 |
| James Schwab, who was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman until last week, said that his decision to resign was prompted by the agency’s statements after the mayor of Oakland, Calif., warned about an immigration raid. |
A spokesman for United States Immigration and Customs
Enforcement has resigned, saying that he could no longer “bear the burden” of
spreading falsehoods on behalf of the Trump administration.
The spokesman, James Schwab, who had worked for the agency’s San
Francisco Division, told news outlets Monday that his decision was prompted by
false statements made by the agency on Feb. 27 and repeated by Attorney General
Jeff Sessions last week.
The statements criticized the mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf,
for her decision last month to warn city
residents that a raid by federal immigration agents targeting roughly 1,000
people was imminent. The agency’s deputy director, Thomas D. Homan, said that Ms. Schaaf’s warning had helped “864 criminal
aliens and public safety threats” to evade capture in the raid.
Mr. Sessions, in a visit to California last
week, condemned Ms. Schaaf, a Democrat, and echoed the agency, asserting that her actions had
allowed hundreds to escape.
Mr. Schwab said in
interviews, first with The San Francisco Chronicleand then with CNN, that he had been frustrated by the
remarks, and had quit “because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts.”
“I asked them to change the information,” he told The Chronicle,
referring to the 864 people to whom the statement alluded. “I told them that
the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with
that. Then I took some time and I quit.”
He explained that the enforcement agency would have been
unlikely to capture all of the roughly 1,000 undocumented immigrants in the
area that it had targeted, and that it was incorrect to identify those who were
not detained as threats to public safety.
“We were never going to pick up that many people,” he said. “To
say that 100 percent are dangerous criminals on the street, or that those
people weren’t picked up because of the misguided actions of the mayor, is just
wrong.”
Mr. Schwab did not immediately respond to requests for comment
on Tuesday. He resigned last week, according to CNN.
“I just couldn’t bear the
burden — continuing on as a representative of the agency and charged with
upholding integrity, knowing that information was false,” he told CNN, adding
that in his 16 years of experience in government he had never been asked to
deflect when he knew something was inaccurate.
Please continue this article
here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/13/us/california-ice-spokesman-resigns.html
No comments:
Post a Comment