‘Activists’ Doxxing ICE Agents in L.A.

Fox News has reported that “anti-ICE activists, who have been interfering with ICE operations in the Los Angeles area in recent days, have now started putting up posters featuring the personal information of ICE and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers”, complaining that they are “separating families” by arresting aliens. Meanwhile, frightened parents are keeping their kids home from school — not in L.A., but in Mexico, where border-fueled drug violence has devolved into a civil war between rival factions.

“These Armed Agents Work in Southern California”. ICE, under President Trump and his “border czar”, Tom Homan, have launched numerous enforcement operations across the country, including in Southern California, since the January 20 inauguration.

In response, according to local Los Angeles outlet KTLA, a group of 100 volunteers calling themselves the “Community Self-Defense Coalition” has been patrolling the City of Angels, looking for ICE and broadcasting information about the agency’s activities.

KTLA quotes one volunteer who explains: “We denounce [ICE] and alert the community with megaphones. … We were there until the agents left. They didn’t kidnap anybody today.”

Our First Amendment freedom of speech rights are exceptionally broad, which Americans generally appreciate even when we don’t like what is being said. To the degree any group exercises that right simply to inform the public, it’s likely protected speech.

It’s unclear who is posting the fliers that are appearing across L.A., which include pictures of ICE agents, their names, and phone numbers, but DHS is appropriately concerned about them.

Splashed across the top of those fliers is “CUIDADO CON ESTOS ROSTROS”, which according to Google translates into “Careful with these Faces”, and the posters contain the following claims:

These armed agents work in Southern California. ICE and HSI racially terrorize and criminalize entire communities with their policies. They kidnap people from their homes and from the streets, separating families and fracturing communities. Many people have died while locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers.

ICE “Crack Down on Innocent Immigrants in a Brutal and Militarized Fashion”. Most of those claims are fallacious, but you’ll likely recognize the rhetoric from similar contentions made over the past decade by those (including many elected officials) who complain that ICE enforcement — and in fact the Immigration and Nationality Act itself — is discriminatory and therefore morally and legally invalid.

Consider the following from the official website of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minn.):

[S]adly, our nation’s immigration system is fundamentally unjust and tragically inhumane. Instead of extending humanity and compassion to migrants and refugees, we treat them as criminals. … There is no need to the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency [sic] routinely crack down on innocent immigrants in a brutal and militarized fashion. My position will always be to establish a just immigration system that welcomes and protects all human beings, never treating anyone as a presumed criminal, no matter their ethnicity, religion, or any other orientation.

In Congress, I continue to push for ICE to be abolished and replaced with an agency that can defend our national security without criminalizing and brutalizing vulnerable communities.

As I have explained in the past, similar contentions anchored the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies, and its restrictions on ICE in particular.

Those restrictions, facially premised on DHS’s inherent “prosecutorial discretion” authority, were set forth in a September 2021 memorandum issued by then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

That “Mayorkas memo” was accompanied by a separate memo that justified those enforcement restrictions captioned “Significant Considerations in Developing Updated Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law” (the “Considerations memo”).

On page 7 of the Considerations memo, Biden’s DHS made the following claim:

On his first day in office, President Biden affirmed that “advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government.” In the immigration enforcement context, scholars and professors have observed that prosecutorial discretion guidelines are essential to advancing this Administration’s stated commitment to “advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.” [Emphasis added; footnotes omitted.]

In other words, the decline in border security and ICE interior enforcement wasn’t inadvertent — it was deliberately driven by the Biden administration’s blinkered “whole of government” focus on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

“This Shouldn’t Be Controversial”. Trump quickly shut down Biden’s DEI initiatives, and not surprisingly, his DHS was quick to respond to those fliers, too. As a department spokesperson told Fox News:

These pathetic activists are putting targets on the backs of our law enforcement as they shield MS-13, Tren De Aragua and other vicious gangs that traffic women and children, kidnap for ransom and poison Americans with lethal drugs. …

These individuals will be held accountable for obstructing the law and justice. This shouldn’t be controversial.

ICE arrests of gang members and drug traffickers likely shouldn’t be controversial, but with high-profile federal officials like Omar and Mayorkas peddling tropes about alleged racial and ethnic discrimination in immigration enforcement, it should come as no surprise that activists in L.A. believe they have license to dox ICE agents.

“Locals in Culiacán Dodge Bullets”. Recently, immigrants’ advocates in the United States have been alleging that “highly publicized ICE raids” are driving migrant parents to keep their kids home from school out of fear immigration agents and officers will do sweeps in those educational institutions looking for random aliens to arrest.

According to USA Today, “From New York to Los Angeles, Chicago and Denver, school districts have reported students staying home in fear that they or their parents could be deported.”

That such responses border on paranoia should be self-evident, as it’s questionable whether ICE could perform random raids, and in any event, they’d be a waste of agency resources.

There is, however, one place where parents are justifiably keeping their children home from school out of fear, but it’s more than 1,100 miles south of L.A., in the city of Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

To the degree most Americans are familiar with Sinaloa, it’s likely thanks to the cartel operating there of the same name, and on February 24, the Wall Street Journal published an expose on the impacts of an ongoing internecine war between factions of the splintered cartel in that city.

Two boys and their father were recently victims of that violence, shot to death by gunmen in their car. Their deaths prompted a mob of “thousands of angry citizens dressed in white” to converge on the governor’s palace.

There, they smashed the door to the governor’s office, in what was described as “desperation” by the headmaster of the boys’ school, Víctor Manuel Aispuro.

Aispuro is all too familiar with the carnage. Seven fathers of his students have been killed in cartel violence, and his cousin was murdered while selling beer at a roadside stand.

The threat the cartels pose has prompted some families to leave and others to keep their children home. That forced truancy is reasonable and understandable. What USA Today describes in this country is not.

“We Have to Produce Millions of Pills a Week to Keep the Gringos Happy.” Money is the lifeblood of both Sinaloa Cartel factions, and their stock in trade is the fentanyl they produce and smuggle into the United States. As one lab operator told the Journal: “We have to produce millions of pills a week to keep the gringos happy.”

War is expensive, and the two factions have had to boost their fentanyl production levels to pay for “gunmen, intelligence and weapons” to wage it.

One drug producer complained, “If before we were making 10 million pills, now we have to make 20 million,” and as the Journal made clear, nearly all that fentanyl is headed here.

Unless, of course, CBP can seize it at the Southwest border and the ports first.

As I recently explained, the agency was inundated with tens of thousands of migrants coming illegally each month over the past four years, leaving agents stretched too thin to keep the drugs out.

The migrant flow has slowed to a trickle since Trump took office, which frees up Border Patrol agents and CBP officers to interdict more fentanyl and other drugs entering the United States, keeping it off our streets and out of our communities.

The president’s border policies are deterring illegal entrants at present, but human smugglers are constantly looking for weaknesses they can exploit. That means to keep drug interdictions up and illegal entries down, DHS must deter would-be migrants from coming illegally by deporting the ones who have already come.

Migrants are economic actors, and if they can’t live and work in this country to pay back thousands of dollars in smuggling fees, they won’t hire smugglers to bring them here.

Thus, ICE enforcement efforts aren’t simply intended to drive down the unauthorized population — they make it much easier for CBP to secure the border, as well.

That is especially true when it comes to the criminal gang members and drug traffickers who are already here. If the smugglers and pushers are deported, cartels will have to find new contacts and it will be more difficult for the “gringos” to get their fixes.

I’m from Baltimore and therefore all too aware that we have plenty of homegrown dope peddlers, too, but street-level drug dealers rely on a significant markup. If fentanyl gets scarce, they could price themselves out of the market. At that point, methadone treatment becomes a more attractive option for even the most inveterate junkie.

Gadflies in the United States who are protesting ICE “raids” and doxxing agents should go to Culiacán, Sinaloa, and see the harm that the weak immigration enforcement policies they favor have inflicted on innocent parents and children. They’ll likely discover what true “terror” is, and how death — not deportation — is the ultimate form of “family separation”.