The nation has never been so adamantly divided over U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It presents itself as a fair arbiter of immigration policy, while critics portray its separations of parents and children and targeting of grandpas and pizza guys as heartless and bigoted.



Yet no matter which side of this debate you fall on, the agency could hardly do better at fueling the worst impression of itself, and sowing further distrust, than to hire someone with ties to anti-Muslim fanatics.



At issue is the man who speaks for ICE in New Jersey, Emilio Karim Dabul. According to our research, done with help from the Southern Poverty Law Center, he was previously an editor for an anti-Muslim hate group, and published a piece for another anti-Muslim hate group, praising an Islamophobe.



Dabul has links to three anti-Muslim celebs, we found: Brigitte Gabriel, David Horowitz and Steven Emerson.



He was an editor for Gabriel: Dabul was formerly an editor for Gabriel's organization, ACT for America, once called American Congress for Truth, according to an online profile and a short bio in the New York Daily News. The SPLC classifies it as a hate group and the largest anti-Muslim outfit in the United States.



Gabriel, its founder, is a Lebanese Christian who became a U.S. citizen and declared in 2007 that practicing Muslims "cannot be loyal citizens of the United States," that "every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim," and, four years later, that "[t]ens of thousands of Islamic militants now reside in America, operating in sleeper cells, attending our colleges and universities."



She's been spewing such vitriol for years, and recently visited the White House to support President Trump's Muslim ban.



He wrote for Horowitz: Dabul published a piece at FrontPage Magazine, a project of the anti-Muslim hate group David Horowitz Freedom Center. Horowitz is a major bankroller of Muslim-bashers in America, according to the SPLC, working closely with Pamela Geller to help fund her hate group, Stop Islamization of America.



On Horowitz's payroll is the poisonous Robert Spencer and his hate website, Jihad Watch. Spencer's work was cited dozens of times in the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people, and Spencer was banned from the U.K. as an extremist in 2013.



He praised Emerson: In the 2007 piece for FrontPage and a 2015 video online, Dabul defended Emerson, a peddler of anti-Muslim lies, hyperbole and innuendo.



In 2011, Emerson accused Gov. Chris Christie of having a "strange relationship with radical Islam" after he nominated a Muslim, Sohail Mohammed, for a state judgeship. That prompted Christie to denounce the "crazies" in his own party. Emerson was also one of the first to claim that lawless "no-go zones" exist in Europe that non-Muslims can't even enter, overrun by Islamist thugs enforcing Shariah law.



Fox News had to apologize for his 2015 declaration that Birmingham, England was a "totally Muslim" city "where non-Muslims just simply don't go." Prime Minister David Cameron called Emerson a "complete idiot." The pundit apologized, but that didn't stop his nonsense from being repeated far and wide.



He also claimed before the Oklahoma City bomber was caught that the 1995 attack showed "a Middle Eastern trait" because it aimed to "inflict as many casualties as possible." In fact, it was a white guy, Timothy McVeigh.



And in 1997, Emerson gave Associated Press reporters what he said was an FBI dossier showing ties between Muslim American organizations and radical Islamists, which the AP concluded he had made up himself, according to the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).



The think-tank Center for American Progress (CAP) considers Emerson's group, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, part of "the Islamophobia network in America."



Yet Dabul argued that Emerson was the victim of "an electronic lynching," is not an Islamophobe, and described him as a hero and a friend.



In the video above, Emilio Dabul praises Steven Emerson, a peddler of anti-Muslim falsehoods. In other sections, Dabul makes fair, legitimate points about the threat of terrorism.

The 2015 video in which Dabul praises Emerson has some reasonable stuff in it. Dabul says he is not looking for all Muslims to be profiled, and not all terrorists in the U.S. are Muslim. He argues, rightly, that terrorism is a real problem in the Muslim world.



But the bottom line is that he is promoting Emerson, a vile guy who the SPLC and CAP consider a dangerous anti-Muslim extremist.



Nobody at ICE - not Dabul, not John Tsoukaris, the head of the agency's New Jersey office for deportations, nor its D.C. media office - will answer questions about this.



A woman who answered the phone in ICE's D.C. press office on July 18 refused to give her name, but said Tsoukaris did not hire Dabul: "His boss is here with headquarters."



She refused to discuss the matter further. "Obviously, no one's going to put that on the record," she said. "A media request, and no one answered it: That means they're not going to answer it."



Since then, Dabul has remained active in his role as ICE spokesman, issuing news releases about its enforcement operations and politely responding to our questions on other topics.



For someone with anti-Muslim affiliations, he has a curious online history. In the 2015 video, Dabul says his grandparents on his father's side were Syrian Muslims who emigrated to Argentina during World War I. He calls himself Arab-American, though he does not say he is Muslim.



He penned a couple freelance pieces that showed no anti-Muslim bias, appearing in the New York Post and the Daily News, including "One Arab's Apology" for 9-11 and an op-ed titled, "I am with Israel: One Arab American's salute."



But it's hard to believe his romance with the haters was all an innocent mistake. "It's almost impossible for me to imagine that you don't know that Emerson, Horowitz and Gabriel have anti-Muslim views," said Heidi Beirich, who tracks hate groups for the SPLC.



Of Dabul, she added, "It sounds like he's at least sympathetic to these people. He's gone out of his way to type something up and turn it in."



Now, Dabul types up what sparse information we get about deportations in New Jersey, and news releases that slander Middlesex county as a "sanctuary" that releases sex offenders, when in reality, ICE's own agents had ample opportunity to pick them up.



Granted, it's hard to hold an ICE spokesman to account for associating with Islamophobes, when Gabriel posed for photos with Trump and top presidential advisor Stephen Miller hobnobbed with Horowitz's hate group and authored the Muslim ban. Anti-Muslim bigotry is at the top of this administration.



But that doesn't mean we have to accept it in New Jersey. A guy affiliated with anti-Muslim extremists has no place in this particularly sensitive spot for Muslims and minorities.



Given ICE's expanded power and shrunken use of humanitarian reprieves under this administration, the New Jersey field office director's silence on the man who speaks for him is troubling.



Tsoukaris' office has nearly doubled its arrests of people with no criminal convictions, to 40 percent, way higher than the national average of 26 percent.



Tsoukaris admits his use of humanitarian discretion is less generous. "All our discretion is case by case," he said in June. "Under the past administration, it was wider. Now it's more restrictive." He added, "Just because you're harmless doesn't mean that you get a free pass."



No. But ICE seems perfectly willing to give his spokesman one, a disturbing example of how it handles allegations of bias.

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