Democrats’ demands for immigration enforcement changes should be DOA

OPINION:

The Republican response to House and Senate Democrats’ 10-item list of demands for immigration enforcement reforms in exchange for agreeing to fund the Department of Homeland Security should consist of a pair of acronyms: AYKM? and DOA.

Unveiled Feb. 4 by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, both New York Democrats, those demands deserve reactions such as “Are you kidding me?” and “dead on arrival” in committee.

Sen. Katie Britt, Alabama Republican, was being unduly charitable in describing the Democrats’ demands holding funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard, among other Homeland Security agencies, hostage for the remainder of the fiscal year as “a ridiculous Christmas list.”

The Democrats, whose requirements read more like a love letter to the open-borders lobby and Latin American criminal gangs than a Christmas wish list, were spelled out in proposed legislative text on Feb. 7.

Stopgap funding for the department runs out Friday. Barring an agreement, that could result in another Democratic-driven partial government shutdown the next day.

Foremost among the Democrats’ insidious demands that should be greeted with “Are you kidding me?” (or even the R-rated version, “AYFKM?”) and issued DOA toe-tags are a prohibition on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other Homeland Security Department agents wearing face masks to conceal their identities and requiring them to wear visible ID badges.

A member of the House Homeland Security Committee, freshman Rep. James Walkinshaw, Virginia Democrat, complained that a bill previously before Congress “did not include enforceable protections like ending masking [and] requiring agents to identify themselves with visible badges and badge numbers.”

Democrats’ insistence on making agents’ identities public, and thus known to the anti-ICE extremists, is extraordinarily irresponsible and incomprehensible.

Surely they know that requiring the unmasking and ID badging of federal immigration enforcement officials would result in fanatical leftist militants doxing the agents and their families and threatening their lives and property.

When will mainstream media reporters confront Democrats and ask them whether they are OK with that? Because that’s what would inevitably ensue.

By contrast, there’s no reason for the anti-ICE insurrectionists and agitators to be masked, other than to protect themselves from identification and prosecution when they break the law.

Where are the Democrats’ demands, much less bills, that the anti-ICE extremists show their faces? Somehow, that was left out of the legislative package of Messrs. Schumer and Jeffries.

Although both sides have agreed on having agents wear body cameras, Democrats now want them to be worn so agents can be held accountable if they use excessive force, but they don’t want to employ the body cameras to document the agitators’ violence and lawlessness.

Another provision in the Democrats’ 10-point plan that also should be DOA calls for prohibiting arrests of illegal immigrants near hospitals, schools and child care facilities, churches, courts and other “sensitive locations.”

Where do Messrs. Schumer and Jeffries and their congressional Democratic acolytes suppose illegal aliens, criminals and noncriminals alike would flock to if those “sensitive locations” were effectively turned into havens from ICE and the Homeland Security Department?

In a similar fashion, another of their demands explicitly calls for giving state and local officials veto power over “large-scale” immigration enforcement operations. Even apart from the vagueness of what qualifies as “large-scale,” that’s nothing if not a nonstarter under the Constitution’s supremacy clause.

“The American people rightfully expect their elected representatives to take action to rein in ICE and ensure no more lives are lost,” the New York Democrats wrote in their letter to Republican leaders.

Those proposals, in the unlikely event they are ever enacted, would go far beyond reining in ICE. They would severely hobble immigration enforcement, and that’s by design.

As for ensuring “no more lives are lost” — a reference to Minnesota protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom almost certainly would be alive today if they hadn’t actively put themselves in harm’s way — the Democrats’ proposals would have precisely the opposite effect.

By making it far more difficult to track and capture illegal aliens for incarceration and deportation, they would ensure that more, not fewer, American citizens’ lives are lost, such as the four killed in Indiana in a horrific Feb. 3 highway crash caused by an illegal immigrant driving a semitruck on a commercial driver’s license issued to him by the state of Pennsylvania.

“Bekzhan Beishekeev, a 30-year-old national of Kyrgyzstan, illegally came to the United States using the Biden administration’s disastrous [Customs and Border Protection] One app and was released into the United States,” the Department of Homeland Security said.

Shamefully, to congressional Democrats, the four Indiana victims’ lives apparently were of little or no value — or, at least, of less value than Good’s or Pretti’s.

For all practical purposes, what congressional Democrats want is nothing short of a return to President Biden’s disastrous open borders and nonenforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.

As such, the bottom line is this: There’s no room for negotiations when Messrs. Schumer and Jeffries are bringing to the table these kinds of radical proposals, which would effectively tie one or both hands behind immigration enforcement agents’ backs.

Though it’s not on their wish list per se, most Democrats also would like to see Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem fired. Curiously, we don’t recall any of those same Democrats calling for the scalp of her predecessor as homeland security chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was complicit in allowing 10 million or more illegal aliens to flood into the country during the Biden presidency.

On the Senate floor Feb. 5, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, rightly called the Democrats’ demands “unrealistic and unserious.” That’s an undeservedly genteel understatement.

The unequivocal response of the majority of Republicans this week to virtually all of Messrs. Schumer and Jeffries’ radical immigration nonenforcement proposals should be: “Not just no. Hell, no.”

• Peter Parisi is a former editor for The Washington Times.