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King County Executive Dow Constantine has chosen to violate federal law — through mafia tactics. You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, he announced he would not let ICE use King County International Airport, more commonly known as Boeing Field, to deport illegal immigrants.

Over the last 10 years, we have deported 34,000 illegal immigrants out of Boeing Field. These were illegal immigrants who had gone before a judge — some were rapists, murderers, and sex traffickers.

Why would Dow Constantine want to keep rapists, murderers, and child molesters in our region? Because they were illegal immigrants. That is more noble than whatever crimes they’ve committed.

broke the have now told King County and Dow Constantine that they are in violation of federal law.

RELATED: Portland food truck threatened for simply selling lunch to ICE employees

The airport, which was deeded to the county by the federal government in the 1940s, gets tens of millions in federal grants every year; part of the deal there is that you can’t discriminate against the federal government.

In a bit of thuggery, Dow Constantine has told private contractors that if they fuel or service those ICE planes, they will lose county contracts.

This is mafia-type stuff by Dow the don.

The private companies are too afraid to service the ICE flights. So now, instead of a 40-minute bus trip from the federal detention center in Tacoma to Boeing Field, these handcuffed illegal immigrants have to sit on a bus for three hours to Yakima, where they are then put on a plane. It costs taxpayers a fortune more.

Dow Constantine won’t talk to the media — he is a coward. Boeing Field CEO John Perrott backed out of his interview with Springer, which is also cowardly and really too bad. I cannot possibly imagine what the other side’s defense would be of this. I would love to know from these guys how we can justify this.

“John Perrott said in his quote to the Seattle Times that he believes they are on firm legal ground because, he said, they are engaged in ‘just discrimination,'” Springer told me. “In other words, that the federal government is discriminating against illegal immigrants by deporting them, and that there [are] some sort of human rights abuses, but if we prevent them from flying out of our airport, that’s ‘just discrimination.'”

You have a law enforcement agency in ICE. All that those men and women do is their job. They don’t make the rules. They don’t craft legislation. They just enforce federal immigration laws.

One of our laws is that if you’re in this country illegally, and you commit another crime, you can be deported.

And Dow Constantine, to make a political stunt of a statement, says that after 34,000 deportation flights, we can no longer fly illegal immigrants out of Boeing Field. And his tool for getting that done is mob stuff.

Do the people who call Trump a dictator realize that people like Dow Constantine are worse? He goes to private companies that fuel and service airplanes at Boeing Field and threatens them with cancelled contracts if they put fuel in those planes.

A true attorney general would swoop in and begin proceedings to get Constantine out of office for that kind of thuggery. But Bob Ferguson is of course too busy suing the Trump administration.

I try to anticipate arguments on the other side, but I cannot understand this one. Dow, why do you refuse to let illegal immigrants who have committed rape, murder, and human trafficking be transported out of Boeing Field? There is no rational position for what he’s doing, and there should be no legal one.