About Me

My photo
Beverly Hills, California, United States
Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

Translate

Thursday, July 09, 2015

The Immigration Secessionists

Politico (Op-Ed)
By Rich Lowry
July 8, 2015

It turns out that everything we’ve heard about the evils of states and localities defying federal law is wrong.

So long as a jurisdiction is sticking its thumb in the eye of the federal government on behalf of illegal immigrants who have been arrested and jailed, defiance of federal authority is progressive and commendable.

Over the years, the left has created dozens upon dozens of so-called sanctuary cities devoted to frustrating federal immigration enforcement and doing all they can to make a mockery of our laws. On immigration, they are in effect little islands of secession. Somewhere John C. Calhoun must be smiling — although slightly puzzled — over the renewed prestige of a version of his old, discredited idea of nullification.

Sanctuary cities have gotten renewed attention in the wake of a horrific murder in San Francisco, a case amplified by the bullhorn of Donald Trump. Kathryn Steinle, 32, was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who had a long rap sheet and had been deported five times. The murder was easily avoidable. A few months prior, the city had arrested Lopez-Sanchez on drug charges, but it simply released him when the charges were dropped, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement wanted to take custody of him for deportation.

This wasn’t an isolated misjudgment. San Francisco has long been a sanctuary city that doesn’t honor so-called federal detainers (i.e., notices that Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to take custody of an illegal immigrant upon release from jail). It is a policy of calculated irresponsibility meant to create a zone of lawlessness. In this instance, the human cost was heartbreakingly high.

The immigration debate is famously fraught. Maybe we can’t agree on building a fence. Maybe we can’t agree on a pathway to citizenship. But surely we can agree that illegal aliens who have landed in jail should be deported?

Apparently not. We have a “broken system,” as the supporters of amnesty always like to say, in part because they took a sledgehammer to said system. When an illegal alien is arrested and put in jail, he is officially out of the shadows. Yet it is the policy of sanctuary cities to send him right back into the shadows, come what may.

According to Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies (a group that favors restricted immigration), of some 8,100 deportable aliens released after their arrest by sanctuary jurisdictions from January to August 2014, about 1,900 were arrested again, on 7,500 charges.

Some of these crimes are worthy of the most lurid Trump rhetoric. Vaughan relates a case, based on an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement report, of an alien arrested for sexual abuse of a child in Los Angeles. The local agency ignored a detainer and the alien was arrested again on charges of sexually assaulting a child.

The number of sanctuary cities has been increasing during the Obama years, and the administration doesn’t care. It has thrown the book at states that have dared to aid in the enforcement of federal immigration law but hasn’t moved against jurisdictions acting at cross purposes to the law. Indeed, it has eased the way for them.

It reinterpreted, with no legal justification, a federal regulation in order to make detainers voluntary. It kneecapped the successful Secure Communities program that shared the fingerprints of local arrestees with the feds, replacing it with a significantly watered-down program.

Consider what happened to poor Sarah Saldaña. New on the job as head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, she evidently hadn’t gotten the memo that she shouldn’t take the name of her agency too seriously. In congressional testimony earlier this year, she inveighed against local communities that obstruct immigration enforcement.

She noted an increasing lack of cooperation and said, rather self-evidently, that it “may increase the risk that dangerous criminals are returned to the streets, putting the public and our officers at greater risk.”

Asked the natural question whether it would help if Congress passed legislation cracking down on sanctuary cities, she gave the response you might expect of someone whose job it is to enforce immigration laws: “Thank you, Amen.”

Wrong answer. Saldaña must have left Capitol Hill to go directly to a woodshed. She immediately backtracked, saying the same proposed measure that she had greeted with relief and gratitude about 24 hours earlier would be “highly counterproductive.”

The myth is that President Barack Obama is the “deporter in chief.” In reality, his alleged spike in deportations is the artifact of an accounting gimmick (counting the arrest and removal of border-crossers as deportations). Obama has gutted interior enforcement, as his acts of “prosecutorial discretion” have covered ever-more illegal immigrants. The former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said recently, “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.”

The focus is supposed to be on enforcement against serious criminals, but so lax is the administration’s approach that even criminals benefit from its broad nonenforcement. In 2013, 36,000 criminal aliens were released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and in 2014 30,000 more.

What to do about sanctuary cities? It is already against federal law for jurisdictions to forbid their officials from sharing immigration information with the federal government. Congress should tighten up the law by making it clear again that detainers are mandatory and withholding certain federal funds from jurisdictions that still won’t comply.


Of course, it would take a different president to sign such a bill, one who cares about the laws he is pledged to enforce and who doesn’t seek a sanctuary nation.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com

No comments: