ThinkProgress (Opinion)
By Esther Lee
July 7, 2015
The
murder of San Francisco resident Kathryn Steinle by an undocumented
immigrant who was deported five times has generated renewed debate over
the president’s deportation
policies.
Juan
Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an undocumented immigrant, confessed to
shooting and killing 32-year-old Steinle on a sightseeing pier last
week. He said he found a gun
wrapped in a T-shirt and accidentally shot it three times, not
realizing that he had shot someone.
Steinle’s
death has unfurled anti-immigrant sentiment against so-called
“sanctuary cities” — places that generally have large immigrant
populations where local law enforcement
officials do not detain immigrants solely on the basis of their legal
status, largely ceding immigration enforcement to federal authorities.
In his confession, Lopez-Sanchez indicated that he returned to San
Francisco every time he was previously deported
because it was a “sanctuary city” and that he felt protected from
deportation, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
GOP
lawmakers, including Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump,
are citing the tragedy to double down on calls to secure the border and
to get rid of sanctuary
cities. But forcing cities to cooperate with federal immigration
officials is a misrepresentation of the actual crime rates among
undocumented immigrants, and could leave both immigrants and Americans
less safe.
What it means to be a sanctuary city
San
Francisco is one of about 300 municipalities that have “amended their
policies regarding ICE detainers” to dissuade local law enforcement
officials from pursuing immigrants
for deportation proceedings, according to the San Francisco Sheriff’s
department. In 2007, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom said, “I will not allow any
of my department heads or anyone associated with this city to cooperate
in any way shape or form with these raids.
We are a sanctuary city, make no mistake about it.”
According
to CNN, after Lopez-Sanchez completed a prison sentence for illegally
re-entering the United States, ICE requested an immigration hold to keep
him in jail until
federal immigration authorities could pick him up for potential
deportation proceedings. But a 1989 ordinance expanded by Mayor Ed Lee
in October 2013 prohibits local San Francisco police from honoring
immigration holds “unless such help is required by federal
or state law or a warrant.” In a statement, the San Francisco Sheriff’s
Department indicated that “there was no active Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) warrant or judicial order of removal” for
Lopez-Sanchez.
We do not hand over people to ICE.
Earlier
this year, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department also released a set
of procedures seriously restricting local and state law enforcement
officials to detain or
release immigrants to ICE authorities. “We do not hand over people to
ICE,” San Francisco Police Officer Grace Gatpandan Gatpandan explained
at the time.
Some
Republicans have seized on Steinle’s death to attack the use of
sanctuary cities — particularly Trump, who has been making headlines
since his incendiary remarks
about Mexicans rapists and drug dealers entering the country.
“This
senseless and totally preventable act of violence committed by an
illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must secure our
border immediately,” Trump said
in a statement. “This is an absolutely disgraceful situation and I am
the only one that can fix it. Nobody else has the guts to even talk
about it.”
House
Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) echoed those comments
on ABC’s “This Week” this weekend. “The tragic murder of Kate Steinle
once again underscores
the need to end these reckless policies,” Goodlatte said. “Why did they
ever turn him over to them when they could have deported him, or they
could have prosecuted him for illegally re-entering the country four
times and send him to prison? Either way, Kate
Steinle would be safe.”
Rep.
Lou Barletta (R-PA), who enacted draconian anti-immigrant measures as a
small-town Pennsylvania mayor, added, “These so-called ‘sanctuary
cities’ are safe havens
for everyone but law-abiding citizens.”
Missing their intended targets
Sanctuary
cities have emerged as a response to policies that haven’t done a good
job of finding their intended targets: Immigrants with serious criminal
records who may
pose a threat to Americans.
Late
last year, President Obama announced an executive action to eliminate
the Secure Communities (S-Comm) program, which allowed local and state
jails to share biometric
information with federal immigration and asked local precincts to honor
immigration holds. That move ostensibly shifted away from targeting
immigrants with low-level offenses to focus on those who have committed
serious crimes.
A
2014 Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse report found that just
12 percent of all deportees caught through the Secure Communities
program just the previous year
committed a serious or “Level 1″ offense — people who pose a serious
threat to public or national safety.
A
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent escorts a handcuffed
undocumented immigrant convicted of a felony during an early morning
operation. A U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agent escorts a handcuffed undocumented
immigrant convicted of a felony during an early morning operation.
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/LM OTERO
Secure
Communities’ replacement, the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), now
requests detainers for notification, “a request that the local agency
notify ICE of a pending
release during the time the person is in custody under state or local
authority,” according to the immigration reform advocacy group National
Immigrant Law Center (NILC). “ICE should seek the transfer only of
people who have been convicted of certain offenses,
or who have intentionally participated in an organized gang to further
the illegal activities of the gang, or people whom ICE has found present
a ‘demonstrable risk to national security,’” a recent NILC fact sheet
indicated.
It’s
unclear whether PEP has done a better job at catching more immigrants
who commit serious crimes. But in a recent week-long, national raid,
nearly half of the convicted
criminal immigrants were individuals whose most serious crimes were
misdemeanors. In another incident, ICE accosted both a U.S. citizen
child and a legal immigrant grandmother at their homes.
Officials
enforcing immigration policies are most successful at driving out
college educated immigrants into other parts of the United States, an
indication that some
enforcement policies are “missing their intended targets,” a report
found last year. The report finds that the only place where the vast
majority of undocumented immigrants do leave the country is in Maricopa
County, Arizona — in part due to intense immigration
enforcement tactics. But those extreme measures also come at a great
price: Anti-immigration Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County has racked
up numerous violations, lawsuits, and was ordered a court-appointed
monitor for his unconstitutional racial profiling
tactics.
Sanctuary cities foster better relationships
Though
immigration restrictionists are going after the more than 70 cities and
states that have adopted policies preventing police from asking
residents to prove their
immigration status, sanctuary cities have made community policing
safer, a 2011 Immigration Policy Center report asserted. The report
stated, “State and local police departments around the country support
community policing policies because they encourage
immigrants to work with the police to put criminals behind bars.”
When
state and local law enforcement agencies are required to enforce
federal immigration laws, undocumented residents may become fearful.
One
immigrant who provided critical testimony to the police to help put a
convicted murderer behind bars was deported following the trial. When
asked whether he would
come forward again “knowing that doing so would lead to his
deportation, Sigui replied: ‘If I had known they would take my liberty,
that they would take my children away from me, that they would put me
[in immigration detention], I would not do this.’”
Some
law enforcement officials support building relationships with their
immigrant population. One Massachusetts police chief stated in 2009,
“When immigrant residents
of Lowell are afraid to report crimes because they worry that contact
with my officers could lead to deportation, criminals are allowed to
roam free and the entire community suffers as a result.”
Earlier
this year, law enforcement officials wrote a letter in opposition to
the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement (SAFE) Act, a bill that requires
state and local law
enforcement to take on the role of immigration agents. The letter
partially stated, “When state and local law enforcement agencies are
required to enforce federal immigration laws, undocumented residents may
become fearful that they, or people they know, will
be exposed to immigration officials and are less likely to cooperate.
This undermines trust between law enforcement and these communities,
creating breeding grounds for criminal enterprises.”
Most immigrants are not criminals
Studies
have shown that the vast majority of the 11 million undocumented
immigrant population are not criminals. They also commit considerably
fewer crimes than Americans.
One study found that “among men age 18-39 (who comprise the vast
majority of the prison population), the 3.5 percent incarceration rate
of the native-born in 2000 was 5 times higher than the 0.7 percent
incarceration rate of the foreign-born.”
Jessica
Vaughan, director of policy studies at the immigration-restrictionist
organization Center for Immigration Studies previously said, “we found
no strong evidence
one way or the other for the notion that immigrants commit either more
or less crime than the American population. And a 2013 Criminology and
Delinquency study found that first-generation immigrants commit crime at
a lower rate than second-generation immigrants
and native-born, non-Hispanic whites.
We
found no strong evidence one way or the other for the notion that
immigrants commit either more or less crime than the American
population.
Still,
anti-immigrant lawmakers have been keen on using flawed statistics to
paint undocumented immigrants as dangerous. Earlier this year, House
Rules Committee Chairman
Pete Sessions (R-TX) stated that undocumented immigrants are
responsible for killing Americans “every day.” As evidence, Sessions’
spokesman pointed to a now-defunct Texas Department of Public Safety
graphic, which reportedly showed that immigrants were responsible
for more than 3,000 homicides in 2014. But that graphic didn’t break
down the legal status of immigrants.
Rep.
Steve King (R-IA) has made the argument that undocumented immigrants
killed more Americans in a four-year period than the number of people
who perished during the
September 2001 terrorist attacks. But he also took the number of
homicides committed by undocumented immigrants over a 51-year period,
instead of a snapshot of “a four year window,” as he stated.
King’s
citation statistics comes from a Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report, which found that more than 25,000 foreign nationals were
arrested for homicides
over a 51-year period between August 1955 to April 2010, but not all of
them were undocumented immigrants, nor ultimately convicted. Among the
general population, there were 11,200 arrests for homicides in 2010
alone, the Department of Justice reported.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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