In a resounding victory for the State of Texas, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has thrown out almost all of a preliminary injunction issued by a lower court that was preventing the Lone Star State from enforcing a state law going after sanctuary cities such as Austin, the state’s capital.
This is the right result, both legally and morally. Not only does the state law not violate the Constitution, as was erroneously claimed, but it’s intended to prevent the state from becoming a sanctuary – a safe haven – for criminal aliens who endanger the public.
Texas certainly has a right to be concerned about aliens who commit crimes in the state. The Texas Department of Public Safety recently released a report on the 245,000 criminal aliens who had been booked into local Texas jails from 2011 through the end of February of this year. Those criminal aliens, 66 percent of whom were in the country illegally, were charged with more than 650,000 criminal offenses. They have been convicted of almost 600 murders; 30,000 assaults; 3,300 sexual assaults; 9,000 burglaries; 20,000 thefts; 38,000 drug crimes; and 274 kidnappings.
As U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a recent speech, the policies of sanctuary cities and states make no sense. The fact that these aliens were arrested for committing local crimes shows that these jurisdictions found these aliens “dangerous enough to detain them in the first place, but then insist on releasing them back into the community instead of allowing federal officers to remove them,” as Sessions noted. That is reckless behavior by public officials.
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