Here's How Sanctuary Cities Work, and Why Democrats Are Wrong To Keep Protecting Them
http://ijr.com/opinion/2015/10/2493...ns-conservatives-distrust-immigration-reform/
On Tuesday, Democrats in the Senate
filibustered a bill that would have placed new burdens on cities that choose to play by their own immigration rules, or as we call them in political slang terms, sanctuary cities.
Democrats claim they are motivated to “fix a broken immigration system.” Martin O'Malley even
used that language to
defend sanctuary cities. But, to
a hefty majority of Americans, sanctuary cities are a glaring symptom of said system, providing jurisdictions the power to scrupulously select when to cooperate with drained immigration authorities who are already struggling to enforce the law.
Here is a sanctuary city's basic
modus operandi: if local law enforcement, in an encounter with an illegal alien, becomes aware of their immigration status, under certain circumstances they will not notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); or, if they do, and ICE asks the local jail to hold them for 48 hours so they can be picked up, under certain circumstances they will not honor the request (that request is called a “detainer”).
This practice is generally legal. It's also much more complicated than the above explanation, partially thanks to the bewildering quilt of about 340 city, state, and county jurisdictions which each follow
their own set of immigration rules. Tucson, Arizona, for example, will only cooperate with ICE if they pledge to pay for the cost of detainment. Berkeley, California won't honor an ICE request unless the detainee has been arrested for a violent crime or has committed murder in the last decade. Los Angeles County, meanwhile, just won't comply with ICE at all.
The results are troubling. In the
first eight months of 2014 alone, 8,145 detainers issued by ICE were rejected by local law enforcement. 63% of those involved aliens with serious criminal backgrounds, and nearly 3,000 were actual felons. 23% of the 8,145 were arrested again (some multiple times), and even then, sanctuary cities still didn't cooperate with ICE on more than half of the repeat offenders. (If this isn't a broken system, what is?)
These cities aren't snubbing immigration authorities for the fun of it. Local law enforcement argue that, by refusing to act on someone's immigration status, they are encouraging undocumented victims, suspects, criminals, and witnesses to cooperate with their investigations. Hillary Clinton's campaign used that argument this summer,
rallying behind sanctuary cities in the name of public safety. Not all law enforcement groups agree,
arguing that such policies actually create undue liability on officers who may be punished if they share information with the feds.
But when it comes to our national immigration policy, one thing is clear: sanctuary cities are a roadblock to effective immigration enforcement. Even the Obama administration has recognized this fact and tried to rein such cities in, first creating the Secure Communities program (which required local authorities to share fingerprints with immigration agents), then
scrapping it and creating the Priorities Enforcement Program, which shifted the focus to higher-risk cases.
Which brings us back to the Senate bill. That bill would have stripped federal grant funding from cities that refuse to cooperate with ICE's enforcement policies, coercing them into compliance with the feds. Even more appropriately, one revoked grant would have been the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which was created precisely to help local jurisdictions cover the costs associated with detaining illegal immigrants in the first place.
The bill would have also mandated sentencing rules for an illegal alien who is caught trying to re-enter the U.S. a second time.
Dropping the hammer on sanctuary cities is by no means a panacea for our immigration crisis. But putting the nation's thousands of competing jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies on the same page to enforce our immigration laws is certainly a great place to start. As poll after poll has shown, an
unwavering majority of Americans - and Republicans in Congress, to boot - agree that border security and enforcement of our laws needs to be a higher priority than paving a pathway towards legalization and/or citizenship.
Democrats this week proved that, for them, that's not the case, preferring to play politics by accusing Republicans of “demonizing” immigrants and
labeling the bill the “Donald Trump Act.” The broken system remains, kept broken by the same party that claims it is willing to fix it.
Sadly, each vote like this pushes conservatives further and further away from signing on to a “comprehensive immigration reform” deal. Sure, such a bill will likely have beefy border security and enforcement provisions, to convince Republicans to sign on. But remember: Democrats just illustrated to us that they have no interest in actually working to enforce any of the laws we already have.
So next time this comes up, you'll have to forgive our skepticism.
