‘New York will continue to stand with all immigrants to ensure they have the full protections afforded under the law…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday that he would use a publicly-funded resource to help illegal aliens flout current federal deportation efforts.
Cuomo has increasingly sought to pit himself as a nemesis against President Donald Trump, injecting his unsolicited opinions into discussions of policies that have little bearing on the governance of his own state.
He has previously sparred with the White House on an array of issues, including tax cuts and gun rights.
Last week, the far-left governor called for a probe of the president’s Hurricane Maria response and the emergency provisions given to Puerto Rico, claiming the debt-ridden and corruption-plagued U.S. territory did not receive the same relief funding as Texas and Florida after recent hurricanes.
The most recent attack on Trump comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement finalized its plans to follow up on the president’s earlier delayed promise of mass deportations.
Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in. Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people…….
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2019
While inserting himself into the debate, Cuomo, bizarrely, accused the president of trying to politicize immigration by enforcing federal law.
“This is the latest example of this administration’s politicization of immigration in this country and constant assault on the civil rights and dignity of individuals and families,” Cuomo said in a statement.
He said that New York’s public–private Liberty Defense Project would help those facing deportation to continue to forestall the process by attempting to clog the judicial system with specious legal challenges.
“New York will continue to stand with all immigrants to ensure they have the full protections afforded under the law,” Cuomo said.
Despite New York’s budget having encountered a more than $2 billion shortfall this year, Cuomo allotted $10 million in state funding to expand the Liberty Defense Project, a primarily state-run initiative that also involves many activist immigration-advocacy groups, according to its website.
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, explained Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the deportations impacted illegals who already had reached the end of the legal hearings process and continued to defy orders to self-deport.
“[ICE is] ready to just perform their mission, which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately 1 million people who have final removal orders,” Cuccinelli said. “They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders.”
Measures such as Cuomo’s to undermine immigration enforcement efforts have been criticized by the federal agencies, who say they create danger to the law-enforcement officers and the community.
Attempts to delay deportations by exploiting loopholes in the asylum laws to overwhelm the courts have also resulted in an overflow of detention centers at the southern border, creating cramped conditions for the immigtants who continue to flood across by the thousands every day.
“It’s important for people to realize that we continue to effectuate an asylum process that is intended to help people who are persecuted for political, religious, et cetera reasons,” Cuccinelli said. “But that whole process is being swamped by fraudulent asylum claims.”
Cuccinelli said he was “disappointed” that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had included nothing on the legislative agenda to address the emergency, despite increasingly severe rhetoric from Democrats in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—where some, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, D-NY, have claimed the facilities resembled Nazi “concentration camps.”
Those overseeing the immigration enforcement efforts say the ball is in Congress’s court to fix the issues that regulatory policies alone cannot achieve.
“Until we start fixing these loopholes and getting some changes in place it’s going to be very difficult to avoid overcrowding to avoid the kind of conditions at the border that all of us would like to see dissipated” Cuccinelli said.