Sanctuary Cities & Criminals
Democrat Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon claims that people “who oppose sanctuary cities do so in the mistaken belief that those cities provide sanctuary to violent criminals. That’s just not true.”
IN FACT, that is exactly what sanctuary cities do. Here are the specifics:
- Sanctuary cities, counties, and states are those that shield illegal immigrants from deportation by refusing to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. One of the primary ways in which they do this is by releasing illegal immigrants from jail before ICE can detain them.
- Per the Congressional Research Service, sanctuary “jurisdictions may limit law enforcement’s ability to honor an immigration detainer” when ICE “formally requests that a state or local” law enforcement agency keep a detained immigrant in “custody for up to forty-eight hours after the alien would otherwise be released” so ICE can deport them.
- For example, in 2019, ICE issued 7,526 detainers in New York City for non-citizens with criminal histories that include “more than 3,500 assaults, 1,500 DUIs, 1,000 sex crimes, 1,000 weapon offenses, 500 robberies, and 200 homicide offenses.” New York City honored a total of just 25 of these detainers and let the rest of these criminals go free.
- As explained by ICE during the Obama administration, “Declined detainers result in convicted criminals being released back into U.S. communities with the potential to re-offend, notwithstanding ICE’s requests for transfer of those individuals. Moreover, these releases constrain ICE’s civil immigration enforcement efforts because they required ICE to expend additional resources to locate and arrest convicted criminals who were at-large rather than transferred directly from jails into ICE custody, drawing resources away from other ICE enforcement efforts.”
- Sanctuary jurisdictions that flout ICE detainers have enabled countless violent crimes, such as the murder of Ariana Funes-Diaz, a 14-year-old Maryland girl who was slaughtered with a machete and a baseball bat by illegal immigrants after they were previously arrested and released by Prince George’s County, MD for “attempted first-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, participation in gang activity, conspiracy to commit murder, attempted robbery, and other related charges.”
- Sanctuary politicians say that they would turn these criminals over to ICE if only ICE would present judicial warrants, but the reality is that federal law and the U.S. Constitution allow ICE to detain illegal immigrants with administrative warrants, and federal law doesn’t even allow ICE to obtain judicial warrants for the civil offense of being illegally present in the United States.
