San Francisco and other cities across the United States have created so-called "sanctuaries" for illegal aliens. These municipalities are defying federal immigration law, just like some Southern jurisdictions that defied federal civil rights laws in the 1960s.
But unlike that earlier era, today's sanctuary cities are creating safe havens for known criminals. Their policies have victimized innocent Americans, enabling illegal aliens to commit thousands of crimes that would not otherwise have occurred.
There is no question that sanctuary policies violate federal immigration law. One provision of the law (8 U.S.C. 1373) bans local governments from preventing law enforcement or other government officials from sharing information with the federal government on the "citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual."
So sanctuary policies such as those in San Francisco that ban local police officers from notifying the Department of Homeland Security when they arrest a criminal alien -- or release him after he has served his sentence -- are plainly illegal. Unfortunately, in keeping with its general non-enforcement policy regarding immigration law, the Obama administration announced in 2010 that it would not sue sanctuary cities for flouting the law.
We know these criminal aliens are victimizing Americans. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office released a study on approximately 250,000 illegal aliens locked up in our federal, state and local prisons. Those prisoners had been arrested nearly 1.7 million times and committed 3 million offenses, averaging about seven arrests and 12 offenses each. Their convictions ran the gamut from drug-dealing and sex crimes to kidnapping and murder.
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