ICE Won’t Arrest Illegal Aliens Caught In Traffic Stops

In its latest surreptitious effort to protect illegal immigrants the Obama Administration plans to prohibit both federal and local law enforcement officers from arresting undocumented aliens discovered as a result of traffic violations.

It marks the third time this month that a covert plan to shield illegal aliens from deportation gets exposed. A few weeks ago the administration ordered authorities to halt the removal of some 700,000 illegal immigrants who are students while lawmakers craft legislation to officially spare them from expulsion. Weeks earlier an internal Homeland Security document revealed that the president has a secret backup plan to grant illegal immigrants amnesty in case Congress doesn’t pass legislation to do it.

This week’s plan du jour is to shield illegal immigrants who break U.S. law by operating a vehicle without a license or driving recklessly, possibly endangering innocent Americans. A draft policy issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says that agency Chief John Morton intends to prohibit his agents as well as local law enforcement officers from detaining illegal aliens stopped during traffic violations.

The three-page ICE memo was made public this week by a research organization dedicated to studying immigration issues. Even police departments that participate in the local-federal partnership known as 287(g) will be prohibited from apprehending or reporting an illegal alien in the course of a traffic stop. Federal agents will be forbidden from issuing what’s known as an immigration detainer unless the illegal alien has committed a separate criminal violation.

Morton is implementing the new measure in response to the “many concerns” of immigration enforcement critics (i.e. open borders, La Raza movement) who believe local police abuse their authority to arrest “innocent” illegal aliens in order to have them deported. That’s according to an ICE political appointee who discourages cooperation between local and federal authorities.

Never mind that local police across the country regularly encounter unlicensed illegal immigrants operating unsafe vehicles, smuggling other undocumented aliens or plotting serious crime sprees. Two of the 9/11 hijackers (Ziad Jarrah and Nawaf al-Hazmi) had been stopped for speeding by police in separate states but were not detained even though they were in the U.S. illegally.

Jarrah was ticketed by a Maryland State trooper just days before he boarded United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field, and al-Hazmi, one of the 9/11 masterminds, got pulled over in Oklahoma around eight months before he crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.