Good News! ICE Releases Weekly Report of Noncompliant Sanctuary Cities

By Joe Guzzardi
March 27, 2017

Here’s an assortment of police blotter entries local law enforcement officers made during recent weeks.
 
In Montgomery Country, Md., illegal aliens Henry Sanchez-Milian, 18, and Jose Montano, 17, raped their 14-year-old high school classmate in a campus bathroom. In Hempstead, N.Y., a four-time deported Salvadoran MS-13 gang member, Tommy Vladim Alvarado-Ventura, stabbed two women and sexually assaulted a two-year-old. Alvarado-Ventura’s rap sheet includes priors for drunken driving, assault, contempt of court and other charges. In Franklin County, N.C., Oliver Mauricio Funes-Machada, 18, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, decapitated his mother with a butcher knife. In Dallas, previously deported Dionicio Polanco Lopez shot and killed a Hispanic man.
 
These crimes and hundreds like them are carried out every year. But immigration advocates refuse to budge in their insistence that an illegal alien’s presence in the community is a positive. Their tortured logic is contrived, but follows the blueprint House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi continuously advances.
 
In a town hall meeting last month, Laura Wilkerson, a mother whose teenage son was beaten, tied, killed and then set on fire by an illegal alien, confronted Pelosi whose district includes sanctuary San Francisco. Incredulously, Pelosi told Wilkerson that “our people are not disobeying the law,” but are instead “law-abiding citizens” ready to report crimes “that they might bear witness to.”
 
Like Pelosi, advocates who defend the indefensible insist that removing illegal immigrants would endanger local neighborhoods. In their wishful thinking fantasy, illegal immigrants wouldn’t cooperate with local police if they feared that those same police would turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for removal. Ergo, the argument goes, sanctuaries protect innocent citizens and should be encouraged. Montgomery and Franklin counties, Hempstead, Houston and Dallas, noted above, are sanctuaries. Maryland and Pelosi’s California have legislation pending that would grant illegal aliens statewide sanctuary protection.
 
After New Orleans police were forbidden from asking suspects about their immigration status, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. Landry, a former U.S. representative, said that crime in sanctuary cities has risen across the nation because it allows convicted criminals to roam free among an unsuspecting public. Landry pointed to Los Angeles as his prime example of a sanctuary’s consequences: in 2015, all crime rose, with violent crime up 19.9 percent, homicides up 10.2 percent, shooting victims up 12.6 percent, rapes up 8.6 percent, robberies up 12.3 percent, and aggravated assault up 27.5 percent. Moreover, Landry noted sanctuaries encourage more illegal immigration which in turn creates an underground economy that reduces state tax revenues.
 
America is angry at the blatant disregard for public safety in sanctuary cities. The defiant leaders in these cities and counties will soon be under intensified heat from their residents. Pursuant to his January Executive Order, President Donald Trump authorized ICE to issue a weekly “Declined Detainer Outcome Report” which will expose the jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with immigration officials. Last week, ICE released its first report. Before Trump’s EO, jurisdictions kept their noncompliance on the hush-hush.
 
But now, with the ICE weekly update and the Trump administration’s threat to defund sanctuaries, recalcitrant legislators might, to the benefit of all except illegal immigrant lawbreakers, reconsider their too often deadly policies.
 

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Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow. Contact him at [email protected] and on Twitter @joeguzzardi19.