Robert Hornak
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail. com and @roberthornak on X.
The shooting this past week- end of an off-duty Border Patrol agent during a robbery in upper Manhattan has increased tensions over what the American people want done about the millions of illegal immigrants that entered the country during the four years the Biden administration disregarded our immigration laws.
Donald Trump won the election on a platform that led with securing the border and getting rid of illegals that came here and are committing crime. Securing the border was the easy part – and without any of the new laws that Biden and many Democrats insisted was needed to make that happen. The farcical claim that massive illegal immigration was due to a broken immigration system was exposed as yet another lie.
But the second part is turning out to be a little more complicated as state and local elected Democrats are actively trying to impede and undermine these efforts, even going so far as to be complicit in the doxxing of federal agents who just do their job and take illegals into custody.
In a rare display of common sense, embattled mayor Eric Ad- ams backed an executive order to allow ICE to set up an office on Rikers Island, to make the process of taking illegals into custody an uneventful process.
But Democrats in the city council refused to allow this to be a safe, easy process. They went to court to block the deal, getting the judge to rule that this deal looked like payback for Adams’ favorable treatment from the U.S. Attorney’s office in his pending federal corruption trial.
The result of the left’s obstruction is that now ICE must go out into the communities where these illegals are likely to be found and do what they can to apprehend them. And since there is no law that says if you are not committing crime you can stay, potentially otherwise law-abiding illegals of- ten get swept up in these actions. And, yes, they too will now be at risk of deportation or if they have an outstanding deportation order they will likely have their deportation expedited.
As they say, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. And Democrats are certainly get- ting it.
In a post-shooting press conference in NYC on Monday, border czar Tom Homan said, “You don’t want to let us in the jails
to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of a jail.” and went on to say, “So what are we gonna do? We’re gonna put more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy. So, sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want: more agents in the community.”
And, of course, Adams passed the buck, saying, “I have nothing to do with the rules that are put in place. I just carry out the rules.”
This as New York is trying to pass a bill to make it illegal for law enforcement to wear masks, as ICE has been doing to make it harder for the obstructionists to doxx them. A move that will be both inflammatory and likely un- constitutional as no city or state can regulate the federal government. Something that was made very clear in the recent confrontation between Trump and California Gov Newsome over control of the national guard.
The bottom line is clear. Many Americans want criminal illegal aliens deported. And ICE will be conducting these operations for as long as the country has leadership willing to enforce our immigration laws.
If the Democrats want the fo- cus to be primarily on criminals and want to make these apprehensions safe for all concerned, they need to cooperate instead of obstructing. But, sadly, it appears as if they want to allow even the worst criminals who have com- mitted the most heinous crimes to remain in this country with impu- nity.
