Well boo-frickin’-hoo! Emphasis added:

Juan Reardon, standing on the corner of 23rd Street and Barrett Avenue in Richmond on a hot Monday afternoon, strongly suggests you turn right. Particularly if you speak Spanish. Particularly if you lack a driver’s license or drive an uninsured vehicle.

Just know that police wait ahead at a checkpoint to ask for that paperwork, and to tow cars.

“We have a law that mandates you to have a driver’s license, but at the same time prohibits you from getting one,” said Reardon, fronting a group of placard-waving locals. “And the Richmond police, by implementing these BS policies, are … directly targeting the Latino population.”

I can’t help but notice how he neglects to mention that it was law-breaking that got these people into this situation in the first place.

Political candidate Chris Tallerico can set him straight:

“Driving is not a right. It’s a privilege,” Tallerico said. “If this provides us with a safer city, more power to it.”

The Richmond Vice Mayor also has his head on straight:

[John] Marquez, one of the city’s first Latino politicians and the council member most closely identified with the Latino business community, also is chairman of the council’s public safety subcommittee. He joined in a unanimous vote in the winter to support checkpoints and also clamored for the California Highway Patrol to temporarily supplement the local police force.

It is not “helping” the Latino community to allow lawlessness to run rampant in their neighborhoods, or to pick and choose which laws to enforce. It is not the job of law enforcement, or indeed of local government, to pass judgment on the laws passed by the legislative branches of state or federal government - their job is only to enforce them. It is up to the legislature to pass or repeal those laws, and it is for the courts to determine if they are unconstitutional. The anarchy that these protesters are asking for is not part of the American legal system.

Deportations from Washington, Oregon and Alaska have spiked by nearly 40 percent, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said Friday.

Immigration officials said the number of illegal aliens deported from those three states was 7,345 for the first nine months of the fiscal year. That number was up from 5,256 for the same period last year.

If the monthly average continues, the agency is on pace for a record-breaking year in the region, said Neil Clark, field office director for ICE detention and removal operations in Seattle.

Officials credit the increase in part to expansion of the Criminal Alien Program, in which immigration officers hone in on illegal aliens with criminal records and work with local law enforcement to process them. Those deportations increased by 26 percent in the same period. Of the more than 7,300 deported, more than 2,000 had prior criminal convictions.

“If you think of ICE’s mission being public safety, the Criminal Alien Program really goes at the heart of that,” agency spokeswoman Lori Dankers said.

Kudos to immigration officials for stepping up the pace to remove criminals from our country! But…how effective are these deportations given that our borders remain porous?

Pledging to “take them on big-time,” Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, sharply criticized the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency Friday and declared she would push for measures to reduce the fear she said agents have caused East Bay immigrant families.

The Oakland Democrat told a packed North Oakland church that she wants to “ensure that ICE is following the rules and that those rules are well-known and publicized — especially when it comes to actions at schools, hospitals, religious centers and other critical community institutions.”

Her comments followed a furor in Oakland and Berkeley last month when federal operations to arrest illegal immigrants, which ICE says were routine, caused panic because agents were seen in the vicinity of public schools.

But was ICE to blame for the panic?

Berkeley High senior Chase Stern said he was taking an Advanced Placement test May 6, when he noticed that his classmates were fidgeting in their seats and seemed distracted.

He soon found out that the Latino students were receiving text messages and phone calls from family members, warning them that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were nearby, and that they should be cautious and find their way home because family members could not pick them up.

Scores of undocumented parents began to panic as early as 7:30 a.m. May 6, as word got around that ICE vehicles were parked near schools in East Oakland and South Berkeley.

ICE agents “seen in the vicinity” caused people admittedly breaking the law to panic, and they themselves spread the disinformation.

And who was it that ICE was after?

ICE fugitive operations teams arrested four adults from a residence in Berkeley and one adult from a business in Oakland on May 6…The fugitive operations teams were looking for specific individuals who were named in administrative warrants, she said.

ICE’s Fugitive Operations Teams are tasked with identifying and arresting foreign nationals who have ignored final orders of deportation or have returned to the United States illegally after being removed. The teams prioritize cases involving immigration violators who pose a threat to national security and community safety. These include child sex offenders, suspected gang members, and those who have convictions for violent crimes.

It should be noted that we found no reports that the individuals arrested in Oakland and Berkeley on May 6 were violent offenders. However, given that ICE is tasked with arresting immigration violators who pose a threat to the community, why would Lee choose to risk the safety of immigrant children just to avoid causing them fear - fear caused, not by the ICE agents doing their jobs, but by paranoid immigrants?

It should also be noted that the “well-known rules” Rep. Lee claims ICE is violating may not exist:

What remains unclear is whether ICE has the sort of rules about sensitive locations that Lee said she wants to make sure are followed.

ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had a written policy expressly stating that the service “attempt to avoid apprehension of persons and to tightly control investigative operations on the premises of schools, places of worship, funerals and other religious ceremonies,” according to copies of agency memorandums from the 1990s.

But Kice said that past policies were not necessarily transferred to ICE when it formed under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

I spent a couple of hours trying to verify the rules in this regard pertaining to ICE raids, but was unable to confirm or deny their existence.

I call BS on Rep. Lee’s unfounded claims of broken rules and her attempts to obstruct federal agents from doing their lawful work! Congresspeople have a duty to verify the facts and not make unfounded accusations! I challenge Rep. Lee or any of her supporters to specify any rules or laws that ICE broke in this matter!