Larson on ICE

So then, what are we to make of State Senator John Larson’s most recent attack on ICE, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

As its title suggests, ICE is the enforcement arm of US immigration and custom processes, which include the time honored and orderly entrée of immigrants into the United States. Border jumping, rampant during the administration of former Democrat President Joe Biden, remains illegal, and is invariably attended with consequent illegal acts, such as gang activity, drug dealing, murder and mayhem.

Even Larson might agree that a family in Connecticut that made loads of money by facilitating illegal border crashing, charging the “illegals” large entrance fees and later demanding a cut on their annual salaries, was in retrospect an attack on illegal immigrants, victims of the violation of a process ICE fully intends to restore. The chief mandate of ICE is to enforce prevailing immigration law, which assures legal entrée into the United States following standard processing.

The United States tracks “border encounters” between agents and migrants seeking illegally to cross the US border; it does not publish data on the net number of migrants who enter illegally and remain in the country. “Under the Biden administration, there have been 6.4 million encounters outside official ports of entry along the southern border so far [since 2024], with the yearly average more than quadruple that of the [previous] Trump administration, according to a Monitor analysis of CBP [Customs and Border Protection] data. In addition, CBP agents have registered more than 1.6 million encounters at official ports of entry with migrants deemed “inadmissible,” some of whom are allowed to temporarily enter the country.”

Laws that do not have an enforcement mechanism are paper laws that may be – and have been -- violated with impunity. The unbearable load of illegal immigrants avoiding legal processing during Biden’s open border administration has been whittled down to a trickle since President Donald Trump regained office.

All quotes below are taken from a recent Hartford Courant story, “Lawmakers condemn ICE arrests at CT car wash. It’s ‘government thuggery,’ Larson says.” Here is Larson inveighing against ICE:

“I condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the actions taken this morning by ICE in Newington when they grabbed seven individuals at a local car wash. After speaking with Mayor Trister, I can confirm that no local officials were notified (emphasis mine) and that no details have been made available about who these men and women are. Snatching people at work is not keeping our community safe – it is government thuggery, and this, combined with his actions in D.C. only further show President Trump’s descension (sic) to authoritarianism. This is exactly the kind of heavy-handed, unconstitutional action we have come to expect from his administration and his ICE operatives. They operate in secrecy, wearing masks, ignoring due process, disregarding the rights of individuals, and showing no respect for the laws of our state or the elected officials of our communities. These raids are not about safety. They are about fear. They undermine trust, divide our communities, and trample on the very principles of justice and fairness that define our nation. This must stop, and it must stop now. I will continue to stand with our immigrant neighbors and work with my colleagues in Congress to hold ICE accountable and ensure that our Constitution and the rule of law are respected.”

The Courant tells us, “Larson is also a co-sponsor of the No Secret Police Act to require ICE agents to identify themselves and bar them from wearing masks and a co-sponsor of the Protecting Sensitive Locations Act to prevent ICE raids at schools, hospitals, courthouses, and places of worship.”

Critics of Larson’s No Secret Police Act insists that ICE masks are necessary because ice agents have been “docked” by radical opponents of ICE, some of whom are quite willing to commit violence upon the agents once they have been publically identified by leftists with knives in their brains.

1) “I can confirm that no local officials were notified” concerning the raids. Would it not be pointless to notify officials operating under Connecticut’s Trust Act, the purpose of which is to prevent officials from working cooperatively with ICE agents?

2) The actions taken by ICE agents in Newington and elsewhere in Connecticut represent a heavy-handed, unconstitutional action. Perhaps, but only in the sense that any lawful detention or arrest must seem to those detained or arrested “heavy handed” (read: successful). Larson does not tell us why he regards such commonplace interventions as unconstitutional. Is it not usual for enforcement authorities to detain or arrest a bank robber? No doubt the bank robber seeking to make an unlawful withdrawal may regard his detention or arrest as heavy-handed and perhaps unconstitutional. But should the bank robber apply for help to his U.S. Representative on the grounds that his arrest was unconstitutional, Senator Compassion may be forgiven for turning aside the unconvincing notion that lawbreaking is in some sense constitutional.

A cynical Republican tells me that Larson’s heavy-hand may have been forced upon him by circumstances. While Larson’s gerrymandered 1^st District is an impregnable Democrat fortress, he is being challenged this time around by a few hopeful Democrats, among them former Mayor of Hartford Luke Bronin, young, popular and not at all Mamdani-like. Larson, my cynic tells me, may have been forced left by Connecticut progressives. The future, Yogi Berra tells us, “ain’t what it used to be.”