Right after the 9th Circuit Court
ruled against President Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugees,
Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said, “We are a nation of laws,
and as we have said those laws apply to everybody in our country.” When he was uttering these words, he seemed
to ignore the fact that right in his home state, its largest city, Seattle, is
one of those “ ‘sanctuary cities’ which refuses to
enforce federal immigration laws. The
mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, is one of the staunchest defenders of Seattle's ‘sanctuary
city’ policy, even after police charged five illegal immigrants who shot and
killed Jill Marie Sundberg at a location about 150-miles east of Seattle in December
2016. It seems the Left only chooses to embrace
the ‘rule of law’ if the result is in their favor.
How did the United States end up with
so many ‘sanctuary cities?’ The
sanctuary movement started in the 1980s when about a million Central Americans
(mainly from El Salvador and Guatemala) crossed the U.S. border seeking asylum
from their repressive governments and seemingly never-ending civil wars. But the Reagan Administration was supporting
these governments’ (especially the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala)
attempts to fight communist rebels. Therefore,
the administration would only characterize Salvadorans and Guatemalans as
“economic migrants, not eligible for policy asylum.”
Hundreds of churches in the U.S.
openly defied the U.S. government and its immigration policy by providing safe
havens for Central Americans. The
movement later was turned into an indictment of the Reagan Administration’s
Central America policy.
Eventually, in 1990, Congress passed
legislation allowing the president to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to
certain groups in need of a temporary safe haven, including explicitly
designating Salvadorans for TPS.
Influenced by the sanctuary movement,
San Francisco passed the ‘City and County of Refuge’ Ordinance in 1989, which
barred city money from being used to enforce immigration law. Hundreds of U.S. cities and counties have
followed suit and adopted similar ‘sanctuary’ laws or policies. While San Francisco barred city money from
being used to enforce immigration law, it didn’t hesitate to use city money
(really, taxpayers’ money) to shield “convicted juvenile offenders who were in
the country illegally from federal authorities, either escorting them to their
home countries at city expense or transporting them to group homes, often
outside the city.” [It’s worth pointing
out that San Francisco receives over $1 billion dollars from the federal
government on an annual basis.]
Supporters of ‘sanctuary cities’
believe they are being compassionate toward immigrants. But what these supporters are doing is to cater
to a small segment of the immigrant population at the expense of most
law-abiding legal immigrants. We as a
nation have three times more legal immigrants than illegal immigrants. Many legal immigrants, followed the law,
endured long waits and long separation from our families and made many other
sacrifices to become an American. Many
legal immigrants came to the U.S. because they were tired of chaos and
lawlessness in their homelands. They want
to live and raise their families in a place where law and order prevail. They chose to leave everything and everyone
they were familiar with to come to America.
Yes, our immigration law is broken. A real relief for all immigrants would be a
common sense based immigration reform.
Yet, ‘sanctuary cities’ are taking resources and people’s attention away
from focusing on sensible immigration reform.
The idea of ‘sanctuary cities’ sends
the wrong message. When lawless behavior
goes unpunished, it only encourages more lawlessness.
On May 12, 2014, 32-year-old Mesa
police officer Brandon Mendoza was killed in a head-on collision with a
wrong-way driver. The driver was Raul
Silva Corona, an illegal alien from Chihuahua, Mexico, who in 1994 pleaded
guilty to criminal conspiracy in Adams County Colorado, but was not deported. Colorado is one of the handful sanctuary
states and in 2013; Colorado passed a bill to allow illegal immigrants living
in Colorado to get driver’s licenses. Sgt.
Mendoza’s mom wrote a passionate letter to President Obama. She stated, “My son, Brandon Mendoza, was half
Hispanic. It’s not the color of skin
that my son or I see, it’s the person and how they conduct their lives.”
On July 1, 2015, Francisco Sanchez, a
45-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, shot Kate Steinle as she walked on
San Francisco’s Pier 14 with her father and a friend. Sanchez claimed the shooting was an accident. Whether the shooting was an accident or not,
this tragedy could have been prevented had the San Francisco Sherriff’s
Department not released Sanchez from their custody a few months before. The Sherriff's department claimed that they
merely followed San Francisco’s ‘sanctuary city’ guideline, even though they
were fully aware that Sanchez not only broke immigration law multiple times (he
illegally crossed the border five times), he was also on probation in Texas at
the time of shooting.
While it’s important to remember that
neither Corona nor Sanchez represent all 40-million immigrants and a few
anecdotes don’t epitomize a trend or evidence, more and more people feel that sanctuary
cities or communities do not promote freedom and compassion; they promote
chaos. Furthermore, they help fuel
distrust and resentment between immigrants and native-born Americans. ‘Sanctuary cities’ have done a disservice to
all American people, and governments at both local and federal levels are
losing credibility in their ability to protect lawful residents.
Let’s not forget that the entire U.S.
is a sanctuary for people who seek a better life by working hard and abiding by
the law of the land. We as a nation can
only continue to play the role of a sanctuary for all who seek freedom and
escape from oppression … if we continue to uphold the rule of law. The left needs to stop its hypocrisy of
proclaiming, “we are a nation of laws” on the one hand and choosing to follow
laws selectively on the other hand. If you’re
truly compassionate toward immigrants’ well-being, stop supporting ‘sanctuary
cities.’ Instead, advocate for a
common-sense immigration reform.
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor,
Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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