The White House’s new deputy director for political strategy and outreach reportedly advocated for dismantling the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and claimed ICE agents were “terrorizing immigrant communities.”
A 2018 social media post that appeared to come from Natalie Montelongo’s account encouraged communities to force the shuttering of any nearby ICE buildings, Fox News reported.
“If you’re looking for a way to help – look up your nearest ICE office and shut-it-down,” Montelongo wrote on Twitter on June 21, 2018 while commenting on a story about protesters camping outside an ICE office in Portland.
“This administration’s actions are not motivated by public safety concerns – they’re terrorizing immigrant communities. #ICE didn’t exist 15 years ago, it doesn’t have to exist now,” she wrote in a tweet on May 10, 2018.
Montelongo, who was born in Texas but grew up in Mexico, told The Brownsville Herald recently that, “from a young age I remember having to cross back and forth from Matamoros to Brownsville to go school, that’s how I started going to school in the U.S. I have a lot of respect for the community. I think it’s a community that’s very resilient, it’s a community that, like myself, had to learn two languages from a very young age.”
She praised the Biden administration for “being inclusive and making sure that everyone has a seat at the table.”
Montelongo previously worked as a political director for former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro on his 2020 presidential campaign and was a political director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, according to mysanantonio.com.
Her resume also includes a stint as the national campaign strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union and the founder of lifestyle and clothing line The Future Is Latina, Teen Vogue reported in a January 2019 article about “Latinx women in politics.”
“You have to learn to be bold on so many levels,” she told the publication about her experiences in the professional world. “You have to let people know what you want.”
ICE recently announced it deported fewer than 3,000 undocumented immigrants in April, the first time the agency’s deportation figures have dropped below 3,000.
A spokesperson for the agency told Fox News in a statement: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has concentrated its limited law enforcement resources on threats to national security, border security and public safety. This has allowed ICE to focus on the quality of enforcement actions and how they further the security and safety of our communities rather than the simple quantity of arrests and removals.”
Source: Newmax
