Irondale Mayor James Stewart's recent comments about refusing to assist ICE are a "dog whistle," according to Jared Hudson, a U.S. Senate candidate and former Navy SEAL.
Stewart recently stated that families were being hunted by ICE, and the city wouldn't help ICE with cracking down on illegal immigration.
Hudson, founder of Covenant Rescue Group, said during an interview on "Alabama Morning News with JT" on Tuesday that his organization assisted Irondale months ago in a human trafficking operation that resulted in the arrest of two illegal immigrants.
"The mayor of Irondale just came out recently and said, 'Hey, we're not going to work with ICE in the splitting apart of families,' which disappoints me. We worked with Irondale on some human trafficking training and operations with my organization six months ago. I want to say two of the seven we arrested over 24 hours were illegal immigrants. That's pretty common. About 30% of the guys we get on human trafficking operations are illegal immigrants, then they get put on an ICE hold, and they are deported," Hudson said. "This mayor is basically doing a dog whistle. He's saying something that's not true. ICE agents are not splitting up families. They're going after criminal illegal aliens. They're targeting them specifically because that's how they find out who they are when they commit a crime against, in our case, the citizens of Alabama. In Minnesota, what you see going on, the citizens of Minnesota. Either way, they are committing crimes against American citizens, and it's the job of the federal government to make sure that we get those out of here and send them back to the country that they came from."
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