The head of ICE slammed Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot over her continued support for the city’s sanctuary policy, which he has said allowed an illegal alien to sexually assault a toddler. During an interview this week, Director Matthew Albence called out Lightfoot for demonizing ICE officials and refusing to cooperate with its procedures.

The Democrat mayor recently blamed the agency for politicizing the sexual assault of a 3-year-old girl by convicted felon Christopher Puente just last month. Puente was arrested for theft in June of 2019, but instead of being turned over to ICE officials, he was released due to Chicago’s sanctuary city policy.

Albence called  Lightfoot's remarks the height of hypocrisy. He has constantly condemned sanctuary cities for hurting Americans that he and the agency are trying to protect.

“As a law enforcement officer, we work every day to ensure the safety of those in the communities we serve,” he said. “There’s no worse feeling than when those innocent citizens you’ve sworn to protect are needlessly harmed.”

Acting United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Ken Cuccinelli says the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is ready to deport about a million illegal aliens who remain in the country despite having final orders for deportation.

During an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Cuccinelli said despite a delay of mass deportations by President Trump two weeks ago, ICE agents are ready to detain and deport the roughly one million illegal aliens who have been ordered deported from the country.

Cuccinelli said:

[ICE agents are] ready to just perform their mission which is to go and find and detain and then deport the approximately one million people who have final removal orders. They’ve been all the way through the due process and have final removal orders. Who among those will be targeted for this particular effort or not is really just information kept within ICE. [Emphasis added]

Cuccinelli said mass deportations by ICE of illegal aliens with final deportation orders “should be going on on a rolling basis” and blamed “the politics of Washington” for interfering with ICE operations.

“I’m just pointing out that the pool of those with final removal orders is enormous,” Cuccinelli said. “It’s important to note, here we are talking about ICE doing its job as if it’s special. And really this should be going on on a rolling basis for ICE and they’ve been interfered with, effectively, and held up by the politics of Washington to a certain extent…”

Trump, last month, delayed a plan by ICE to mass deport about 2,000 illegal aliens who had final deportation orders after details of the operation were leaked to the media. Former ICE Director Thomas Homan accused Acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kevin McAleenan of leaking the plans of the ICE raid in order to halt the operation.

SALEM, Ohio-- U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided four Fresh Mark locations in Northeast Ohio on Tuesday.

At the meat processing plant in Salem, agents arrested 146 employees for immigration violations, ICE said in a news release on Wednesday.

Search warrants were also executed at Fresh Mark locations on South Way Street SW in Massillon, Cloverleaf Street SW in Massillon and Harmont Avenue NE in Canton.

"Unlawful employment is one of the key magnets drawing illegal aliens across our borders," said Steve Francis, HSI special agent in charge for Michigan and Ohio. "Businesses who knowingly harbor and hire illegal aliens as a business model must be held accountable for their actions."

Those arrested were taken to processing facilities, where they will begin the removal proceedings. They will be moved to detention facilities in Michigan and Ohio. According to a news release from ICE, several people were processed and released from custody because of humanitarian considerations.

An ICE spokesman said there would be no additional arrests on Wednesday.

Fresh Mark is a member of ICE's Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers program. IMAGE members are not immune from prosecution.

Are we going to have immigration limits or not?

That's the question underlying the calls for the abolition of Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE), the bureau within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for upholding our immigration rules away from the borders.

The push to #AbolishICE is threatening to become a litmus test for Democratic politicians. It has been embraced by presidential hopefuls like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand(D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), as well as other far-left figures such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, actress-turned-New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, and a number of House members.

Despite the efforts of some senior Democrats to try to tamp down the anti-borders fervor of their base for fear of political backlash, the energy in the Democratic party is clearly on the far left. In the words of activist Sean McElwee, a co-founder of AbolishICE.org:

"I believe that every Democrat running in the 2020 Presidential Election will have to articulate a vision of a world without ICE."

Democrats have a solution for illegal immigration: Abolish ICE. Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisconsin, is drafting legislation to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and five Democrats are joining him. Looking at the recent protest signs in Portland, this idea is taking off. Well, it’s a novel idea. No police, no lawbreakers. No Border Patrol. No border.

So, how did we get caught between separating children from their parents and abolishing ICE? As a child therapist, I’m keenly aware of the trauma that’s caused when children are separated from their parents. And I don’t support it.

But since the 1990s, between 6,000 and 10,000 migrants, including children, have died miserable deaths along our southern border. Millions of families have been separated as the parents came north to get better paid jobs and provide wealthy Americans with an abundant stream of cheap labor as nannies, landscapers, house cleaners and so on. The negative impact on children and family structure of migrating providers is well documented by academics, and many children have been abandoned entirely by fathers who started new families in America.

Prior to President Barack Obama’s “catch and release” policies, 90 percent of illegal migrants were single men, who, if caught, faced incarceration until their cases were heard. But the number of children brought to the border exploded when people realized that with a child they would be released into the interior with an appointment for a future hearing, and many never showed up. In addition, these policies created business opportunities for drug gangs who moved into smuggling children and using children to carry drugs.

So, where was public shock and moral outrage on behalf of children all these years?

LOS ANGELES (AP) — U.S. immigration agents descended on dozens of 7-Eleven stores before dawn Wednesday to open employment audits and interview workers in what officials described as the largest operation against an employer under Donald Trump’s presidency.

Agents targeted about 100 stores nationwide, broadening an investigation that began with a 4-year-old case against a franchisee on New York’s Long Island. The audits could lead to criminal charges or fines over the stores’ hiring practices.

The action appears to open a new front in Trump’s sharp expansion of immigration enforcement, which has already brought a 40 percent increase in deportation arrests and plans to spend billions of dollars on a border wall with Mexico. Hardliners have been pressing for a tougher stance on employers.

Derek Benner, a top official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told The Associated Press that Wednesday’s operation was “the first of many” and “a harbinger of what’s to come” for employers. He said there would be more employment audits and investigations, though there is no numerical goal.

“This is what we’re gearing up for this year and what you’re going to see more and more of is these large-scale compliance inspections, just for starters. From there, we will look at whether these cases warrant an administrative posture or criminal investigation,” said Benner, acting head of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, which oversees cases against employers.

“It’s not going to be limited to large companies or any particular industry, big medium and small,” he said. “It’s going to be inclusive of everything that we see out there.”

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency released nearly 600 illegal immigrants convicted of sex crimes, many because their home countries refused to take them back, according to newly obtained documents.

ICE said that a total of 564 illegal sex criminals were let go for legal reasons in the latest accounting period, fiscal 2015.

Of those, ICE was forced to release 151 because their native nations would not accept them. Under a 2001 Supreme Court case, the government can't indefinitely jail illegals ordered deported if their home countries won't take them back.

The documents, obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute under the Freedom of Information Act, do not give names or locations of the illegals, but do provide a general classification of the sex crimes. They are:

• 95 convicted of "commercialized sexual offense."
• 275 convicted of "other sexual offenses."
• 194 convicted of "sexual assault."

A man accused of gunning down a woman Wednesday along a popular San Francisco waterfront is a convicted felon who has been deported several times, government officials said.

Francisco Sanchez, 45, who was arrested in connection with the seemingly random killing of Kathryn Steinle, 32, while she walked along the city's Pier 14 with her father, was last deported in 2009 — the fifth time he has been sent back to Mexico, authorities said.

"His criminal history includes seven prior felony convictions, four involving narcotics charges," Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said in a statement, Fox News reported Friday

The Associated Press has published figures from ICE's weekly internal metrics showing that immigration enforcement has continued to decline in 2014. But the reasons offered sound more like spin from the DHS or ICE press office, which for years has peddled the tall tale that the Obama administration is tougher than any other on enforcement.

Writes AP immigration writer Alicia Caldwell:

[ICE] sent home 258,608 immigrants between the start of the budget year last October and July 28 this summer. During the same period a year earlier, it removed 320,167 people — meaning a decrease this year of nearly 20 percent.

Over the same period ending in July 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 344,624 people, some 25 percent more than this year, according to the federal figures obtained by the AP.

I have earlier editions of the same report Caldwell examined that show the same trend. Indeed, it was first reportedby Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times back in April, not long after incoming DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson admitted that the administration previously had been cooking the books to give the impression of record deportations.

Caldwell then seems to restate the administration talking points regarding the reasons for the decline, providing two explanations:

1. "The Obama administration decided as early as summer 2011 to focus its deportation efforts on criminal immigrants or those who posed a threat to national security or public safety." She points out that many non-criminal deportation cases are "stuck" in the immigration court system, which has now a backlog of 400,000 cases. 
    
2. Border Patrol agents are detaining more Central Americans, and the deportation process is more work and takes longer for them, because they have to be flown home.

These "explanations" don't hold water. Let's take them one at a time.