The battle between sanctuary jurisdictions and the Trump Administration has soared to new heights with a flap over a small regional airport in Washington state.
The King County Airport in Seattle had been used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport 34,000 illegal immigrants over the last decade. But after a politically motivated study done by the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, which concluded in its report, “the time has come for this work to be done,” County Executive Dow Constantine issued an order pressuring companies that fuel planes, to stop servicing ICE flights or lose their contracts with the county.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform calls it all-out war against border enforcement. “This is taking it to a new level,” said FAIR’s spokesman Ira Mehlman. “Sanctuary policies say that the local jurisdiction won’t cooperate with ICE. Here (Constantine) is taking it a step further and blacklisting companies that do business with ICE. This crosses the line probably into obstruction of Justice.”
ICE operates the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where illegal immigrants are detained while their cases wind their way through the immigration court system. When deporting through the King County Airport, handcuffed detainees were taken on a short, 40-minute bus ride before boarding a charter flight. Now, ICE is driving detainees three hours to the Yakima Airport.
Bryan Wilcox, ICE’s acting field operations director in Seattle, said, “state and local efforts thwarting ICE operations serve only to create additional security concerns and add significant delays and costs to U.S. taxpayers.”
ICE spokesperson Tanya Roman issued a press release detailing some of the illegal immigrants deported with charter flights from the King County Airport. The list includes a Mexican citizen wanted for human trafficking, a Honduran man accused of rape and murder and a Guatemalan man charged with torture and murder.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
