BS BULLETIN:
- American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten filmed a video outside New Jersey’s Delaney Hall immigration detention facility criticizing conditions inside.
- DHS responded by accusing politicians and activists of using rhetoric that demonizes ICE officers.
- The department says threats against DHS law enforcement have increased by more than 8,000%.
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has taken her activism from the classroom wars to immigration enforcement — and the Department of Homeland Security isn’t exactly welcoming the field trip.
Weingarten posted a video from a field overlooking Delaney Hall, the immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, where she criticized the Trump administration’s immigration policies and alleged conditions inside the facility.
“I’m standing here right now at Delaney Hall,” Weingarten said, describing the detention center as a place where immigrants were being held as the administration carried out its deportation agenda.
The teachers union chief has increasingly waded into the immigration fight. The AFT has also targeted companies over their dealings with immigration authorities and promoted efforts opposing ICE enforcement.
This time, DHS responded directly.
A department spokesperson told Fox News Digital that “dangerous rhetoric” from politicians and activists demonizing ICE officers has contributed to what DHS says is an increase of more than 8,000% in threats against its law-enforcement personnel.
DHS defended ICE agents as carrying out a congressionally mandated mission to remove criminal illegal immigrants from American communities.
Weingarten’s video also drew plenty of reaction online — including from critics wondering why the head of one of America’s largest teachers unions was standing outside an immigration detention center in the first place.
Some pointed to continuing concerns about student academic performance and argued that Weingarten’s organization would be better served concentrating on schools.
Others resurfaced images of Weingarten promoting her book, “Why Fascists Fear Teachers,” while criticizing the increasingly broad political portfolio of the AFT.
The union sees things differently.
AFT has long argued that its mission extends beyond classroom instruction into civil rights, labor rights and issues affecting students, teachers and their communities.
And Weingarten has made no secret of her opposition to major portions of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
But DHS’s response puts a considerably more serious issue into the argument.
The department isn’t merely accusing its critics of being wrong about immigration policy. It’s arguing that increasingly heated rhetoric surrounding ICE has consequences for the agents carrying out the law.
That’s a much different debate than the one Weingarten presumably expected to start from that field outside Delaney Hall.
MY QUICK TAKE
Randi Weingarten has certainly expanded the traditional job description of “teachers union president.”
There was a time when you might reasonably expect the head of a teachers union to be arguing about salaries, classroom sizes and whether Mrs. Crabtree gets stuck supervising detention again.
Now we’re doing immigration detention centers.
But DHS’s 8,000% figure turns this from political theater into a question worth taking seriously. You can despise an administration’s immigration policy, protest it and demand that Congress change it. That’s politics.
When the people physically enforcing the law become the target instead, we’ve crossed into different territory. We’ve seen enough political violence in America to know that treating inflammatory rhetoric as harmless background noise is a luxury nobody should assume we still have.
DBS WIRE SOURCES
Fox News — DHS unloads on teachers union boss over ‘dangerous rhetoric,’ anti-ICE activism
