White House officials are spotlighting New York City’s protection of an illegal migrant who bit off the fingertip of an immigration officer charged with deporting the migrant.

“New York’s dangerous ‘sanctuary’ policies are directly responsible for the egregious and violent harm suffered by this courageous ICE officer,” said Hogan Gidley, the principal deputy press secretary at the White House.The biter is allegedly Christopher Santos Felix, an illegally present Dominican national, according to an agency statement, which continued:

He entered the United States on a visitor’s visa is June 2015, but failed to leave within the required timeframe. Santos Felix has a criminal history in the United States, including a prior conviction for driving while intoxicated (DWI) and a Sept. 29, 2018 arrest by local authorities for assault charges. On that same date, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officer lodged a detainer for Santos Felix, however the detainer was not honored and he was released from local custody. On March 3, 2019, Santos Felix was arrested by ERO for immigration violations. At the time of the arrest, Santos Felix allegedly assaulted an ERO officer and is now facing federal prosecution.

“The officer’s injury was the direct, foreseeable and entirely avoidable result of New York’s criminal alien sanctuary policies,” said a DHS official. “Proponents of sanctuary policies claim they make communities safer, but in many cases they are causing more harm than good.”

But the city leaders welcome legal and illegal migrants because New York’s elite economy relies on a huge workforce of low-wage legal immigrants and lower-wage illegal immigrants. Those legal and illegal migrant workers fill many service sector jobs and help raise rental revenues for real estate owners. In 2006, National Public Radio reported:

Tim Zagat, founder and CEO of the Zagat Survey, says that immigrant labor, legal and otherwise, is nothing short of vital to the inner workings of most New York City restaurants. Mr. TIM ZAGAT (Founder and CEO, Zagat): I go into the backs of restaurants all the time. In most restaurants, and I’m talking about the better restaurants, there may be one European and everybody else is from South and Central America.

The huge labor force of illegals has successfully kept food industry wages extremely low, while providing meals to the city’s wealthy diners, according to 2017 state data.

Nationwide, wages are rising under President Donald Trump’s Hire American policy.