Sanctuary Consequences: ICE Arrests 1,400 Criminal Aliens in Three Weeks

President Trump consistently says that many of the illegals in our midst were released from prisons and mental institutions in their home countries. And they’re now in our neighborhoods. Our Corruption Chronicles blog examines ICE working to remove criminal illegal aliens.

As the mainstream media continues to ignore the benefits of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, federal agents keep arresting murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, gang members, and child sex predators welcomed into the United States or released from local jails under Biden. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is making it easy to cover these important operations by spoon feeding reluctant news organizations detailed information about the perpetrators, complete with criminal records and mug shots though the establishment press focuses solely on the suffering that deportations are causing in migrant communities throughout the country. The reality is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is making communities throughout America safer by ridding them of heinous criminals protected under the previous administration and by local governments that offer illegal aliens sanctuary.

In one of the agency’s most recent operations, over 1,400 criminal aliens were arrested in just three weeks in September. They were all rounded up in Massachusetts, a state that has long offered illegal immigrants sanctuary and forbids local law enforcement agencies from assisting or cooperating with federal immigration authorities. More than 600 of the migrants arrested have significant criminal convictions or criminal charges for crimes committed in the U.S. or are known foreign fugitives. Some are members of the famously violent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Tren de Aragua and 18th Street gangs. David Wesling, the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) director in Boston that spearheaded the recent operation confirms that the illegal aliens had “significant criminality in the United States or abroad.” Wesling explains that the effort nabbed “criminal offenders who victimized innocent people and traumatized entire communities—murderers, rapists, drug traffickers, child sex predators and members of violent transnational criminal gangs.” He adds that “all made the mistake of attempting to undermine U.S. immigration law by hiding out in Massachusetts.”

The arrested include a 53-year-old man, Jose Orellana-Pena, from El Salvador with rape, assault, and battery convictions. A 34-year-old from India, Raj Kumar Sah, has been charged with enticement of a child to engage in prostitution/human trafficking or commercial sex and assault and battery on a person over 14. A 24-year-old Guatemalan, Anderson Hernandez-Vasquez, was convicted of raping a child and served a two-year sentence in Woburn before being released back into the community instead of being deported. A 47-year-old from El Salvador, Mauricio Eguizabal-Ovalle, has been charged with seven counts of assault and battery, three counts of statutory rape and six counts of assault and battery on a child under 14. Manuel Antonio Rivera-Eraso, a 35-year-old Honduran, has been charged with four counts of rape of a child and possession of child pornography as well as indecent assault and battery on a child. A 65-year-old from Laos, Souvanheuang Phachansiri, was convicted of second-degree murder and kidnapping and 21-year-old Guatemalan Perfecto Nolasco-Lopez has convictions for assault and battery on a child, strangulation/suffocation, and kidnapping.

The September Massachusetts operation exposed the grave consequences of sanctuary policies and the urgent need for local leaders to prioritize the safety of their residents over politics, according to ICE Director Todd M. Lyons. “Every illegal alien we arrested during the operation was breaking U.S. immigration law, and hundreds were violent criminals who should never have been allowed to roam freely in our communities,” Lyons said. “Local law enforcement agencies released them instead of handing them over to us in a secure environment, and this puts neighborhoods, law enforcement officers and illegal aliens at risk.” The ICE chief called on local politicians to step up and end “irresponsible sanctuary policies” that clearly endanger communities.

Just weeks ago, ICE arrested dozens of illegal immigrants with felony convictions in Connecticut, another blue state that also bans local police from cooperating with federal authorities to remove criminal aliens. In just four days federal agents apprehended 65 illegal aliens, nearly half of them convicted or charged in the U.S. with serious felonies, including kidnapping, assault, drug offenses, weapons violations, and sex crimes. Others were identified as members of transnational gangs or had criminal histories in their native countries. Among them were men convicted of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol, sexual assault, drug, and cocaine possession, carrying a prohibited weapon, cruelty toward a child and reckless endangerment.

Radical Muslim Group to Help Public Schools be ‘More Inclusive’

A radical Muslim nonprofit with deep roots in the jihad movement is working to influence our public schools. The alarm has been sounded, as our Corruption Chronicles blog reports.

Nearly two decades after a Judicial Watch special report chronicled how radical Muslim nonprofits operate in the United States as mainstream humanitarian charities, one of the groups with roots buried deep in the Islamic jihad movement is partnering with American public schools to help make them “more inclusive.” It is a worrisome alliance between taxpayer-funded learning institutions in at least two states and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a terrorist front group that was named as a co-conspirator in a federal terror-finance case involving the Hamas front group Holy Land Foundation. CAIR was founded in 1994 by three Middle Eastern extremists (Omar Ahmad, Nihad Awad and Rafeeq Jaber), who ran the American propaganda wing of Hamas, known then as the Islamic Association for Palestine.

Despite its documented ties to terrorism, CAIR’s influence has extended into multiple areas of American public life and the group, like many other Islamist organizations, has received taxpayer dollars through various government initiatives, including a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant program during Trump’s first term as president. The Obama administration even allowed the radical group to transform the way U.S. law enforcement conducts anti-terrorism training by permitting it to bully agencies at the local, state, and federal level to alter materials determined to be discriminatory against Muslims. This includes getting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to purge anti-terrorism training curricula of material coined “offensive” to Muslims. Judicial Watch uncovered that scandal, obtained the FBI records and published an in-depth report documenting Islamist measures and influence operations targeting anti-terrorism training in this country. CAIR also got the U.S. military and local police departments to eliminate anti-terrorism training materials and instructors it deemed anti-Muslim.

More recently the pro-Hamas organization that represents itself as a human rights group is going after young minds with a purported plan to bring inclusivity to public schools in Pennsylvania and Delaware. It could be the beginning of a broader effort to sneak its radical teachings into classrooms across the U.S. CAIR will use “An Educator’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practices” to teach American children that jihad is an internal struggle to become a better person and not violence committed in the name of Islam. The guide also asserts that the oppression of Muslim women “is not related to their adherence to Islam but rather tied to customs and traditions.” Another educational guide that will be utilized is titled “Remembering and Reflecting: Teaching September 11, 2001 in Diverse Classrooms” and directs teachers not to use what it calls “inaccurate and inflammatory” terms like Islamic terrorists, jihadists or radical Islamic terrorists to avoid validating the claims of the 9/11 attackers by associating their crimes with Islam and Muslims. When covering topics—like Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq war and Afghanistan invasion—related to the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks the guide says to include discussion of the bigotry and hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs.

This disturbing encroachment on public education by a known terrorist front group has caught the attention of a U.S. Senator who recently issued a nationwide warning about CAIR’s efforts to influence K-12 schools. In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon the veteran lawmaker, Republican Tom Cotton of Arkansas, writes that it is well documented that CAIR has deep ties to terrorist organizations and publicly supports Hamas’s activities. “Such an organization should never have access to our nation’s children,” Senator Cotton writes, adding that “CAIR’s history makes it clear that its influence will be detrimental and possibly illegal.” The legislator lists examples of the “educational” materials available on CAIR’s website that perpetuate pro-terrorist, anti-Israel rhetoric. He ends the letter by telling the Education Secretary that her agency “must ensure that CAIR is not given an opportunity to push its radical, pro-terrorist, anti-Israel ideology on American schoolchildren.”

Until next week,