Trump's acting immigration chief blamed the stabbing at a rabbi's New York home on amnesty laws for 'illegal immigrants'

AP Photo/Steve Helber

• In a now-deleted Monday tweet, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli blamed a Saturday stabbing at a rabbi’s home in New York on illegal immigration and amnesty laws.

• On Saturday, an attacker wielding a machete wounded five Jewish individuals gathering in the home of a Hasidic rabbi to light candles at around 10 p.m. ET for the last night of Hanukah in Monsey, New York.

• Cuccinelli tweeted that Grafton Thomas, the accused assailant, is “the US citizen son of an illegal alien who got amnesty under the 1986 law amnesty law for illegal immigrants,” adding, “apparently, American values did not take hold in this family.”

• The Monsey attack comes amid a troubling spike in violent crimes targeting primarily Orthodox Jewish communities in New York.

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In a now-deleted Monday tweet, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli blamed a Saturday stabbing at a rabbi’s home in New York on illegal immigration and amnesty laws.

An attacker wielding a machete wounded five Jewish individuals gathering in the home of a Hasidic rabbi to light candles at around 10 p.m. ET for the last night of Hanukah in Monsey, New York, a town with a large Orthodox Jewish population located about 25 miles outside New York City in Rockland County. 

Authorities have taken a man named Grafton Thomas, age 38, into custody as the main suspect for the attack, locating him in Harlem on Sunday and charging him with five counts of attempted murder and one count of first-degree burglary. Thomas has pleaded not guilty to all six charges, according to The New York Times.

On Monday, The Times further reported that federal prosecutors have filed additional hate crimes charges against Thomas after federal officials found both handwritten journal entries referencing “Nazi culture” and browser history from Thomas’ phone showing he had searched for the locations of “Zionist temples” in the region.

Cuccinelli tweeted on Monday that Thomas, the accused assailant, is “the US citizen son of an illegal alien who got amnesty under the 1986 law amnesty law for illegal immigrants,” adding, “apparently, American values did not take hold in this family, at least this one violent and apparently bigoted son.” 

 

A lawyer representing Thomas’ family released a statement saying that Thomas had “a long history of mental illness and hospitalizations” but “no known history of anti-Semitism and was raised in a home which embraced and respected all religions and races.”

The Monsey attack comes amid a troubling spike in violent crimes targeting primarily Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, as well as a recent shooting that killed three people in a Jewish kosher market across the river from New York in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City has pledged to increase police presence in neighborhoods of Brooklyn with large Hasidic populations, including Williamsburg and Borough Park. 

Cuccinelli was appointed as the acting director of USCIS in May 2019, where has faced criticism for trying to expedite asylum proceedings and for introducing a controversial “public charge” rule that would deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to take advantage of public benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, and public housing. 

Cuccinelli, who previously served as a state senator from Virginia and the state’s attorney general, has pushed hardline positions on both illegal and legal immigration for well over a decade.

As ThinkProgress and The New Republic reported during Cuccinelli’s 2013 gubernatorial campaign, he sponsored anti-immigrant resolutions and legislation during his time in the state Senate. 

His efforts included introducing a joint resolution to call for Congress to convene a constitutional convention to amend the 14th amendment of the US Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship and only extend citizenship to people born in the US who have at least one US citizen parent.

Cuccinelli also introduced a draconian bill that would have allowed Virginia companies to fire employees for speaking a language other than English in the workplace and disqualify them from receiving unemployment benefits.

Then-majority leader Dick Salsaw called the proposal “the most mean-spirited piece of legislation I have seen in my 30 years down here,” as The Washington Post reported at the time.

Read more

‘I was praying for my life’: Witnesses of stabbing in rabbi’s home say the attacker had a machete ‘the size of a broomstick’

The machete attack at a Rabbi’s home is part of an ‘epidemic’ of anti-Semitic incidents

Trump’s acting immigration chief was part of a group that called immigrants ‘invaders’ and blamed them for diseases and terrorism

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