The Face Of The Deep State Resistance In ICE SVU

Thomas Homan, now retired Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), promised that under the Trump Administration all illegal aliens should fear arrest, and specifically stated that there would be a 400% increase in work-site enforcement which would include not just audits of employers of illegal aliens, but unlike under the Obama Regime Administrative Amnesty, there would be arrests of the illegal aliens employed by scofflaw employers who use illegal alien labor.  Despite Homan’s very public orders to the Special Agents-in-Charge (SAC) of the component of ICE that is responsible for work-site enforcement, derisively referred to by this correspondent as ICE SVU for it’s strange obsession with sex crimes, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is deliberately ignoring Homan’s orders, and doing their best to ensure that illegal aliens remain in the United States.  The first big ICE SVU work-site enforcement action resulted in a measly 20 arrests in a nation-wide raid of 7-11 stores.  In the old days, 20 arrests was the average number of arrests by one immigration agent just trolling the streets of Los Angeles for illegals, much less a targeted raid on a nation-wide employer of illegal aliens.  And none of those records obtained from 7-11 were used to track down their illegal alien employees at their homes and make arrests of those aliens and their family members.  This is telling of the attitude of ICE SVU.

And nothing is more telling than these statistics is the black heart of the backstabber.  Recently 19 former Special Agents of the now defunct U.S. Customs Service (USCS), one of the two agencies combined to create U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE, and now all now SACs in ICE SVU, attacked President Donald John Trump and former Acting Director Homan for enforcing immigration law.  The backstabbers, the Dirty 19, are Special Agents-in-Charge of ICE SVU, but that is one part of two of the major components of ICE, the ill-named Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the other being Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).  Ill-named because HSI avoids any investigation related to the protection of the homeland from illegal aliens.  ICE SVU prefers pointless investigations into counterfeit Super Bowl merchandise rather than investigating illegal aliens, their employers, and their smugglers.

This correspondent first advised then candidate Donald J. Trump that ICE SVU would be one of the components of DHS that would be sabotaging immigration enforcement.

ICE SVU actively shirks its immigration enforcement responsibilities and has long been looking for a mission doing anything but immigration law enforcement.  I refer to it as ICE SVU because it has apparently decided to concentrate on child pornography and similar non-immigration offenses as its major investigative effort…

ICE HSI is dominated by legacy USCS Special Agents and managers who long ago purged most legacy INS Special Agents and managers from the agency.  Those that remain, such as agents assigned to perform worksite enforcement, basically do no work for the very generous pay that ICE HSI Special Agents receive.  I know one legacy INS agent assigned to worksite enforcement who has made no arrests and done no worksite raids in 8 years.

President Trump will have major problems with ICE HSI management and agents. Even current agents don’t want to do immigration work. They consider it beneath them, and they have little or no knowledge of immigration law.

[President Trump Will Have Foes In Immigration Bureaucracy—But Also Friends. They Can Help Him Win, by Federale, VDare, April 25, 2016]

Sadly, my predictions on the behavior of ICE SVU were point on.  ICE SVU is as much a #DeepState Resistance to the Trump Administration as the top leadership of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).  One need not look further than the insubordinate reaction to orders to begin work-site enforcement by SAC Ryan Spradlin, the most prominent member of the Dirty 19 resisting President Trump, of the San Francisco Field Office of ICE SVU; Spradlin sent his agents out to “raid” employers of illegal aliens and managed to make no arrests in northern California, where over 1 million illegal aliens live and work.

Federal immigration agents raided 77 businesses in Northern California this week, demanding proof that their employees are legally allowed to work in the United States, officials said Thursday.

It was believed to be the largest such localized sweep of workplaces by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency since President Trump took office. ICE agents swept into nearly 100 7-Eleven stores nationwide last month and arrested 21 suspected undocumented immigrants.

Thomas Homan, the agency’s acting director, has called for a “400 percent increase” in such workplace operations.

ICE did not identify any of the businesses its agents visited in the Bay Area and the Sacramento region Monday through Wednesday. The businesses were served notices of inspection and given three working days to comply, and no immediate arrests were made.

[Immigration Agents Raid 77 Northern California Workplaces; No Arrests Reported, by  Hamed Aleaziz, SFGate, February 2, 2018]

These “raids” were a colossal failure, and likely a deliberate one at that.  ICE SVU has no interest in doing immigration enforcement, and more so with Spradlin who fancies himself a wannabee FBI agent, doing fancy investigations, not enforcing immigration law.

Asked in an interview this month whether HSI agents were mandated to make collateral arrests, Ryan Spradlin, the agency’s special agent in charge in San Francisco, said executive orders signed by President Trump had changed his agents’ ability to use “discretion” on the ground to not make arrests. But he said they still made case-by-case determinations…

“The Department of Justice has the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security has Homeland Security Investigations,” Spradlin said. “We are in the business of public safety and national security, and a lot of folks don’t know that.”

[‘Collateral’ Immigration Arrests Threaten Key Crime Alliances, By Hamed Aleaziz, SFGate, April 28, 2017]

Spradlin came to ICE SVU from the legacy U.S. Customs Service (USCS), where he was a Special Agent before the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and is the son of a USCS Special Agent, obviously suckled at the mother’s teat of the rivalry between the legacy USCS and the legacy Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).  He has a distinct distaste for immigration enforcement, it is just not sexy. Spradlin, who has never made an immigration arrest and processed an arrested alien for removal, made certain his agents made no arrests despite orders from his boss, Thomas Homan, that arrests are back on the table in work-site enforcement.  Immigration enforcement is not like being an FBI agent and Spradlin wants to be like an FBI agent.  Note how he emphasized that his agents have “discretion” not to do their jobs.  That is telling us that Spradlin’s ICE SVU is more interested in not making immigration arrests, and the recent fake raids on employers of illegal aliens prove that Spradlin has no intention of doing immigration enforcement work in the future.  Two telling points concerning Spradlin and his distaste for immigration enforcement; there is only one agent assigned to do work-site enforcement in the San Francisco Field Office and the San Francisco ICE Office of the Chief Counsel (OCC)/Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) have standing orders to all ICE SVU agents not to make immigration arrests without prior legal approval.  That is the attitude of the Resistance to the Trump immigration enforcement agenda in San Francisco, make no arrests.  In the old INS days, no agent needed permission from an attorney to make an arrest.

Spradlin laid down a marker to Homan and President Trump. He wants to play a Robert Mueller or Rod Rosenstein, daring President Trump to fire him.  This is the #DeepState playbook, sabotage the Trump Administration objectives on immigration enforcement from within the bureaucracy.  Ryan Spradlin is #TheResistance in ICE SVU.

The Face Of #TheResistance In ICE SVU, Ryan Spradlin