With polls showing widespread public support for deporting criminal illegal immigrants, Republican gubernatorial candidate Winsome Earl-Sears isn’t going to let Democratic opponent Abigail Spanberger off the hook for disparaging comments she made about raids at a Virginia courthouse last month.
The raid by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents netted two illegal aliens with substantial rap sheets, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported.
Spanberger, a former Democrat congresswoman and intelligence officer, criticized the agents’ law enforcement protocol when making the busts.
“I think what we’ve seen most shocking, including here in Charlottesville, has been cases where people haven’t provided identification and have been in some cases masked and in plain clothes,” Spanberger told the Daily Progress earlier this month. She added:
I’m a former federal agent, and I used to work narcotics cases and money laundering cases. I have been on so many arrest warrants and search warrants at the crack of dawn and at all hours of the day, and identifying yourself, demonstrating who you are, making clear to a community member — even someone you are about to put handcuffs on, even when you enter a home, in a stack, lined up, guns drawn, yelling, ‘Police!’ — you show your badge, you show your credentials, you show your warrant.
Earl-Sears spokesperson Peyton Vogel turned those comments into political ammunition this week, telling Fox News Digital, “Abigail Spanberger’s outrage over criminal illegal immigrants being taken off our streets is everything Virginians need to know about what kind of governor she’d be — criminals first, victims last.”
Arrested by ICE was Teodoro Dominguez-Rodriguez, a Honduran national, described by DHS as a “violent illegal alien” with “multiple arrests for assault and battery as well as an outstanding order of protection against him.”
Also nabbed was Pablo Aparicio Marcelino, a Mexican national, who DHS reported had “multiple arrests for failing to stop at the scene of an accident, driving without a license, and driving under the influence.”
The lieutenant governor’s spokesman also called out Spanberger, as well as the media, for pointing out that agents were wearing masks:
It is interesting that the media who are so concerned with our law enforcement officers wearing masks to protect themselves don’t say a word about the terrorist sympathizers on U.S. college campuses who cowardly wear masks as they do the bidding of terrorist organizations that relish the killing of Americans and Jews.
The assistant DHS secretary also dismissed Spanberger’s suggestion that the ICE agents did not properly identify themselves. She said that arresting defendants at courthouses is “common sense” because illegal aliens there are unarmed after being screened for weapons.
Popular, term-limited Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has endorsed Earle-Sears in the election this November that will determine the commonwealth’s next leader.
It’s not the first time the lieutenant governor’s campaign has seized upon illegal immigration, seeing it as a winning issue. In her very first campaign ad, Earle-Sears criticized Spanberger for her opposition to a border wall.
A Spanberger spokesperson at the time called the ad a “distraction attempt,” claiming that the former congresswoman “led bipartisan bills that were signed into law by both President Trump and President Biden to disrupt fentanyl trafficking at our ports of entry, combat Mexican cartels and secure our borders.”
