Guest editorial: Congress needs to rein in a reckless deportation campaign
The killing of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents underscores a growing crisis facing the White House: Its reckless deportation campaign has spun out of control. If congressional Republicans don’t start holding the administration to account, they’ll be putting public safety at even greater risk — and more Americans will needlessly lose their lives.
Agents for Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement perform difficult, dangerous and — yes — essential jobs. Requiring violent criminals who are in the country illegally to face deportation proceedings should be a principle that both parties support. But the administration, in its militant zeal for deportations, is too often failing to distinguish between criminals and honest, hardworking people.
Government figures show that only about a quarter of those detained by ICE have criminal convictions. Another quarter face pending charges. Only 5% have been convicted of a violent crime; combine that with property crime and the figure climbs to 8%.
By casting too wide a net, the administration is at times sweeping up American citizens in its dragnet — a serious affront to civil liberties. In St. Paul, ICE agents with guns drawn battered down the front door of a naturalized U.S. citizen, handcuffed him, dragged him out into the cold in his underwear and detained him for lengthy questioning before releasing him without, his family says, even the courtesy of an apology. The president brushed away concerns about such errors, saying of ICE, “They’re going to make mistakes.”
The more immigration agents act without disciplined restraint, the more they will err, sometimes violently — and the more people will lose confidence in them. A recent poll found that while the country is split nearly evenly on deportations, 61% of voters believe that ICE has “gone too far” in attempting to carry them out.
That poll was taken after the killing of Renee Good, a U.S. citizen and Minneapolis mother of three, but before agents killed Pretti. Both incidents raise troubling questions about whether agents are following basic policing procedures. Although ICE and Border Patrol agents are law enforcement officers, they differ from local police in numerous ways. Most importantly, they generally lack the training required to patrol local communities effectively. Yet the administration seems unbothered by possible negligence and misconduct.
Indeed, its language has all but invited it. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has wrongly claimed that agents have “immunity” in the conduct of their duties. Vice President JD Vance went further, stating that the agents have “absolute immunity.” In fact, agents have only what is called qualified immunity, which offers them significant but limited protection against lawsuits. It does not insulate them against criminal prosecution. An agent who commits a crime while in uniform can be arrested and prosecuted.
Vance later backtracked, acknowledging that it’s “absurd” to think that “officers who engaged in wrongdoing would enjoy immunity.” That’s a message administration officials should have been hammering home to ensure that agents don’t think they have free rein to ignore the law and the rights of citizens. Instead, after Pretti’s killing, they continued to offer knee-jerk defenses of agents’ actions while also slandering Pretti with the same epithet they hurled at Good, calling him a “domestic terrorist.” The parents of Pretti, who worked at a Veterans Affairs hospital, called the accusation “reprehensible and disgusting.” They’re right, and the White House has wisely stopped repeating it, though the administration has yet to issue an apology.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, who called the Pretti shooting “incredibly disturbing,” is demanding a “full joint federal and state investigation.” More Republicans should join him before the body count from this misguided and mismanaged campaign climbs higher.
Written by the Bloomberg editorial board. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.