The Sheriff of Tarrant County, Texas, Bill Waybourn, said Thursday that immigrants are “drunk” and that if they are released they will “run over their children.” The controversial statements were made during a press conference at the White House with the interim director of the Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Matt Albence.
“If we have to release them or release them, they will return to their neighborhood and to my neighborhood. These drunks will run over their children and run over my children,” said the policeman.
The press conference was convened by the Donald Trump government to criticize a ruling issued at the end of September by a federal judge in California, which prohibits ICE from issuing arrest warrants for immigrants from prison databases. local.
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The opinion of Judge André Birotte Jr., of the Court of the Central District of California, also warns that the information stored may contain incomplete or erroneous information.
The ruling also does not allow ICE to order to retain migrants who are released from prisons in locations that have not authorized the police to collaborate with immigration agents (within the framework of agreements made under Section 287g), known as “sanctuary jurisdictions”.
Criminal immigrants
Sheriff Waybourn also said he knows many undocumented immigrants who cross the southern border of Texas with Mexico in search of what he defined as “a better day and something better for his family.” But “the problem is that the people they fled from, who took advantage of them, came with them” and are in the United States, he said.
He added that the Tarrant County jail holds unauthorized immigrants who are repeat offenders. “That is what we are trying to eliminate initially from our country,” he said.
In turn, Waybourn defended the ICE agents and said that the criticisms to which they are subjected were similar to those received by US soldiers when they returned from the Vietnam War.
“(They are) gutting honorable people (who are) doing noble things and standing on the wall between good and evil, for you and me,” said the policeman.
He also said that ICE agents are not the ones who write the policies they enforce. And if people want a change, Congress should do it.
Hard response
After comments made by Waybourn, state representative Chris Turner (Democrat), wrote on his Twitter social network account that “this is the type of ignorant and irresponsible rhetoric that fosters fear, creates hate and division. Did Sheriff Waybourn learn nothing after the El Paso tragedy? No elected official should say things like this, especially in a county as diverse as Tarrant, ”he said.
The El Paso massacre, cited by Turner, was recorded on August 3 at a Wal-Mart store where an armed man identified as Patrick Crusius killed 22 people.
The gunman, after being arrested by the authorities, confessed that his goal was to “kill (immigrants) Mexicans.”
Waybourn’s harsh words were also made on the same day that Crusius first appears before a court in El Paso, in a judicial process where prosecutors ask for the death penalty.
Democratic presidential candidates and Latino organizations nationwide blamed President Trump’s anti-immigrant speech for the El Paso massacre. During the campaign and as president, Trump has said that immigrants are criminals, kidnappers and drug traffickers.
Albence’s speech
Prior to Waybourn’s words, the interim director of ICE criticized the Waybourn ruling, an opinion he described as a “judicial overreach” that threatens public safety.
Judge Birotte Jr. wrote in the ruling that 42 detainees between May 2015 and February 2016 were explicitly lifted and the person was a US citizen. And about 800 detainees of almost 13,000 during that time were removed because the person was a citizen “or was not subject to deportation.”
To the question as to why ICE has arrested US citizens, Albence said he could not answer because the case was in dispute.
“Many times, the people we meet who are citizens of the United States do not even know that they are because citizenship laws are very complicated,” he said.
In addition to Birotte’s ruling, at the end of September the federal judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson suspended a new policy that affected any undocumented person who had been in the country for less than two years. The measure, known as ‘expedited removal’, ordered the immediate deportation of foreigners without papers, even without being brought before an immigration judge.
The current policy only applies to undocumented detainees up to 100 miles from the border and who have been in the country for less than 14 days.
In photos: the five documents an immigrant needs to avoid expedited deportation
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