House Homeland Security Chair Lashes ICE Boss For Children Left Abandoned By Raids
The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee on Friday sent a blistering letter to the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement for leaving an “unknown number of children without their parents” when agents detained nearly 700 immigrant workers in raids in Mississippi. “I write to express my outrage,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote to ICE chief Matthew Albence, accusing him of using an underhanded strategy to effect “another form of family separation.”
“At a time when this country is grieving due to two domestic terrorist shootings, your agency has instead seemingly deliberately disregarded its own long-standing guidelines and carried out another form of family separation,” wrote Thompson, referring to the mass shootings last Saturday in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. The suspected gunman in the Texas attack told police he targeted Mexicans, according to authorities.
Thompson accused Albence of creating “chaos” and failing to follow ICE’s own guidelines for coordinating actions with local social service agencies to make certain children left abandoned by the detentions were taken care of. “The blatant lack of planning and resulting chaos calls into question the true motivation behind these worksite enforcement operations,” Thompson wrote.
“More than 24 hours after the operation had concluded, ICE had still not contacted Mississippi’s Department of Child Protection Services,” Thompson added. “This left state agencies, schools, and local communities scrambling to help children affected by these raids and ensure they did not go home to an empty house on their first day of school. This is unacceptable.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-thompson-homeland-security-committee-matthew-albence-raids-immigrants-abandoned-children_n_5d4e475fe4b0fc06ace81b2f
