While ICE SVU is trying to replace the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and take over the child porn and terrorism cases that the FBI is supposed to investigate, the FBI apparently has seen that ICE SVU is refusing to do immigration fraud investigations, and decided to move in on those cases to make stats.

Stats, or statistics, meaning the number of arrests and convictions an agency has, is the sine qua non of Federal law enforcement.  Managers and agents need to make cases to get awards and promotions.  And when ICE SVU leaves an area of investigations open to other agencies, the stat hungry FBI sees an opportunity.  Better yet, the FBI has no problem raiding churches who aid and abet immigration fraud, unlike ICE SVU who give churches a pass on criminal activity.

In this latest case, a Protestant church created and run by immigrants from the Philippines was raided by the FBI for engaging in immigration fraud, including illegal work in the United States and immigration benefits fraud, to wit marriage fraud.

Federal agents raided a Philippines-based church in Los Angeles Wednesday in a human trafficking investigation that led to arrests of three church leaders in what prosecutors said was a decades-long scheme to trick followers into becoming fundraisers and arrange sham marriages to keep them in the U.S.

The local leader of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ church was arrested on immigration fraud charges in the early morning bust along with a worker who confiscated passports of the victims of the scheme and another who handled finances, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Workers who managed to escape from the church told the FBI that they had been sent across the U.S. to work long hours soliciting donations for the church’s charity and were beaten and psychologically abused if they didn’t make daily quotas, according to an affidavit filed in support of the charges. Some described having to live in cars at truck stops.

The immigrants essentially became full-time workers, sometimes referred to as “miracle workers,” in a crusade to raise money for the nonprofit Children’s Joy Foundation USA, which was supposed to benefit poor children in their homeland. But the complaint said most of the money raised was used to finance church operations and the lavish lifestyle of church leader Apollo Quiboloy.

[FBI Raids Los Angeles Church To Make Immigration Fraud Bust, by Brian Melley, AP/ABC News, January 29, 2020]

Notably missing in this case of immigration fraud is ICE SVU and the Special Agent-in-Charge for their Los Angeles Office, Joe Macias.  Macias is one of the notorious Dirty 19 who attacked immigration enforcement priorities under President Trump.  Macias is, of course, a legacy U.S. Customs Service (USCS) agent who came over to ICE SVU after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The FBI has no problem raiding churches, and there is nothing in the law or the Constitution that prohibits such raids.  We do not live in a medieval society where the One True Roman Catholic Church was a separate secular as well as religious power and check on the monarchs and nobility, a sanctuary as it was from abuses at the time.  Sadly though, saboteurs like Macias pushed through a policy under Barack Hussein Obama to protect churches from investigation and raids when aiding and abetting illegal aliens, in violation of Federal criminal laws that criminalized fraud and assistance to illegals.

It is clearly time for Ken The Knife Cuccinelli  to end the immunity churches have concerning immigration fraud and aiding illegal aliens.