SANCTUARY CITY SOLUTION? HIT
CITIES' POCKETBOOKS 'HARD', 'Suddenly, these
policies will go away', by Paul Bremmer, 11/19/16, WND
Donald Trump built his presidential
campaign around tough talk of securing the border and deporting illegal
immigrants already in the United States. But mayors and police chiefs from
around the country are promising to defy the new president by continuing to
provide “sanctuary,” an exemption from federal law for lawbreakers.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Barack
Obama’s former chief of staff, affirmed his city will continue to prohibit
government workers and police from asking locals about their immigration
status. “Chicago
will always be a sanctuary city,” he
boasted.
Seattle Mayor Ed Murray sounded a
similar note, saying, “Seattle has always been a welcoming city. The last thing
I want is for us to start turning on our neighbors.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio
told Muslim residents concerned about deportation, “We have your back.”
Daniel Horowitz, senior editor at
Conservative Review, finds great irony in the sanctuary city phenomenon. He
noted the federal government “crushes” states on issues such as religious
liberty and election laws when states try to exercise rightful control.
“Yet when it comes to the one area
that is clearly within the purview of the federal government, an enumerated
power given to Congress to regulate immigration for the sovereignty of an
entire union, somehow the states and localities are able to get away with
thwarting federal law,”
Horowitz mused to WND.
Horowitz, author of “Stolen
Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges From Transforming America,” sees a horribly backwards double standard regarding
immigration laws.
He pointed out Arizona passed a law
in 2010 to help augment and enforce federal immigration law, but the courts
struck down several provisions of the law. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, San
Francisco and many other cities are undermining federal immigration law with
their sanctuary policies, without ramifications.
“They’re getting away with it,”
Horowitz groused. “They’re getting away with stealing the sovereignty of the
people. So we have it exactly backwards.”
But Trump promises to not let them
get away with it any longer. The president-elect has previously stated he will
cut off federal funding to sanctuary cities after he takes office.
Cheryl Chumley, an award-winning
freelance journalist, enthusiastically supports Trump’s proposal. “Cut the purse strings off until
these sanctuary cities recognize the dangers of their foolish policies and quit
advertising to the world of illegals: Come on in,” she told WND.
Chumley, author of “The
Devil in DC: Winning Back the Country From the Beast in Washington,” encouraged Americans to remember Kate Steinle, the San
Francisco woman who was gunned down in broad daylight while walking on a pier
with her father. Her killer was an illegal immigrant
who had previously been deported several times for felonies. But San
Francisco’s sanctuary policies allowed him to roam free, and while roaming
free, he killed.
“If police chiefs, city officials
and liberal-leaning bureaucrats fail to uphold the safety of American citizens
and regard that job description as the number one priority, and instead insist
on forcing a personal political open-border agenda down the throats of the
communities they’re supposed to serve and protect, they should lose taxpayer
support,” Chumley said.
Mayor Jorge Eloza of Providence,
Rhode Island, said his city would keep on refusing to hold people charged with
civil infractions for federal immigration officials, and Newark Mayor Ras
Baraka expressed the same sentiment.
Los Angeles Police Department
chief Charlie
Beck promised to maintain his
city’s decades-long tradition of sanctuary policies, saying, “If the federal
government takes a more aggressive role on deportation, then they’ll have to do
that on their own.”
Beck added it is not his
department’s job to “work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation
efforts,” a notion Horowitz finds ridiculous. “There are so many crimes that cross
state lines and affect the nation in general, and it is within the federal
purview to deal with immigration,” Horowitz said. “They can’t do it without the
cooperation of local police. If local police are downright protecting them, the
federal government cannot exercise one of its core enumerated powers.”
However, Jeff Roorda, a retired St.
Louis-area police chief, takes a more nuanced view on this matter. “This is a bit of a double-edged
sword in that when we ask local jurisdictions to enforce federal law when they
have no authority to do so, or when we ask them not to enforce it, it really is
putting the burden where it doesn’t belong,” Roorda told WND. “ICE is the one
that should be enforcing this. With that said, the law is the law and these
police chiefs don’t have the right to ignore federal law. They do have the
argument that they don’t have the authority to enforce it.”
Roorda, author of “The
War on Police: How the Ferguson Effect is Making America Unsafe,” said he would favor a federal law explicitly allowing
local jurisdictions to enforce federal immigration laws. But he confessed most
officers don’t care for the political side of law enforcement.
“I can tell you that police officers
don’t like it when politics are infused into the job of law enforcement,” he
revealed. “They see it as the role of politicians to decide what’s legal and
what’s not by passing laws and then the cops enforce them without any judgment
about what’s a good law or what’s a bad law.”
Chumley, for her part, suggested if
an illegal alien taking shelter in a sanctuary city commits an additional
crime, Trump should use the full force of his Justice Department to prosecute
the leaders responsible for the continuing sanctuary status – including going
after punitive damages that could be awarded to the victims and families of
victims. “Hit these sanctuary cities in the
pocketbooks hard, open the doors to accountability for officials who turn a
blind eye when their sanctuary policies result in real crimes to real citizens,
and suddenly, these policies will go away, if not by the officials’ own doings,
then at the pressure of a community tired of the financial losses,” Chumley
proclaimed. Horowitz sees an easy way Trump could turn back the tide of illegal
immigration.
“The good news is that a lot of what
Obama did was through executive action,” he noted. “The statutes remain the
same; in fact, Congress never changed the immigration statutes during his
entire eight-year tenure. So this is garbage in, garbage out: whatever he was
able to implement through executive order, Trump could reverse.”
Horowitz suggested Trump could restore
the Secure Communities program, which Obama gutted, or roll back DACA and DAPA.
He also shared one tip on federal immigration law.
“It’s very important for people to
realize that the immigration statutes were written for the most part one
directionally,” Horowitz advised. “They gave broad latitude to the executive to
ratchet down immigration as needed for the security of the nation, but did not
give discretion for a president to broadly expand immigration.
“Certainly if Obama was able to get
away with all his expansive immigration executive orders, Trump could
definitely follow the statutes by ratcheting down some of this immigration.”
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