Ghouls and goblins

Governor-elect Landry's transition team is populated with all of the infamous figures you might expect to see. You've got your Grigsbys and your Bollingers and whatnot. There are other things you might expect.  An oil company lawyer will chair the Coast & Environment committee, a charter school guy will chair a K-12 education group.  I also see there's a committee chaired by Gray Stream. That's an interesting character we highlighted last month as well. 

Lane Grigsby will be in charge of something called a "Constitutional Reform" committee which is itself a whole 'nother can of worms we've been trying not to have to open for quite some time, primarily because of some issues we brought up on election night. 

Anyway, I'm linking back to old posts here because we're about to get swallowed up by some monsters that I, like a lot of people, have been warning about for a long time. You might say we're practically haunted. Not sure what anyone can do about it now. After all, the exorcist was two governors ago.

Bollinger ICE raid

Not sure what, exactly, is going on here but the possibility that a company with so many critical ties to the Republican Party in general and to Donald Trump's campaign in particular, might be calling out ICE on its own employees probably needs consideration.

Federal agents staged an extensive search of the Bollinger Shipyards facilities in Lockport on Tuesday as part of an "ongoing federal criminal investigation" led by the Department of Homeland Security and also detained several immigrants in the country illegally at the facility, authorities said.

The operation at the Lafourche Parish shipyard on Tuesday was led by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Bryan Cox, an ICE spokesman. Cox referred additional questions to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

U.S. Attorney Peter Strasser declined comment.

Cox said federal agents also arrested 19 "unlawfully present foreign nationals" at the Bollinger Shipyards location. Five of those people were placed in ICE detention while the other 14 were processed and released after being placed into deportation proceedings in federal immigration court, Cox said.

Of course it also says there is an "ongoing federal criminal investigation"  and it's the sort of thing that has ensnared other Republican Party figures in the state already.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, who has railed against loose borders and lax immigration policies during his four years as the state’s top lawman, went into business in 2017 with a Houston labor broker named Marco Pesquera, who had become rich by helping his clients defraud the immigration system to import more than 1,000 Mexican laborers to the Gulf South.

They set out to make millions by winning federal approval to bring in hundreds of skilled Mexican construction workers to help build a massive liquefied natural gas terminal in Cameron Parish.

These are the guys who yell and scream about how we need tough immigration enforcement practices while they themselves are the ones profiting from the exploitation of migrant labor.  You ever wonder if maybe they just like to be able to threaten their workers?