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A former Bristol County prosecutor is hoping to unseat longtime incumbent Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson in next years election.

Nicholas Bernier, 36, of Fall River, a Democrat, has filed papers with the state Office of Campaign and Political Finance announcing his intention to throw his hat in the ring.

I think its time for a change. Thats why Im running, Bernier said Wednesday.

Before becoming a partner in the Rampart Law Group LLC, Bernier served as an assistant district attorney for former Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter.

While also passionate about the law, Bernier says he has always had an interest in politics and a passion for public service.

In 2012, Bernier lost a close election for Governors Council that included a recount. The council considers approvals of judicial nominees and clerk magistrates, among other duties.

Bernier also made headlines as a major witness for federal prosecutors in the recent trial of disgraced former Fall River Mayor Jasiel Correia. Bernier once worked for Correias software company, SnoOwl.

Bernier said he wants to focus on concerns about drugs in Bristol County, rehabilitating incarcerated individuals and closing the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford rather than raise national issues like illegal immigration at the Southern border.

While I respect the sheriff, Bernier said. I disagree with his policies.

Hodgson, 67, one of the most prominent Republicans in a state dominated by Democrats, has held his office for 24 years.

He went to the White House with other sheriffs to meet with then President Donald Trump, served last year as the honorary state chair of Trumps re-election campaign and has been vocal about illegal immigration.

I want to focus on Bristol County, Bernier said.

He said the Ash Street Jail, built in the 1880s, was supposed to be closed under former sheriff David Nelson and has become a money pit with few inmates.

While incarcerated, individuals need to have rehabilitation programs to avoid recidivism, Bernier said.

Fighting the drug problem, Bernier said, will lead to lower crime in the county instead of perpetuating the revolving door, he said.

Bernier said that, as a prosecutor, he knows some people need to be in jail, but he has also visited the jail and has seen the other side. He said he also wants to hire more correctional officers.

Hodgson, appointed to office in 1997 by then-Gov. William Weld, has won re-election four times. In 2016, he ran unopposed for his current six-year term. In 2010, he won a competitive match against former state Rep. John Quinn, a Dartmouth Democrat.

Hodgson says he will run again and welcomes competition.

I think competition is good, he said, adding that he will make a formal announcement after the holidays.

Hodgson was a former Maryland police officer and New Bedford city councilor before he became sheriff.

While he has grabbed national attention for his views on illegal immigration and support of Trump, Hodgson said many people do not realize illegal immigration impacts public safety in the county and the state.

Hodgson also said his office has several programs aimed at rehabilitating individuals in jail and plans on instituting more.

David Linton may be reached at 508-236-0338.

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Fall River Democrat wants to unseat Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson - The Sun Chronicle

A doctor who has been treating injured migrants from Iraq and Syria at a Polish hospital recently went on Kurdish TV to warn people in Iraq not to attempt an illegal immigration path to the European Union through the Belarus-Poland border, after treating migrants attempting the dangerous journey, the Associated Press reported.

Dr. Arsalan Azzaddin, who is originally from Iraq, told the AP he was treating migrants from his homeland and Syria every day. Many of them suffered from hypothermia, pneumonia, broken bones and severe dehydration, he said.

"I want them not to come. They could die," Azzaddin told the Associated Press on Monday.

After some viewers accused Azzaddin of doing the Polish government's bidding to keep out migrants, he used his second appearance on Kurdish TV to allow his patients to describe their suffering firsthand. He also told Iraqi leaders: "Save those people," he said. "Kurds don't deserve something like this."

Azzaddin said he had been treating an average of two to five migrants in need of urgent treatment daily. One was a 38-year-old Syrian woman who had a miscarriage after she was in the forest for 22 days. She then caught COVID-19 after being taken to the hospital. Border Guard officers took the woman from the hospital on Monday and would not let AP journalists speak to her.

Days after Azzaddin went on TV, the Iraqi government began taking steps to stop the migration of Iraqis to Belarus. The government stopped flights to Belarus, closed offices that issued travel visas there and sent government planes to bring Iraqis in Belarus back home.

For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.

EU officials also mounted pressure on Iraq to halt the migration, but Azzaddin is convinced that his appeals on TV, which he said reached 2.5 million viewers, played a significant in stopping the migration.

With Poland's border increasingly sealed, it has gotten harder and harder for migrants at the border. Many are getting trapped in a dank forest of bogs that sees subfreezing temperatures at night. There have been reports of at least a dozen deaths along the border, and Azzaddin believes there are more on the Belarus side, based on his monitoring of social media posts.

With flights to Belarus from the Mideast coming to a halt, Azzaddin says he believes there are no more migrants in Poland's forest but there are still 2,000 people on the Belarusian side.

Azzaddin, originally from Irbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, but has lived in Poland for 40 years, supports the strict Polish approach to migration. He says if Poland were to allow in all the people that Belarus was shepherding to the EU's doorstep, the numbers would only grow and Lukashenko would prevail in his geopolitical standoff against the West.

The problem, he says, should be addressed at its roots. He sharply accuses Iraqi authorities of failing to create conditions where people can have dignified lives.

"You have to ask why people are coming," he said. "The leaders of many countries, of the United States and the European Union, must ask the Iraqi authorities why people are fleeing. These are educated people. They don't have work, they don't have anything to survive on."

He supports immigration, but wants to see it happen in a legal, controlled way.

"We must teach young people that the illegal way is not a good way. If you have an education, look for a job, do it legally," he said. "I am the medical director of this hospital. If 20 doctors wanted to work here, I could give them work tomorrow. But they must fulfill certain requirements. Coming here by risking the death of your family and children is not a good way."

The EU accuses the authoritarian leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, of orchestrating the migration in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Belarus over a presidential election in 2020 that was widely viewed as rigged and a harsh government crackdown on peaceful protesters.

Most of the migrants seek to reach Germany or elsewhere in Western Europe. But after 1 million refugees came to the EU in 2015, the bloc has sought to keep out any large new groups of asylum-seekers. The way it has done so, tacitly allowing the pushbacks of migrants and outsourcing migration control to Libya and Turkey, has prompted rights groups to accuse the EU of abetting human rights abuses.

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Doctor in Poland Goes on Iraq TV, Pleads for Kurds to Avoid Illegal Immigration Path to EU - Newsweek

VAN HORN, Texas Texas state troopers deployed to the border in remote West Texas to serve as backup to the overstretched Border Patrol are overwhelmed responding to the increasing number of illegal migrants who try to outrun them.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has rerouted more than 1,000 officers from their normal duties to the border since March, when the number of people illegally crossing from Mexico into the United States began to spike across the state. West Texas, normally the quietest place along the state's 1,250-mile shared border with Mexico, is being inundated with groups of people crossing, all of whom are trying to evade capture, law enforcement told the Washington Examiner.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of families who crossed in the Rio Grande Valley this past year with the goal of surrendering to agents and being released into the country, the men coming over in West Texas are trying not to get caught. They wear camouflage and sometimes attach pieces of carpet to the bottom of their shoes to avoid leaving behind tracks.

"I've personally never seen any numbers like we've been seeing. It's definitely an increase of activity," said DPS officer Lt. Elizabeth Carter, who has been based in West Texas since she joined the department 12 years ago.

DPS in May sent in vehicles and personnel to help Border Patrol because so many migrants, primarily men, were coming across in remote areas that federal agents were struggling to interdict. Many Border Patrol agents have been pulled from Big Bend to help in hard-hit areas, Yuma, Arizona, and Del Rio, Texas, as illegal immigration spiked after President Joe Biden took office to hit a level never seen at any time in the Border Patrol's century-long existence.

On top of the temporary Border Patrol staffing decline, Louisiana National Guard soldiers assigned to West Texas were recently pulled, leaving more holes in operations.

CAMOUFLAGED MEN EVADE BORDER AGENTS NEAR BLUE ORIGIN LAUNCH SITE

As other states were forced to pull out National Guard due to financial constraints, places like West Texas faced a greater need for backup. DPS sent in reinforcements in early summer, including a helicopter and aircrew who go up daily, searching for groups that Border Patrol agents believe have detected. Other state troopers man Interstate 10 and Highway 90, the most popular routes for migrants who have made the long journey by foot through the mountains and desert from the border. DPS shares its intelligence with the Border Patrol and turns any migrants over to federal agents for processing or arrest.

Statewide, DPS has arrested 9,100 people on criminal charges since March, which includes human smugglers who pick up the migrants once they make it to a highway, as well as migrants with criminal convictions. DPS has apprehended 77,500 migrants who came across the border and transferred them to Border Patrol custody.

DPS recently increased the number of state police sent to the border in West Texas and is hoping for an even bigger deployment to better assist Border Patrol, Carter said.

"Usually we try to track them before they get into the vehicle because we want to prevent a pursuit from happening. Again, it's a danger to the community," said Carter.

On Sunday, the DPS helicopter crew led police on the ground to eight men carrying hundreds of pounds of drugs into the country. The eight backpackers, all dressed in camouflage tops and bottoms, were apprehended with 400 pounds of marijuana.

A trooper stopped a vehicle on Tuesday for a registration violation and found nine people concealed inside. The seven men and two women inside had sneaked over the border and were picked up by a smuggler who was driving them to their next destination.

"A big concern for us as an agency right now and specifically Big Bend are failure to yields,'" said Jeffrey Hammes, a Border Patrol agent who is the president of the National Border Patrol Council's Big Bend union chapter, referring to drivers transporting migrants who refuse to pull over for police, prompting a chase. "These groups that are reaching a highway and are being able to load up into a pickup vehicle. We have been relying a lot on our local law enforcement partners to help us out a lot on those things. And DPS especially has been a fantastic asset for us and helping us with those vehicle stops."

On Wednesday, the DPS helicopter helped Border Patrol find 30 people trekking through the desert fields near Van Horn.

Despite the surge of resources to West Texas, one DPS officer said so many migrants are coming through that they cannot keep up. Sgt. Jimmy Morris, a tactical flight officer for DPS, estimated that they stop 15 of 100 migrants coming through the region from the border. Migrants who cross here are initially led over the border by smugglers who work for the cartels in Mexico. The migrants are told where to walk and given supplies to last them up to a week outside. Carter said some walk for six days before getting to a highway.

"This is true old school stuff," said Morris, who is assigned to a helicopter that surveils thousands of square miles surrounding nearby Alpine, Texas. "We're using sophisticated stuff, yes, but we're going back to early 18th-century tracking."

The helicopter helps because of the thermal imaging onboard that shows Morris areas in a field or mountain where human body heat is detected, an important piece of technology given that many men crossing through West Texas are taking steps to avoid being seen.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Morris and DPS pilot Jesse Chambers get calls to track groups of illegal immigrants daily. In the summer, they received search and rescue calls daily. They listed some of the worst rescues, including those that involved migrants they rescued who had been bitten by rattlesnakes, broken a femur crossing in the mountains, as well as those who did not make it. The freeze that hit Texas last winter cost "many, many" lives, Morris said.

Original Location: State troopers overwhelmed with rising illegal migration in West Texas

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State troopers overwhelmed with rising illegal migration in West Texas - Colorado Springs Gazette

The prospects for meaningful immigration reform couldnt be bleaker. Policy failure or inaction is the rule in almost every area of immigration policy, the only arguable exception being anti-terrorist legislation. In Congress, immigration reform has been pretty much a dead letter since the Obama administrations failed effort. President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are not eager to invest much of their political capital, and the two parties couldnt be further apart on most aspects of the issue.

But the case for enacting reform that balances effective enforcement and humanitarian concerns remains urgent. Illegal entries have reached unprecedented levels. The government just reported that 1.7 million illegal entrants arrived in the last year, the highest number since 1960, when the government began counting. These new figures, which seem unlikely to decline anytime soon, should deepen support for more effective enforcement measures, as well as reforms to the asylum system to prevent economic migrants from circumventing it.

But the system requires fixing for those already here, too. For almost a decade, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has authorized temporary relief from removal for almost 2 million Dreamers (minors who entered the U.S. illegally with their parents), and roughly 800,000 have actually received it. The program, however, was invalidated this summer by a federal district judge in Texas and is not taking new applications, pending appeal. When President Obama created DACA in 2012, I published a New York Times op-ed arguing that the program, though justified as policy, was created by an illegal procedure. Still, the legal status of these families is now in peril. The Biden administration can help them only by slow-walking their removals, an evasive tactic that inevitably undermines the credibility of the nations larger immigration-enforcement effort. A permanent resolution is essential.

Meantime, the number of mixed-status familiesthose headed by unauthorized adults but that also include U.S. citizens under 18probably exceeds 6 million and is steadily growing. The notion that ICE can remove these adults without causing immense harm, not only to their unauthorized family members but also to their U.S. citizen (or noncitizen) children and communities, is wildly unrealistic.

In total, an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants live in the U.S. If past is prologue, ICE will remove only 1 percent of them (185,000 in 2020, itself a large decline from 2019). Moreover, millions of illegal immigrants are long-term residents; the Migration Policy Institute reports that almost two-thirds of them have lived here for more than a decade and 22 percent for more than 20 years. Federal law has long recognized the difficulty of removing long-settled illegal residents. The 1986 immigration statute legalized those who had lived here with good moral character since before 1972. Were Congress to apply the same logic and time frame now, it would extend the same relief to otherwise law-abiding illegal residents settled here since 2007. This would better focus ICE enforcement resources, recognize that assimilation occurs over time, and relieve the deportation anxiety of millions of families. Amnesty for the more-recently-arrived immigrants must be very carefully designed to minimize perverse incentives and moral anomalies.

An overlooked keystone of immigration enforcement is the system of courts through which virtually every contested removal case must pass. Despite a large increase in recent years in the number of immigration judges, to approximately 500, their backlog of cases grew by 50 percent in June alone and now approaches 1.5 million. Detention facilities for those awaiting court hearings have been expanded but are still so limited that the vast majority of detainees must be released pending their long-delayed hearings. This inevitably results in much absconding, illegal work in the U.S., and a sense of futility on the part of ICE, the judges, and the public. Sharply increasing the number of immigration judges would reduce the case backlog and the need for long periods of detention.

Every administration directs enforcement resources and attention on the long southern border and our ports of entry, fortifying the impression among Americans that the problem of illegal immigration is primarily one of border enforcement. But the Center for Migration Studies estimates that almost half of illegal immigrants enter the U.S. at the legal ports of entry with valid documents and then overstay or otherwise violate the terms of their visas. Still, enforcement resources largely neglect workplaces, residences, and other venues where these and other unauthorized congregate and would be easier to apprehend.

This neglect of interior enforcement is easy to explain. Employers, a powerful political and economic force in their communities, bitterly oppose ICE raids on their workplaces due to uncertainties about workers immigration status, interrupted production, unionization incentives, and public criticism. But such employer objections can be more easily addressed through the improved, faster E-Verify system that ICE has installed and that should be made mandatory.

Bipartisan criticisms of our immigration system abound. On October 30 alone, the New York Times ran three long articles focused on controversial migration policies and programs. Yet the prospect of common ground between the two parties on immigration seems remoteeven as the conditions and challenges grow more urgent.

Peter H. Schuck is Baldwin Professor of Law Emeritus at Yale Law School and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU Law School.

Photo by Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

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The Continuing Need for Immigration Reform - City Journal

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Rep. Val Demings, a Florida Democrat who is running to unseat Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, tweeted in favor of securing the U.S. border "and other points of entry" last week, which the Rubio campaign slammed as an "election-cycle charade" that contradicts her own record.

Demings tweeted Wednesday that immigration reform is needed in order to stem the tide of overdose deaths in the country, which have hit record levels.

VAL DEMINGS EMBRACES HARD-LEFT DEMOCRATS IN FLORIDA SENATE RUN

Rep. Val Demings speaks during a House Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 21, 2021. (Greg Nash/The Hill/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

"Whats happening right now is a preventable tragedy. Taking it on requires a multistep approach," she argued. "1) Hold pharma companies accountable 2) Secure the border and other points of entry 3) Make addiction and mental health treatment accessible to all."

Despite her call to secure the border, Demings has a history of voting against policies that some could argue would do just that. In 2019, she called President Trumps southern border wall "an absurd waste of money and a violation of our values as a nation of immigrants," and she voted "yes"to terminate his declaration of an emergency at the border, which freed up billions in funding for the wall.

Demings also voted against a bill that would make it easier to deport illegal immigrants who are suspected of gang activity and another that would restrict taxpayer grant money to sanctuary cities.

Rep. Val Demings attends a Build Back Better for Women rally on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 24, 2021. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

"Demings may be willing to do and say anything in order to win, but her record speaks for itself," the Rubio campaign said in a statement to Fox News Digital. "Demings supports illegal immigrants voting, sanctuary cities, and a pathway to citizenship for gang members and sexual abusers while she opposes the border wall and resources for border agencies.

"Floridians will see right through her election-cycle charade," the campaign said.

Meanwhile, Demings was among the group of Democrats who led the failed effort for immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for millions of DREAMers and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) immigrants, to be included in the $1.9 trillion social spending bill passed by the House on Friday.

Sen. Marco Rubio speaks with reporters before a vote on Capitol Hill on Nov. 4, 2021, in Washington. (Joshua Roberts/Getty Images)

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Demings Campaign Manager Zack Carroll hit back at the Rubio campaign and touted Demings' work as an Orlando police chief in a statement to Fox News Digital on Sunday night.

"Chief Demings kept Floridians safe for 27 years as a law enforcement officer," Carroll said. "In Congress, the Chief has fought to secure funding and strengthen oversight of the Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security as they work to prevent illegal drug smuggling and keep Florida safe.

"But Marco Rubio is too weak and self-serving to do his job: he's skipped nine Senate Foreign Relations hearings since September and voted against bipartisan support for the Department of Homeland Security that will enhance anti-smuggling security at the border and at ports of entry," he continued. "In this race there's only one candidate focused on doing the work to keep Floridians safe, and it's Chief Demings."

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Rubio camp slams election-cycle charade after Demings calls to secure the border - Fox News