The New York attorney general has tapped a special advisor and legal counsel who has claimed she would use her position in power to “prosecute” and “abolish” the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, announced this week that Zephyr Teachout, a left-wing attorney and professor at Fordham University School of Law, would join her team.
“I’m proud to join such an extraordinary office,” Teachout said Monday in a statement, noting that she “couldn’t be happier to be working with [James] and her extraordinary lawyers and leaders in her office.”
Teachout ran for attorney general herself last year, but dropped out of the race and endorsed James. The attorney also ran for the high-level statewide position in 2018, as well as for the New York legislature in 2016 and the governorship in 2014 — losing to Andrew Cuomo. She notably claimed while running for AG in 2018, “One of the key things of my campaign is the wrong people are in jail. We have to end mass incarceration and return our focus to white-collar crime,” as the Washington Free Beacon noted.
In other 2018 remarks, Teachout claimed, “I think it’s critical that law enforcement speak out and say [ICE] is a tool of cruelty, unconstitutional behavior, illegality. I will prosecute ICE for their criminal acts.”
“ICE has to be abolished,” she also said. “And I say that as somebody who is running for one of the top law enforcement jobs in the country,” she said, adding that the agency was “born in xenophobia in the time after 9/11, and has grown up to become a tool of fear and illegality.”
In a phone interview with The Daily Wire, Mark Morgan, the former chief operating officer and acting commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said Teachout’s claims about ICE are “moronic” and “devoid of any truth, fact, or reality with respect to ICE’s statutory mission.”
“If you take a look at ICE, what their statutory responsibility is — and what she does, and a lot of people do too — is they think of ICE as only the part of ICE enforcement or removal operations,” said Morgan. “That their statute of job is to find illegal aliens and remove them. I suggest anybody take three minutes and go to their website and look at the statistical accomplishments. How many pedophiles that they have arrested and saved countless children from the atrocities they’ve experienced, how many gang members they have arrested. The list goes on and on.”
The appointment of Teachout comes after council members in New York City approved a law in December that permits illegal aliens to cast ballots in municipal elections. Called the “Non-Citizen Voting Law,” the policy was signed by Democratic Mayor Eric Adams. Currently, Democrats in the state legislature are considering contentious bills that would bar law enforcement in New York from working with ICE.
Related:
- Letitia James Suspends Her Campaign For New York Governor
- New York Attorney General Letitia James Announces Run For Governor
- Trump, Trump Jr. Blast NY AG Letitia James For ‘Political Persecution’: ‘This Is Banana Republic Stuff’
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