CNN anchor Boris Sanchez on Tuesday appeared not to comprehend why President Donald Trump’s administration was enforcing immigration law, despite former acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf explaining it repeatedly.
While the Trump administration has emphasized a focus on targeting “public safety threats” and “national security threats” for deportation, the president also campaigned on conducting mass deportations. Sanchez, on “CNN News Central, kept asking Wolf why it was necessary to enforce the law on individuals who have not committed crimes beyond immigration violations. (RELATED: Blue States Try To Keep Illegals’ Medicaid Data Hidden From Trump Admin)
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“I wanted to ask you about one aspect of this analysis of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] data. In some states, like Massachusetts, 78% of those arrested in community raids had no criminal record,” Sanchez said. “So I wonder how sweeping up these non-criminals makes communities safer.”
Wolf noted the Trump administration’s focus on criminals, but said it would not ignore immigration law when it comes to non-criminals.
“We saw that during four years of the [former President Joe] Biden administration where they said … we’re not going to arrest and therefore deport certain classes of illegal aliens here in the United States,” Wolf said. “And unfortunately, what that does is it just encourages more and more of those types of individuals to come to the country knowing that they’ll never be deported.”
Sanchez questioned the value of enforcing immigration law as a form of “deterrence.”
“If this is about deterrence, as you alluded to, and you’re detaining students and folks that don’t have priors that are here in the United States just living the American dream and working and may have overstayed a visa … then what exactly are you deterring?” he asked. “Because those folks aren’t a public safety threat, right?”
“I think what you’re deterring here is the fact that individuals knowingly break U.S. law, knowingly stay in the United States when they have no legal right to be here,” Wolf explained. “I think that’s the type of behavior that you want to deter. You want folks to come into — not only to have folks come into the United States legally — but to stay here legally.”
Sanchez then noted Trump’s stance that farmers rely on illegal immigrant labor and must be able to maintain it.
“So if the president says that we need them — our food supply depends on them — why are they then being targeted and not given a pathway to obtain citizenship?” the anchor asked.
Wolf disagreed with the premise, saying he was uncertain whether the Trump administration was targeting illegal immigrant workers.
“ICE is raiding farms!” Sanchez retorted. “Are they not?”
Wolf asserted ICE is legally required to deport every illegal immigrant.
“ICE is doing its job, which is to say they are removing individuals that don’t have a legal right to be here,” he said. “They’re focusing on criminals, but they’re not excluding any group of individuals.”
“ICE does decide ultimately who they’re going to target. So I go back to the broader question of: if you’re seeing that a lot of these folks are non-criminals — they are students, the kinds of workers that the President says the country needs, who come about hard labor naturally, in his words — then why go after these folks?” Sanchez asked. “And why round them up when there are folks out there who have committed crimes and who likely would be — their removal likely would make the community safer? Why go after just a blanket population of folks when you don’t actually know if they’ve done something wrong?”
Wolf responded that he felt as though he had answered the same line of questioning “three times.” He said the Trump administration was enforcing the law on both illegal immigrant criminals and illegal immigrants who have not committed additional crimes.
Sanchez asked why it was necessary to target both categories of illegal migrants.
“I think anytime that you exclude a population … what you have seen over in history is that more and more of these individuals will come to the United States, will overstay their visa, because they know that there is no repercussion,” Wolf explained.
Border czar Tom Homan also explained on “The Stephen A. Smith Show” in July that the Trump administration cannot limit deportations to solely illegal immigrants who commit additional crimes because of the need to deter other migrants from violating immigration law by crossing the U.S. border without authorization.
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