Government

How To Stand Up To Jeff Sessions's Lies About Immigrants: From Two Officials On Opposite Sides Of ICE Debate

You don't have to be a 'liberal' to stand up to Trump, you just need the courage to tell the truth.

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Late Monday night, the San Francisco spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (a.k.a. ICE, née “The Gestapo”) announced that he had resigned over “false” and “misleading” statements made by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and ICE Acting Director Thomas D. Homan.

The now former ICE spokesperson, James Schwab, asked Sessions DOJ officials to correct misleading statements they made in response to the actions of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf. Schaaf used Twitter to alert immigrants of an upcoming ICE raid. The action deeply angered Jeff Sessions, and last week he unleashed a press conference full of falsehoods about how much damage she had caused.

I know, as I write this, few readers really care about the destruction Jeff Sessions is causing to black and brown communities. ICE isn’t coming for you, your family, or your community. Everybody has their own… pet existential crisis with the Trump administration. Maybe you’re worried about Mike Pence’s crusade against women and gays, or our impending nuclear war with North Korea. Gary Cohn resigned over goddamn tariffs. I’ve lived around white people all my life. I know that for many — possibly most — of you, quietly disappearing black and brown people is just not going to be a top concern when pitted against “economic grievance” or whatever you’re calling it these days. Racial minorities and Jewish Americans stand together on this island where even a little bit of ethnic cleansing is too much for us.

Nonetheless, I want to take a moment and just recognize the courage shown by Libby Schaaf and James Schwab, because they both have shown courage and integrity in standing up to Trump’s and Sessions’s attacks on immigrant communities, even though they seem to disagree about ICE and the actions necessary to stop them.

Mayor Schaaf warned people. She took it upon herself to alert people that ICE was coming, so they could basically hide. I know a lot of people who say they’d hide people in their walls, “if it came to that.” But I suspect those people are full of s**t, and anyway, they seem to be waiting around for somebody to show up asking for attic asylum. Schaaf, instead of waiting, proactively took steps to protect people, at great risk to her professional position. I happen to think that Schaaf is on solid legal ground — the question is whether she used government information to literally obstruct justice. I don’t think she did, or at least I don’t think they can prove that she did. Regardless, her actions have already triggered a DOJ investigation and put her directly in the crosshairs of the most authoritarian regime this country as seen since Lincoln. She took a massive professional risk to save people who are not the criminals and rapists the white supremacists running the country have led you to believe. She might not have a job for much longer, but she has honor.

How many people she saved is up for some debate. James Schwab resigned specifically because Sessions is out here acting like Schaaf opened the doors to Arkham Asylum, and that’s just not the case. Not all the people ICE picks up are dangerous criminals, and giving the community a heads-up didn’t lead to a freaking prison break. Schwab resigned instead of being forced to say so. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts,” said Schwab, 38, who was hired in 2015 and resigned last week. “I asked them to change the information. 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.”

Schwab said the statements about immigrants evading arrest, which were widely quoted in an array of media outlets, were misleading “because we were not ever going to be able to capture 100 percent of the target list” of roughly 1,000 undocumented immigrants in Northern California.

“I didn’t feel like fabricating the truth to defend ourselves against (Schaaf’s) actions was the way to go about it,” he said. “We were never going to pick up that many people. 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.”

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Schwab thinks that Schaaf’s actions were “misguided.” I think they are heroic. But the point is that you don’t have to actually agree with the other side in order to stand up to Sessions and Trump. You don’t have to agree with the “progressive agenda” in order to reject the distortion and destruction of the truth that the Trump administration demands. James Schwab doesn’t have a job anymore, but he too has honor.

This is important. I don’t need you to agree with me on the right way to handle immigration and enforcement in this country. I need you to agree that what is happening now IS WRONG. I need you to be willing to do something about it. I need you to RISK OR SACRIFICE SOMETHING to stop it.

As the kids say: they have a word for people who disagreed with the Nazis, but served with them anyway… “Nazis.” James Schwab decided to not be one of those people. Though just a lowly spokesperson, instead of following orders, he quit his job. It doesn’t make him a “liberal” now, it just makes him a demonstrably better person than his boss, his boss’s boss, and (most likely) his replacement.

Somebody tell Sean Spicer that this is how it’s done.

San Francisco’s ICE spokesman quits, disputes agency’s claim that 800 eluded arrest [San Francisco Chronicle]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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