Immigration authorities on Wednesday announced more than a hundred arrests across California in an operation targeting communities where elected officials have adopted policies that restrict police from fully cooperating with federal immigration agents.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the agency arrested 128 people in the Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco areas, between Sept. 28 and Oct. 2.
Part of the agency’s latest “Operation Rise,” the arrests targeted those who had been “arrested for crimes but were released by state or local law enforcement agencies, despite having active immigration detainers in place,” according to a news release from ICE Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, certain local politicians, including many in California continue to put politics over public safety. Instead of fulfilling our shared mission to protect our communities, they would rather play politics with the law by enacting so-called sanctuary city policies to the detriment of our country’s safety,” said Chad Wolf, the acting Department of Homeland Security secretary, in the news release.
Nearly 100 people were taken into custody in the Los Angeles area. Officials said those arrests included immigrants convicted of homicide, sexual assault and other serious crimes. But it’s unclear how many of the individuals were violent offenders.
“A part of ICE’s mission is to protect the American people and provide security to our communities. We accomplish this when we are partners and not adversaries with our localities,” Tony H. Pham, the senior official performing the duties of the director at ICE, said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, California’s sanctuary laws protect and shield criminal aliens, harboring them in our communities where they can potentially reoffend and revictimize.”
Under California’s immigrant-sanctuary law, cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents is limited. Local law enforcement cannot collaborate with immigration enforcement agents except in cases involving more serious crimes.
While ICE officers retain the authority to arrest suspected immigration violators, the agency said the lack of cooperation makes officers’ work much more difficult and time-consuming.
“ICE maintains that cooperation with local law enforcement is essential to protecting public safety, and the agency aims to work cooperatively with local jurisdictions to ensure that criminal aliens are not released into U.S. communities to commit additional crimes,” the agency said.