Is it a sign of sheer laziness or crippling insularity that a stuck-in-its-bubble big-box media believes Americans cannot remember as far back as 2013? An anti-deportation politico with no law enforcement experience appointed by President Barack Obama as acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – he didn’t last more than a few months on the job – regularly makes the dominant news outlet rounds today as a respected authority on ICE protocols. Unsurprisingly, he expresses his professional dismay over President Donald Trump’s deployments of the agency.
“John Sandweg, a former defense attorney who knew former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano from their days as political allies in Arizona … gave his notice just six months after taking the reins in August,” Fox News reported in February 2014 when Sandweg announced his resignation.
Republicans had bitterly opposed Sandweg from the beginning.
“I am deeply disappointed by this appointment and believe it is disrespectful to the thousands of dedicated professionals at ICE who are working tirelessly to enforce our laws and provide for our security,” Rep. John Carter (R-TX), who served as chairman of the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee at the time, said when Obama handed him the job. “I urge the administration to re-think this appointment and promptly appoint a qualified, confirmable applicant for this essential post.”
Fast forward to 2025, and Sandweg is a go-to authoritative source on ICE in establishment media circles.
‘He Used to Lead ICE’
“What strikes me immediately is how this administration has put these agents in a terrible position,” Sandweg told CBS News in an Oct. 18 article questioning the “rules of engagement” on dispatching ICE to major US cities overburdened with illegal aliens. “These are units that are designed to address high-risk threats and bring overwhelming force to bear. And I think the big flaw here is, not, I don’t blame these agents. I blame the administration for putting agents, who are trained in this manner, in a city where they don’t belong.”
The quote is noteworthy for two reasons. One, Democrat Sandweg is portraying himself as a concerned champion of rank-and-file ICE personnel. And, two, he is stating a cherished belief that marked his time in the Obama administration: deporting “non-criminal” illegal aliens is senseless and wrong.
“Why Is ICE So Aggressive Now? A Former ICE Chief Explains,” read the perplexed headline above Politico’s Oct. 14 “Magazine” feature article starring Sandweg.
The article again deceptively propped up Sandweg’s nonexistent ICE bona fides to spin the Obama narrative on illegal aliens. “Sandweg argued that most ICE agents treat people with dignity, but he noted the Trump administration has revved up the agency’s raid strategy, leading to broad and indiscriminate sweeps to maximize arrests – regardless of people’s criminal record,” Politico wrote.
“He Used to Lead ICE. He Doesn’t Love What He’s Seeing,” the headline on CNN’s Aug. 20 podcast interview with Sandweg exclaimed. In keeping with the party line, Sandweg is again offered up as the hard-boiled pro distressed by Trump’s disappointing decision to deport illegal aliens who have not gone on to break more laws beyond criminally residing in America.
Sandweg told CNN he was upset by ICE agents’ use of masks as they performed their duties.
“They’re reinforcing this narrative that unfortunately, I think a lot of people put on ICE of a lawless agency that’s just out there, right,” he asserted. “There’s not really, I mean, the administration likes to say the focus is on criminals and gang members, but unfortunately, I think the masks and these type of operations only reinforce this narrative that that’s not what’s really going on, right, that the administration’s using them as an arm to kind of eliminate the undocumented population in the United States.”
And there you have it. Obama’s woefully unqualified former temporary ICE director does not want illegal aliens removed from the United States, a position he’s openly advanced repeatedly throughout the years.
Leave Those ‘Run-of-the-Mill’ Illegal Aliens Alone
Did CBS, Politico, and CNN think we wouldn’t be able to call up receipts from 5 and 11 years ago?
“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero – it’s just highly unlikely to happen,” Sandweg proclaimed in April 2014, just months after being forced out at ICE. This is what Obamaites want immigration law enforcement to look like.
Sandweg wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times in March 2014 that fleshed out these views.
“[ICE] should eliminate ‘non-criminal re-entrants and immigration fugitives’ as a priority category for deportation,” Sandweg bluntly declared. “Taking them off the priority list would dramatically advance the president’s goal of a more humane enforcement system and would enhance public safety and border security.”
All Americans saw the consequences of “a more humane enforcement system” during the Joe Biden administration. The result has been a social, cultural, legal, and national security catastrophe.
Six full years after leaving ICE, Sandweg was still at it. In March 2020, he wrote an opinion piece for The Atlantic that called for the immediate release of all illegal aliens in federal custody during the coronavirus pandemic.
“With more than 37,000 detainees closely confined in facilities across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers are extremely susceptible to outbreaks of infectious diseases,” observed the opening sentence.
“By releasing from custody the thousands of detainees who pose no threat to public safety and do not constitute an unmanageable flight risk, ICE can reduce the overcrowding of its detention centers, and thus make them safer, while also putting fewer people at risk,” he added.
Letting illegal aliens run free inside America is the dominant thread of Sandweg’s entire approach to the topic on which he fraudulently claims to hold expertise. Of course, it’s no surprise that an appointee of Obama would hold such inappropriate views. But what does it say about the disintegrating relevance of a big-box media that it would continue to trot out such a caricature of credentialed authority as a “news” weapon to be wielded against Trump and a massive deportation operation that poll after poll shows is enormously popular with the American people?
