When progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez AKA “AOC,” her media apologists, and various pro-illegal immigration individuals and organizations in public and private circles call to “Abolish ICE,” as far I’m concerned, they’re deliberately aiding & abetting by default the many criminals that U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement works so diligently to safeguard American society against.
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AOC and Ice: I Take That S*it Personally
I must admit a bit of personal bias here, and I make no apologies for it. You see, though my official 19FortyFive bio mentions that I’m a former Federal law enforcement officer, it doesn’t go into specifics, so in the spirit of full disclosure, I shall provide our dear readers with those specifics now.
For starters, from November 2006 (shortly after I completed my Air Force service) to August 2009, I was a U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP; the ”P” stands for “Protection,” people, not “Patrol!!!”) as a CBP Officer at Los Angeles/Long Beach Seaport, serving on the Radiation Portal Monitors (RPMs) and Vessel Operations Teams.
From there, I transitioned to CBP’s sister agency ICE as a Federal Series 1811 Criminal Investigator/Special Agent under the agency’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) wing and worked in that capacity until June 2011, serving on the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Financial Crimes Teams.
I participated in missions such as Operation Community Shield, working alongside state & local law enforcement counterparts to get sex offenders off the streets, and Operation Red Rein, this time working with the state & local L.E. brethren to target meth and cocaine dealers in the East Los Angeles area.
And though I didn’t make ICE a long-term career, I still feel a sense of kinship with my friends and professional acquaintances who are still with the agency or are now retired from it.
I can vouch that the ICE work is highly diversified in terms of ethnicities and nationalities – our workforce includes plenty of legal immigrants, i.e., naturalized U.S. citizens on the payroll – religious faiths, genders, sexual orientations, etc.
Ergo, when the AOCs of the world treat us disrespectfully, I take that s*it personally.
The Criminals That AOC and Her Ilk Support
The people who call for abolishing or defunding ICE are undermining the fight against vicious criminal gangs like MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha 13), whose infamous motto is “Kill, Rape, Control.”
It undermines the fight against “La Eme,” i.e., Mexican Mafia, and its various narcotraficante elements and offshoots such as Los Zetas, Los Matazetaws the Jalisco Cartel, Nueva Generacion Cartel, the Knights Templar, and so forth; for those of you who’ve never viewed videos or still photos of the killings that these outfits commit, they are pure savagery.
And by defending illegal immigrant caravans, the anti-ICE pundits are supporting the vicious crime of human trafficking.
According to statistics gathered by the Polaris Project, between September 2015 and July 2018, the U.S.-Mexico border saw 509 cases of sex trafficking, 651 cases of labor trafficking, and 76 cases of combined sex and labor trafficking; pit of the 2,552 total number of victims tabulated, 393 were minors.
In my view. if AOC and her ilk had her way, by default, all of the scumbags perpetrating these horrific crimes would get off scot-free.
A Current ICE Agent’s/Officer’s Perspective
Since it’s been 11.5 years (sheesh, where does the time go?) since I last worked for ICE, I figure it might be useful to get some perspectives from a current ICE employee.
For that purpose, I shall turn to my friend “Ivana” – I can’t use her real name for OPSEC reasons, and “Ivana” is a long-running inside joke between herself and Yours Truly – a former U.S. Air Force Security Forces comrade-in-arms whom I’m known for 22 years and nowadays works for ICE as a Detention and Deportation Officer under the agency’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).
Here’s what “Ivana” had to say about the political and media slandering of her (and my former) agency:
“There are people that assume ICE is just about deporting non-citizens. ICE includes ERO (enforcement), HSI (investigations) and OPLA (the court process). These include a multitude of duties that differ completely from normal law enforcement because it involves non-citizens and a completely separate due process.”
And to quote SEAL Team 6 founding C.O. Richard “Demo Dick” Marcinko, “When you assume, you make an A*S of U and ME!”
Anyway, Ivana goes on to add:
“They are cutting our duties, slowing on street arrests, closing offices, releasing detained non-citizens, and reducing the number of air marshals all for the sake of helping with the influx of people coming in through the border. They are putting American citizens safety at risk. ICE is more than immigration issues at the border. It involves in-country security for every single American citizen and those with legal status. It’s a huge operation. To get rid of an organization that big would be an injustice to the American people and leave them scarily vulnerable.”
Yet that is precisely what the AOCs and many in the Democratic Party want to do. That would be a mistake.
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Christian D. Orr is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch and The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). In his spare time, he enjoys shooting, dining out, cigars, Irish and British pubs, travel, USC Trojans college football, and Washington DC professional sports.
