By NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON — Kris Kobach, as general counsel for the Alliance for Free Citizens, is lead counsel for plaintiff sheriffs in Texas and ICE officers wanting to continue to enforce current federal immigration law.
"The Biden administration issued a memo which orders ICE officers to stop deporting about 90% of the people that they were previously deporting under the Trump administration," Kobach said. "Included among those people that they can no longer deport under this new policy are aliens who must be detained and removed from the country under three different federal statutes. Basically, the Biden administration issued a memorandum telling ICE officers to start breaking federal law. The sheriffs are suffering, because that has fueled the crisis down along the border and in south Texas generally. Now that ICE has been forced to stand down, the ICE officers, by the way, they want to continue to work with the sheriffs and take custody of the illegal aliens the sheriffs are arresting virtually every day. They've teamed up to say, look, we just want to be able to follow the law."
Kobach contends that these really are people who the country has an interest in not having on its soil.
"These are serious criminals," Kobach said. "Our sheriffs have filed a legal complaint asserting that among the crimes committed by these illegal aliens, who are now being allowed to walk on the street include, rape of a child, aggravated sexual assault on a child, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, larceny, burglary, domestic violence, carrying a prohibited weapon, possession of drugs, resisting a law enforcement officer, DUI and the list goes on."
Kobach said the remedy is simple.
"It's not a big ask," Kobach said. "All we are asking the judge to do is for a nationwide injunction to allow ICE and the sheriffs of this country to follow the law, so they can once again cooperate in detaining and removing criminal aliens. It's a shocking situation when it takes a lawsuit now, for law enforcement officers to be permitted to follow the law, but unfortunately, that's where we are."
Kobach sees the Biden administration's strategy as twofold, ending interior enforcement, which is the focus of the current suit and at the same time, they are opening the border by ending the remain in Mexico policy that kept those with asylum claims on the Mexico side of the border until the U.S. decided if the claim had merit or not.
Kobach is also running for attorney general in Kansas in 2022.