When Mary Frances Berry left the Commission on Civil Rights three years ago this month, we’d hoped that the body would no longer be used to pursue liberal policy agendas unrelated its genuine purpose. While the climate at the Commission itself seems to have changed for the better, Linda Chavez is continuing in the Berry tradition at the Commission’s Virginia advisory committee, in this case using the cudgel of federal civil rights harassment as a way to prevent local immigration enforcement.

She objected yesterday to my post criticizing a kangaroo court she’d convened to browbeat the elected officials of Prince William County, Va., into backing off from immigration-enforcement measures demanded by their constituents. Her letter simply strengthens my point: for instance, she scolds the county supervisors for having “spent little time gathering facts about the impact of immigrants in the county before passing judgment by way of passing new county laws.” This raises two questions — is it really her position that elected representatives of the people have to hire social scientists before they’re permitted to pass laws? What’s more, what kind of conservative thinks it’s a good idea for federal oversight bodies to stick their noses into local ordinances?

Linda claims that her inquisitorial panel “brought in experts who could provide empirical data.” Even assuming it were any of her business, the only experts providing empirical data, according to the agenda I have, were two advocates for high immigration and loose enforcement — lawyer Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute and demographer Jeff Passel from the Pew Hispanic Center. The absence of my research director, Steve Camarota, who is Passel’s counterpart on the low-immigration, pro-enforcement side of the debate, is all the information you need to divine the tendentious nature of the gathering. The second panel included the local officials Linda wanted to interrogate, and the third panel consisted of three more people supporting Linda’s views — a leftist documentarian, a pacifist clergyman, and an immigration lawyer — plus two representatives of the restrictionist group FAIR, presumably to provide some nominal diversity of opinion.

Why Linda has become so obsessed with preventing immigration enforcement that she makes common cause with the post-American Left, and embraces its tactics is beyond me. But I have no doubt that’s what’s happening.