President Trump’s new Homeland Security chief talks immigration in NC
President Donald Trump’s top immigration official met Republican officials Monday in Raleigh to talk about how the sheriffs of some of North Carolina’s largest counties are no longer cooperating with federal immigration agents.
Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is in charge of federal agencies like ICE, TSA and FEMA. It was the immigration side of the job that brought him to North Carolina, where he and several conservative politicians criticized Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper for vetoing a bill that would have forced sheriffs to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“There are a handful of sheriffs in North Carolina who have chosen for political reasons — purely political reasons — to shirk their responsibility as law enforcement officers of upholding the law,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, a Republican, who is planning on running against Cooper for the governor’s office next year.
Wolf said those sheriffs refused to hand over more than 500 people who ICE wanted to take into custody in the last year.
Wolf’s visit comes during a tumultuous time inside the agency he now leads. He is the fifth person to be put in charge of DHS in Trump’s three years in office, CNN reported earlier this month when Trump appointed him.
He came to Raleigh Monday accompanied by several activists, who said that immigrants had killed family members of theirs. Wolf gave them each a chance to speak before speaking about a local case at length: Bryan Jose Guzman, an 18-year-old charged with the murder of a young woman in Durham.
The N&O previously reported that Guzman was arrested on armed robbery charges, then released from jail pending his trial, several months before police found the body of his 19-year-old girlfriend, Marlene Yamileth Portillo-Posada, whom they believe he killed.
“This was a preventable tragedy, and unfortunately it may occur again and again because local officials here in North Carolina have chosen to place the welfare of criminal aliens over the welfare of the American people,” Wolf said.
Sheriffs oppose ICE policy
Sheriffs who oppose the ICE retainers have cited several reasons for doing so. The agency’s immigration practices have been found to be unconstitutional in several federal court cases — and local police can be held liable for those violations.
Wake County Sheriff Gerald Baker and Mecklenburg County Sheriff Garry McFadden repeatedly have said they think cutting down on ICE cooperation will help them solve more crimes by helping them develop stronger ties in Hispanic communities.
“McFadden said the end of (an ICE partnership) means people in immigrant communities will be more willing to report crime, and he said he also expects it to improve diversity among local law enforcement officers in the long run,” The Charlotte Observer reported last year.
Baker and McFadden both defeated incumbent sheriffs in 2018. In those elections, voters in North Carolina’s seven largest counties all elected black sheriffs for the first time. All are Democrats, and several sheriffs, including Baker and McFadden, made their opposition to ICE a large part of their campaigns.
Cooper’s office said the governor stands by his decision to veto the bill and allow sheriffs to make their own decisions. Megan Thorpe, a spokesman for the governor, said Cooper served as North Carolina’s attorney general for 16 years, and as the state’s top law enforcement official, he knows the law.
“The bill the legislature passed earlier this year was unconstitutional,” Thorpe wrote in an email. “Today’s event was about politicians trying to score political points, not about improving the safety of North Carolinians.”
Crime statistics
Statistics show that immigrants living in the United States — including those in the country without authorization — are much less likely to commit crimes than American citizens, The Washington Post reported last year.
For some Republicans, the fact that Democrats in the legislature supported Cooper to uphold his veto on the ICE bill makes them more motivated to see him defeated in 2020.
“By God, I hope this is the very first bill we introduce if we have a Republican governor,” said Rep. Carson Smith, who was the sheriff of Pender County in southeastern North Carolina before being elected to the legislature last year.
U.S. Reps Dan Bishop and Mark Walker, two of North Carolina’s Republican congressmen, also attended Monday’s meeting. Both said they try to will work in Washington to try to stop what they called “sanctuary cities,” where officials don’t work with ICE.
“It is ridiculous, and it is a black mark on our country,” Walker said.
Chris Storie was one of the people who spoke Monday in support of local law enforcement cooperating with ICE. The North Carolina resident became an activist after a car accident several years ago that killed her brother and left her with injuries. She said the car that hit her was driven by an unauthorized immigrant. She said the driver who hit them was arrested but later posted bail, and has never been seen again.
“It hurts when your own officials, your law enforcement, sometimes they don’t care,” she said. “I’ve been dubbed a pest, a vigilante, just for trying to get justice.”
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This story was originally published November 25, 2019 at 7:55 PM with the headline "President Trump’s new Homeland Security chief talks immigration in NC."
