On Tuesday’s broadcast of “NewsNation Now,” John Sandweg, who served as acting ICE Director under President Obama, said that New York City’s sanctuary laws “certainly played a role” in the shooting of an off duty Border Patrol agent.
Host Marni Hughes asked, “Does flooding sanctuary cities help this immigration problem?”
Sandweg responded, “Well, look, clearly, Marni, something needs to change here, right? This is exactly — I don’t think anyone wants guys like this walking the streets. And I think when you look at the sanctuary laws, they certainly played a role here in this. You have someone who entered the country unlawfully, was ordered deported, had multiple arrests, including for violent crimes. They cannot be allowed to walk the streets.”
He continued, “But Marni, I think you’ve got to look bigger than just at the sanctuary laws. Certainly, if New York City had handed these guys over to ICE, you probably wouldn’t have had this shooting. But I also worry about ICE needs to take a hard look at whether or not this kind of shift they’ve made in tactics where they’re under this pressure to round up as many people as possible has made it a little easier for guys like this to get away with it, right? Guys like this are adept at hiding. They’re not showing up to worksites. And, unfortunately, we’ve seen ICE kind of forced to pivot to these larger worksite operations where they’re hitting farm sites and factories and things like that. You don’t find these bad guys there. You find them through more hard work kind of tracking them down. And — but I think that — I hope that this is a wake-up call for everybody that something is broken in New York and we just can’t let guys like this walk the streets.”
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