Liberal Rutgers University professors and other faculty who were outraged — outraged! — over the RU Police Department’s apprehension of an illegal alien from drunk driving and endangering others have signed an open letter protesting the arrest.
As reported by PJ Media, the police report stated that the illegal alien, Luiz Alberto Lopez Lopez, was arrested Sept. 29 at 2:05 a.m. after running a red light. He faces 10 charges including driving while intoxicated (DUI), having an open container of alcohol in his vehicle, turn signal failure and failing to remain in his lane. And, since he was operating near a busy intersection, police also charged him with endangerment.
And though all of those charges were more than enough, Lopez, 28, also gave cops a fake Mexican driver’s license according to a copy of the police report exclusively obtained by PJ Media.
Before his arrest, Lopez had been living in the U.S. for a decade and had no prior criminal record. The news site also reported that he’s married to an American citizen and has a child born of the marriage inside the country, Telemundo reported soon after his arrest.
“He deserves the opportunity to stay in this country, he did make a mistake, but it is a mistake that can be paid with a fine," Reynalda Cruz, a New Jersey-based immigration activist, told Telemundo.
Lopez was held for about seven hours by RU Police and then turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. Cooperating with ICE in New Jersey is highly controversial, especially now that state Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal has implemented a new sanctuary policy called the “Immigrant Trust Directive,” which essentially prohibits state police agencies from cooperating with ICE except in the most serious of cases.
“Rutgers University follows a state policy that requires notification of ICE when a person is arrested for an indictable offense, a DWI or other serious violations and there are questions related to immigration status,” RU spokesman Dory Devlin told PJ Media. “This is not a Rutgers policy, but a policy required of all law enforcement agencies in New Jersey and guided by the 2007 Attorney General’s Law Enforcement Directive.”
Virtue signaling at the expense of public safety
The arrest prompted an open protest letter, “End RUPD Collaboration with ICE,” signed by 19 professors that was published in the November 20 issue of The Daily Targum, though the letter was retracted from the paper’s website shortly thereafter without explanation. (Related: Leftists denounce the U.S. protecting its own border with non-lethal tear gas as INVASION wave attempts to breach the border and occupy America.)
The RU Police Department’s actions are “a direct violation of your repeated assurances that Rutgers was and would remain a ‘safe haven’” for illegals, the professors wrote in a letter to the university’s president, Robert L. Barchi.
The letter also calls on Barchi to openly flout state law (though now, thanks to AG Grewal, the policy appears to have been changed).
“We call upon you now to speak loudly and forcefully by issuing clear directives to the [RU] Police... that they are not to inquire about or report any individuals’ immigration status, and that they must not detain people for rendition to ICE,” said the letter.
Since the letter first appeared in The Daily Targum, RU’s official school newspaper, an additional 100 faculty have signed onto it, PJ Media reported.
As of this writing, Barchi has not issued an official response.
If virtue signaling was an Olympic sport, supporters of the extreme-Left Democrat Party would forever be gold medalists. Because that’s obviously more important than allowing police to protect the general public from all suspects, citizens and illegal aliens alike.
Read more about the Left’s desire for open borders at OpenBorders.news.
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