The Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) is the legal office of U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE).  Ostensibly its purpose is to provide legal advice to ICE on a wide range of issues, from employment law to customs law to immigration law.  However its main purpose and taking a majority of its time and resources is dealing with immigration law issues and prosecuting immigration law cases before the Executive Office For Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration courts that are part of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and not actual courts.

The OPLA has a dull and not very informative mission statement:

We will protect the homeland by diligently litigating cases while adhering to the highest standards of professional conduct, providing timely and accurate legal advice; and optimizing resources to advance DHS and ICE missions.

[Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, ICE website, undated]

Now, instead of actually dealing with the deadly dull nature of legal work in ICE and before the EOIR, they sex up their mission to suggesting that they protect the homeland, as if they were operators on the front line duking it out with Al Qaeda in the border badlands.  And it would get a pass if they were actually doing something near what they claim, like diligently proving the case for deportation of illegal aliens before the nut jobs who rule the EOIR "courts."

However, the OPLA is doing nothing of the sort.  Aside from the not to be surprising shirking of their duty by dismissing cases they think will be too hard to win, they actually serve at cross purposes of enforcing immigration law.

For example, recently immigration patriots had some good news, enforcement is happening and the actual officers who do immigration enforcement, ICE Enforcement And Removal Operations (ERO), one of the two enforcement arms of ICE, the other being the hapless ICE Special Victims Unit (ICE SVU), known officially as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

In certain areas, ICE ERO and Border Patrol are now doing Area Control (AC) and City Patrol (CP), two techniques from yesteryear where illegal aliens on the street were targeted for identification and arrest.  In some areas, a half a dozen unmarked vans patrol urban areas, suppressing illegal immigration and putting fear into the hearts of illegal aliens.  In other urban areas near the border, Border Patrol Agents are now authorized and assigned to CP away from the border to identify and arrest Mexican illegal aliens and remove them immediately to Mexico.

[“Please, God, Don’t Let Me Get Stopped!”–Illegals Are Starting To Feel The Trump Heat, by Federale, VDare, November 256, 2017]

No sooner than the good news came to the fore, than the Deep State saboteurs in OPLA lept into action.  They were presented with a case where a presumably ICE ERO Deportation Officer saw a suspicious illegal alien and conducted a contact with that pair of illegal aliens while conducting Area Control operations.  But instead of ensuring that the long time illegal aliens arrested were deported, the saboteurs dropped charges, implying that the stop of the illegal aliens was illegal.

Zenon Natividad Cruz was driving with his wife to work early on the morning of Feb. 5, 2016, when the inside of their vehicle lit up with blue flashing lights.

A police officer was pulling them over. Natividad Cruz couldn’t think of what he had done wrong. Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to argue: He and his wife had come to the United States illegally 20 years earlier.

What followed was 18 days in jail and months fearing that he would be deported by an immigration-court judge in Cleveland, which has happened in two-thirds of the “removal” cases heard there.

But the native of Mexico, now 47, was in the one-third not ordered out of the country and separated from his family — at least not yet.

The officer didn’t say he was a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent or why he stopped them. And Natividad Cruz didn’t ask.

The couple gave the officer international identity cards. He asked for more ID, and Natividad Cruz handed over his Mexican identification card. He didn’t have a driver’s license.

After the officer walked to his SUV and returned, he allowed the couple to leave. He told them to be careful, according to a court document.

Ten minutes later, the agent, with backup agents, showed up at the German Village McDonald’s where the couple worked and took Natividad Cruz into custody as a “deportable/inadmissible alien.”

[Feds Drop Deportation Case After ICE’s Columbus Traffic Stop Challenged, by Earl Rinehart, The Columbus Dispatch, December 4, 2017]

Now, the scenario as described by the illegal alien makes no sense.  He was stopped but did not know if the person who stopped him was a local police officer or from ICE?  Now I supposed that the Deportation Office might try and bluff his way through the stop without identifying himself.  Perhaps he was in his "Police" battle rattle that many local politicians complain about.  But that's not important.

But we get the real reason for the story and the transcription services that the reporter [contact Rinehart here] is providing to the Cult Marxists.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued several federal immigration agencies alleging illegal stops and arrests in the past decade. Local lawyers said it’s difficult to quantify arrests from traffic stops because many immigrants don’t seek legal representation to challenge the arrests.

The ACLU doesn't like Area Control or City Patrol, two proven tactics to identify and deport large numbers of illegal aliens.  The ACLU doesn't like immigration enforcement and wants to protect illegal aliens from lawful arrest and deportation.  And the shysters at the OPLA appear to agree: AP and CP are illegal and hurt illegal aliens.

But the story has enough information to show that the stop was completely legal.

ICE relied on a previous DUI conviction stemming from a traffic accident as reason enough to stop Natividad Cruz. A U.S. Department of Homeland Security report said he was stopped because he matched the description of a “criminal alien” being hunted by a Fugitive Operations Team.

Legally, that is enough.  The officer had reasonable suspicion, all that is needed to make a stop under Terry v. Ohio, known as the Terry Stop Doctrine.  Probable cause was not needed, only reasonable suspicion, and physical resemblance to a wanted person is reasonable.

The transcriptionist and the Treason Bar shyster make much that Mexican illegal aliens cannot afford attorneys in deportation proceedings, but don't mention that Mexicans and other Hispanics make up the overwhelming number of illegal aliens in the United States, which is the basis for reasonable suspicion as well.

Mexicans have the lowest rate of legal representation in immigration court: about half. Chinese immigrants have the highest rate, 90 percent, according to the Syracuse study.

And the kritarch at the EOIR appeared to agreed with the fatuous claim the stop was based on race, Hispanic, which is not a race, but an ethnicity, and said he would rule on a motion to dismiss the deportation charges.

Rodriguez Bell argued that the agent stopped Natividad Cruz only because of his ethnicity. The agent also had no authority to make a traffic stop. She filed a motion to suppress all evidence against her client.

On Oct. 30, Judge Thomas W. Janas of Cleveland Immigration Court said he would hear arguments on the motion.

“The immigration officer had no reason other than what he could see — the respondent’s Hispanic appearance — to stop the respondent,” Janas wrote as the basis for his decision. “Race alone does not provide reasonable suspicion for an immigration officer to stop a vehicle.”

Now, this is a classic case of an EOIR "judge" acting out of his place.  Janas' only responsibility is to determine if under any case the stop was legal, and then apply immigration law.  The stop was legal and Janas should not play real judge, it is out of his area of responsibility and competence.  There is a reason they call them Immigration Judges instead of real judges.

But saboteurs at the OPLA, instead of defending the stop based on the facts and the well established Terry Stop Doctrine, dropped the charges.  This is the basest sabotage of immigration enforcement.  Thomas Homan, Acting ICE Director has promised more enforcement, but his OPLA is sabotaging that enforcement that is going on in the field.  Homan needs to bring Tracy Short, Chief Counsel for ICE, into his office for a dressing down.  Is Short on the team for the win?  I think not.  His employees in Cleveland and in San Francisco in particular are not on our team.  They're playing for the other side.

It is heard on good authority that OPLA attorneys are required to approve every arrest ICE SVU makes and are actively denying requests for arrests by falsely claiming there is insufficient evidence to arrest illegal aliens.  Time for Thomas Homan to clean up ICE OPLA and send the Resisters home.