Fifteen months ago in sanctuary city San Francisco, Juan Francisco
Lopez-Sanchez, a five-time deported alien, and seven-time convicted felon,
shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle in broad daylight at a popular
tourist area. Both before and after Ms. Steinle’s murder, hundreds of
Americans senselessly lost their lives at the hands of criminal, deportable
aliens harbored in sanctuary cities like San Francisco.
Yet despite a national outcry against the nation’s estimated 325 sanctuary
cities like San Francisco, on September 30, a federal judge single-handedly
created six sanctuary states. Northern District of Illinois Judge John Lee’s
new order will bar Immigration and Customs Enforcement from placing 48-hour
detainers on illegal aliens held in local Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky,
Kansas, Missouri and Wisconsin jails. In the process, Judge Lee voided
existing detainers in those states.
Judge Lee declared that ICE will be required to obtain a warrant for every
individual before it issues a post-release detainer unless they verify that
each suspected alien is a flight risk, a difficult if not impossible task.
Essentially, nonenforcement of immigration law now officially has the
federal court’s blessing.
Daniel Horowitz, a lawyer who writes for the Conservative Review, branded
Judge Lee’s action “a radical violation of American sovereignty,” an opinion
with which millions agree. Horowitz notes that, by definition, illegal
aliens without valid visas are the consummate flight risk, and why the
relevant statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1357(a)(2), authorizes ICE to apprehend illegal
aliens without a warrant when the suspected alien “is likely to escape
before a warrant can be obtained for his arrest.”
Immigration enforcement is, at best, sporadic; at worst, nonexistent. In
recent years, more than 925,000 illegal aliens have been ordered removed,
but are still in the country. About 60 percent of them come from four
countries: Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. Most have simply
walked, or were trafficked, across the Southwest border, and have
immediately, but without legal cause, petitioned for amnesty. At the same
time, last year the Obama administration released 19,723 criminal aliens,
and interior enforcement continues in steep decline. Despite the Obama
administration’s insistence that criminal removals are his priority, that
category has declined by more than half, from about 150,000 in 2010 and 2011
to about 63,000 last year.
By preventing ICE from doing its job, Judge Lee has put citizens at risk.
Aliens are rarely if ever detained because of their immigration status, but
instead because they’ve committed a nonimmigration related crime, often
felonies. Merely by their unlawful presence, aliens are, once their illegal
status is confirmed, deportable. Now, post-Judge Lee, Horowitz predicts that
immigration lawyers will be able to endlessly litigate the ever-declining
numbers of deportation orders until the alien prevails. In the upside-down
Obama White House, even criminal aliens are released into an unsuspecting
vulnerable public.
Much of the blame for the willful failure to implement immigration law rests
with President Obama, his similarly minded judicial allies like Judge Lee
and anti-American open borders advocates. But the Republican controlled
Congress and specifically the Paul Ryan-led House of Representatives are
equally culpable. In December, Ryan’s $1.1 trillion Omnibus budget approved
millions in continued federal funding grants for sanctuary cities despite
outcries from victims’ families.
The Obama administration still has time to further undermine immigration
laws. Based on the President’s immigration track record, Obama’s critics
should brace for the worst.
—
Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1987.
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