Politico (Op-Ed):
By Rich Lowry
July 8, 2015
It turns out that everything we’ve heard about the evils of states and localities defying federal law is wrong.
So
long as a jurisdiction is sticking its thumb in the eye of the federal
government on behalf of illegal immigrants who have been arrested and
jailed, defiance of federal
authority is progressive and commendable.
Over
the years, the left has created dozens upon dozens of so-called
sanctuary cities devoted to frustrating federal immigration enforcement
and doing all they can to
make a mockery of our laws. On immigration, they are in effect little
islands of secession. Somewhere John C. Calhoun must be smiling —
although slightly puzzled — over the renewed prestige of a version of
his old, discredited idea of nullification.
Sanctuary
cities have gotten renewed attention in the wake of a horrific murder
in San Francisco, a case amplified by the bullhorn of Donald Trump.
Kathryn Steinle, 32,
was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant, Juan Francisco
Lopez-Sanchez, who had a long rap sheet and had been deported five
times. The murder was easily avoidable. A few months prior, the city had
arrested Lopez-Sanchez on drug charges, but it simply released
him when the charges were dropped, even though Immigration and Customs
Enforcement wanted to take custody of him for deportation.
This
wasn’t an isolated misjudgment. San Francisco has long been a sanctuary
city that doesn’t honor so-called federal detainers (i.e., notices that
Immigration and Customs
Enforcement wants to take custody of an illegal immigrant upon release
from jail). It is a policy of calculated irresponsibility meant to
create a zone of lawlessness. In this instance, the human cost was
heartbreakingly high.
The
immigration debate is famously fraught. Maybe we can’t agree on
building a fence. Maybe we can’t agree on a pathway to citizenship. But
surely we can agree that illegal
aliens who have landed in jail should be deported?
Apparently
not. We have a “broken system,” as the supporters of amnesty always
like to say, in part because they took a sledgehammer to said system.
When an illegal alien
is arrested and put in jail, he is officially out of the shadows. Yet
it is the policy of sanctuary cities to send him right back into the
shadows, come what may.
According
to Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies (a group that
favors restricted immigration), of some 8,100 deportable aliens released
after their arrest
by sanctuary jurisdictions from January to August 2014, about 1,900
were arrested again, on 7,500 charges.
Some
of these crimes are worthy of the most lurid Trump rhetoric. Vaughan
relates a case, based on an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement
report, of an alien
arrested for sexual abuse of a child in Los Angeles. The local agency
ignored a detainer and the alien was arrested again on charges of
sexually assaulting a child.
The
number of sanctuary cities has been increasing during the Obama years,
and the administration doesn’t care. It has thrown the book at states
that have dared to aid
in the enforcement of federal immigration law but hasn’t moved against
jurisdictions acting at cross purposes to the law. Indeed, it has eased
the way for them.
It
reinterpreted, with no legal justification, a federal regulation in
order to make detainers voluntary. It kneecapped the successful Secure
Communities program that
shared the fingerprints of local arrestees with the feds, replacing it
with a significantly watered-down program.
Consider
what happened to poor Sarah Saldaña. New on the job as head of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she evidently hadn’t gotten the
memo that she shouldn’t take
the name of her agency too seriously. In congressional testimony
earlier this year, she inveighed against local communities that obstruct
immigration enforcement.
She
noted an increasing lack of cooperation and said, rather
self-evidently, that it “may increase the risk that dangerous criminals
are returned to the streets, putting
the public and our officers at greater risk.”
Asked
the natural question whether it would help if Congress passed
legislation cracking down on sanctuary cities, she gave the response you
might expect of someone whose
job it is to enforce immigration laws: “Thank you, Amen.”
Wrong
answer. Saldaña must have left Capitol Hill to go directly to a
woodshed. She immediately backtracked, saying the same proposed measure
that she had greeted with
relief and gratitude about 24 hours earlier would be “highly
counterproductive.”
The
myth is that President Barack Obama is the “deporter in chief.” In
reality, his alleged spike in deportations is the artifact of an
accounting gimmick (counting the
arrest and removal of border-crossers as deportations). Obama has
gutted interior enforcement, as his acts of “prosecutorial discretion”
have covered ever-more illegal immigrants. The former acting head of
Immigration and Customs Enforcement said recently,
“If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of
getting deported are close to zero.”
The
focus is supposed to be on enforcement against serious criminals, but
so lax is the administration’s approach that even criminals benefit from
its broad nonenforcement.
In 2013, 36,000 criminal aliens were released by Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, and in 2014 30,000 more.
What
to do about sanctuary cities? It is already against federal law for
jurisdictions to forbid their officials from sharing immigration
information with the federal
government. Congress should tighten up the law by making it clear again
that detainers are mandatory and withholding certain federal funds from
jurisdictions that still won’t comply.
Of
course, it would take a different president to sign such a bill, one
who cares about the laws he is pledged to enforce and who doesn’t seek a
sanctuary nation.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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