Irondale Mayor James Stewart, Jr. cited Martin Luther King Jr. as justification for protecting illegal immigrants and pledged funds to train activists to track ICE agents. However, his actions may prompt federal blowback, as Alabama’s senior senator warned the mayor he “won’t like me very much” if he follows through.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. — who is also running to succeed term-limited Gov. Kay Ivey this year — warned Stewart that the Democrat will have no such luck circumventing the feds.
“When I’m governor, Alabama will have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to rogue mayors trying to go around federal law,” Tuberville, the ex-Auburn football coach, told Fox News Digital.
“Like it or not, federal law says that illegal immigrants must be deported. If mayors don’t like that, they should run for Congress.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Stewart’s office after he said in his February mayoral newsletter that “watching ICE operations tear families apart in Irondale highlights the urgent need to address immigration policies affecting our community, which brings me back to King’s final speech, the one where he said he’d seen the Promised Land but might not get there.”
“I understand that now. This may be my last term. But I still have to do God’s will. Every single day. When Dr. King said, ‘I just want to do God’s will’ the night before they killed him, it brings me to tears. Because I know what that means now,” Stewart said.
Stewart said ICE operations are “following the same pattern” King described in his letter from jail in Birmingham, adjacent to Irondale.
Tuberville further took issue with reporting from Alabama news outlet 1819 News – so named for the state’s founding year – that Irondale has contracted with the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ) to aid programs such as a “warning system to track [ICE] agents at the behest of the city’s mayor.”
In that regard, Stewart said in his newsletter his King-inspired work is not done while “families who built this community are being hunted.”
Days after Stewart’s newsletter publication, knife-wielding Mexican illegal immigrant Jose Ba-Ruiz was arrested and charged Monday by the Justice Department for assaulting an ICE agent in the Birmingham area.
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In comments to Fox News Digital, Ivey backed up Tuberville, saying Montgomery will always work with DHS:
“Unlike Minnesota, in Alabama, we enforce the law,” Ivey said.
“We are proud to work with ICE to do just that: Enforce the laws and protect our citizens from criminals and lawbreakers.”
While Stewart did not respond to Fox News Digital by publication time, he told Fox’s Birmingham affiliate that Irondale is not a sanctuary city and will not hide criminals from the law, and then claimed he won’t actually interfere with ICE operations.
“A lot of the things that we see now are the things that were going on 300 to 400 years ago,” he told the outlet. “We want to be a law-abiding city, but we also know our role.”
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