Put down that firehose, you filthy alien!

Crack ICE team is now 'protecting' us from immigrant police officers and firefighters

By Sam Bellamy

Stephen Miller’s fever-dream team at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has strayed far from its supposed mission of arresting murderous rapists and thieves who eat white people’s pets and mooch off taxpayers — so far, in fact, that ICE agents are now arresting police officers and firefighters.

Can someone give us an exact date for when we’ll be great again?

Last month, Jamaican immigrant Jon-Luke Evans agreed to voluntarily leave the United States after ICE officials arrested him in Maine for allegedly overstaying a visa and trying to illegally purchase a gun.

As with many immigrant arrests, there’s a back story here with extenuating circumstances, sort of like the bread-stealing Jean Valjean. But the masked and heavily armed Inspector Javerts running amok in the Trump administration simply don’t care.

To most rational people, the young officer’s visa would seem like a formality that federal officials could easily clear up, and the gun – well, Evans was attempting to purchase that for his job.

Evans, you see, was a reserve police officer in the police department in Old Orchard Beach, a popular resort town near Portland on Maine’s coast.

“Jon-Luke Evans not only broke U.S. immigration law, but he also illegally attempted to purchase a firearm. Shockingly, Evans was employed as a local law enforcement officer,” ICE ERO Boston acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde proclaimed in July.

Not so shockingly, it turns out, for Old Orchard officials – or, for that matter, the Department of Homeland Security.

Police Chief Elise Chard said her department collected 150-plus pages of background checks, documents and references for Evans, a graduate of the state’s criminal justice academy, and verified his work status through the DHS E-Verify program.

This was “reckless reliance” on the E-Verify program, according to Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin.

Let’s pause here to marvel at that accusation.

Old Orchard Town Manager Diana Asanza asked the obvious question: “If we should not trust the word of the federal computer system that verifies documents and employment eligibility, what good is that system?”

To which DHS and ICE officials reply, er … never mind that. It’s the best system you’ve ever seen, so good you wouldn’t believe.

"The fact that a police department would hire an illegal alien and unlawfully issue him a firearm while on duty would be comical if it weren't so tragic,” ICE’s Hyde said.

The tragedy, it appears, was that Evans is well-regarded within the department, well-liked the community and, by all indications, law-abiding and respectful of one’s pets. Who wants people like that running loose?

Maine is one of about a dozen states that permit vetted noncitizens to work in law enforcement. Among them are the red states of West Virginia and House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana.

But Maine, one of Donald Trump’s least favorite states because of his frequent tussles with its Democratic governor, seems to draw the most ire for its employment policy. In June, ICE arrested Gratien Milandou-Wamba, a native of the Republic of Congo, for overstaying his visa while awaiting a ruling on a request for asylum. He was working as a corrections officer.

Milandou-Wamba, also well-regarded by his colleagues and not known to be a cat-snacker or criminal, drew attention when he, too, tried to purchase a firearm. His attorney said the attempt was motivated by his client’s concerns that he faced dangers off-duty following interactions he’d had with inmates at his job.

Milandou-Wamba, his attorney says, was beaten and tortured back home and understandably fears a repeat.

Among those writing about this insanity from Maine is a columnist named – I kid you not – Victoria Hugo-Vidal. “I'm sure glad these troublemakers are off the street,” she says in a column blasting these Javertian moves.

But Stephen Miller’s pet project grows even more ludicrous – and destructive – by the day.

On Wednesday, Border Patrol agents raided an area where firefighters have been battling a blaze for nearly two months near Olympic National Park in western Washington and snatched 44 immigrants.

Ultimately, only two men were arrested on charges of entering the country illegally, and the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement saying the federal contracts with their employers have been terminated.

One of the arrested men has been in the United States since he was four years old and has been waiting since 2018 for a special visa. He and his family became eligible for the visa when he testified for the prosecution in a federal criminal case, according to the Innovation Law Lab, a nonprofit legal group in Portland, Oregon.

“We have seen entire towns burned to the ground and it is outrageous that the U.S. border patrol unlawfully detained the brave individuals who are protecting us,” Rodrigo Fernandez-Ortega, staff attorney at Innovation Law Lab, said in a statement quoted by The Washington Post. “We demand that they allow him to access counsel as is his right afforded by the U.S. Constitution.”

The firefighters at the scene, who are battling the 9,000-acre Bear Gulch fire, were understandably upset by the raid. Disturbances – like a caravan of SUVs carrying federal agents – aren’t exactly welcome under such conditions.

“Firefighting is a difficult, dangerous job and firefighters need to keep their focus on the fire,” said Dale Bosworth, a former chief of the U.S. Forest Service. “We don’t need to have those kind of distractions. It’s dangerous.”

DHS officials contend the detainees weren’t actively fighting the fire but were cutting wood – which, to people fighting wildfires, is known as creating a fire line, sort of critical to the operation but apparently frivolous to DHS.

Although the men presumably aren’t murderous or an established threat to women (like, say, President Trump) or even to dogs, the feds insist they’re doing what they have to do when they arrest firefighters.

“U. S. Border Patrol steadfastly enforces the laws of the United States and unapologetically addresses violations of immigration law wherever they are encountered,” patrol agent Rosario P. Vasquez said.

“Unapologetically” seems to be a buzzword of late among federal officials defending the indefensible, mostly recently Secretary of State Marco Rubio during last week’s Cabinet meeting. Amid heaping praise on Trump, he said he was “unapologetically” seeking countries to take undocumented workers – countries that now include those that aren’t the home country of the immigrants.

At this stage, no one expects an apology. Miller, Rubio, Kristi Noem and the rest of the Trump administration are clearly hell-bent on ridding our nation of anyone who’s not white or of descent acceptable to bigots.

We’re not waiting for apologies. We’re waiting for next November, when we turn Congress over to upper-case Democrats and lower-case democrats. Then we’ll have a chance of being great again.