NY Dems’ self-serving grandstanding over ICE arrest of illegal migrant council staffer

Local Democrats went into full meltdown Tuesday over the arrest and detainment of a City Council staffer with an outstanding deportation order by ICE — thereby exposing just how far from reality New York’s political world has moved.

Council Speaker Julie Menin expressed “outrage” that ICE arrested Rafael Andres Rubio Bohorquez, a council data analyst and Venezuelan national, who’s been in the job for about a year and allegedly possessed “a valid work permit until October.”

Rep. Dan Goldman and other Dem electeds joined Menin at the hastily called City Hall presser to fume and to hurl vitriol at the Department of Homeland Security and ICE officials.

“This is an assault on our democracy, on our city, and our values,” tweeted Mayor Zohran Mamdani. 

Gov. Kathy Hochul jumped on it in her State of the State speech, smugly asking if “an analyst with legal work authorization” is “really one of the baddest of the bad?”

For all the hysteria, DHS reports that Rubio Bohorquez entered the United States on a B2 tourist visa in 2017 and failed to leave — which is a federal crime.

DHS also revealed that he was arrested in Queens in March 30, 2023, and charged with an assault in the 3rd degree causing physical injury — which might disqualify him for the Temporary Protected Status he claims under a Biden-era order granting mass work authorizations for eligible Venezuelan immigrants.

Then again, that charge was expunged from his criminal history . . . . apparently because New York’s sanctuary policies direct district attorneys to protect undocumented immigrants from so-called “collateral consequences” (e.g., deportation, loss of green card) of any interaction with the law.

Those complications didn’t keep Goldman (desperate for headlines as he faces a further-left primary challenge) from calling the ICE arrest part of an “immigration dragnet” conducted by “secret masked police” dragging people “out of cars, out of homes, out of courtrooms” and now targeting those serving “the public as employees of the New York City Council.”

The grandstanding Goldman staked out the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building on Tuesday in hopes of intervening on Rubio Bohorquez’s behalf, while Democratic council members and the staff union protested outside the federal lockup on Varick Street in Manhattan.

Menin, like so many fellow blue-state Democrats, is afflicted by ICE delusion syndrome — obsessively denouncing the agency as a pack of “fascists,” a “modern-day Gestapo” that’s “grabbing people off the street and disappearing them.”

Menin fumed that Rubio Bohorquez “was doing everything the right way,” yet “still found himself the victim of egregious government overreach,” enforcement she called “unacceptable.”

Yes: Enforcing US immigration law is “unacceptable.”

Yet her “outrage” relies mainly the fact that Rubio Borhorquez signed an employment attestation in January claiming that he had never been arrested — when in fact he had been, and even the state’s Clean Slate law still requires disclosure of an expunged arrest when seeking a government job.

This would hardly be the first time an illegal immigrant falsified an attestation or provided phony documents to an employer.

Of course, thanks to the city’s sanctuary policies, the council’s HR department likely didn’t even verify Rubio Bohorquez’s status with the feds.

All this raging no doubt served the politicians’ needs, but we can’t help but wonder if some quieter approach — maybe get the mayor to text his White House bro for a favor? — wouldn’t have done more good for Rubio Bohorquez.

But such is New York’s political class, far more committed to grandstanding than to taking care of a guy they claim to care about.