed the public who will pick up the slack on this front should ICE be abolished.

• Date: July 12, 2019
  Action: 20 Criminals Arrested in San Diego

  A whopping 85 percent of these arrestees had prior convictions, which included, “drugs, weapons offenses, hit-and-run, driving under the influence, theft, domestic violence, evading law enforcement and fraud.” One Mexican citizen who was arrested had been deported seven times already, and had two DUIs as well. Drunk driving kills about 30 Americans per day, and the three states with the highest rates of death are three of the states with the largest immigrant populations: California, Texas, and Florida.

  These criminals are not innocent children, they are foreigners who put American lives in danger. Who within the “abolish ICE” crowd is willing to look at a rap sheet like the above and say, “Yes, these people will make wonderful citizens, they should stay here.”

• Date: July 12, 2019
  Action: Colombian Citizen Pleads Guilty to Heading International Fentanyl Trafficking Ring

  The arrestee in this case, Daniel Vivas Ceron, makes the aforementioned Joseph Richard Caruso look like an amateur. ICE summarizes his years of criminal activity thusly:

  … between 2013 and 2017, Chinese sources shipped several hundred pounds of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues to the United States and Canada. Vivas Ceron and members of his conspiracy imported these opioids into the United States and distributed them to their customers around the country. Vivas Ceron ran his drug trafficking organization from a jail cell in Canada, and he concealed his identity to facilitate the conspiracy by using aliases, encrypted WICKR accounts, and numerous email addresses.

  Drugs Mr. Vivas peddled have been linked to at least 15 overdoses, four of which were fatal—one of which killed an 18-year old. Men like him are the reason the number one cause of death for Americans under the age of 50 is overdose, and the reason why our country’s life expectancy is going down. If the number I cited earlier — 70,237 fatal overdoses in 2017 — does not convince you that this is a national emergency, consider this: the total number of fatal overdoses for the last five years (2014-2018) is 301,853 — more than the entire population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Sources for: 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014)

  Many of these killer drugs are coming from foreign countries and being dealt by foreign nationals—meaning squelching them at their source is out of the purview of a normal police department. Luckily, we have a specialized law enforcement agency that focuses on criminal foreigners, namely, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE.

• Date: July 18, 2019
  Action: Police Officer Sentenced to 20 Years for Dealing Cocaine

  There are few breeds of criminal worse than cops that use their power for evil, and Geovani Hernandez, of Weslaco, Texas, was one of them. At the time of his arrest earlier this year, he had over five kilograms of cocaine in his possession. As noted above, synthetic opioids are the main killer in America’s drug crisis, but cocaine is no benign “party drug” either. One study of the overdose numbers summarized them like this, “Cocaine-related overdose death rates increased significantly from 1.26 to 2.50 per 100,000 population from 2000 to 2006. After 2006, the death rate declined to 1.35 per 100,000 in 2010 before rising to 2.13 per 100,000 in 2015.”

The Left constantly demands more oversight of local police forces. Historically, local law enforcement has been held accountable by national law enforcement. In this case, ICE. How could anyone be against an organization that takes down criminal cops?

Abolishing ICE is the last thing America needs. Right now, our biggest priority as a nation should be ending the opioid crisis. ICE is on the frontlines of that fight every day, and as such, it should be both expanded and emboldened.