While the amnesty chorus scrambles to whip up bogus “studies” that claim illegal aliens aren’t prone to committing crimes (other than the plethora of offenses required to be an illegal alien, of course) and “sanctuary cities” aren’t really a thing, hard data on the alien crime wave keeps pouring in.
The latest comes from the Center for Immigration Studies, which obtained data from the government with a Freedom of Information Act request that showed some 8,000 aliens with criminal records were released by 276 “sanctuary” jurisdictions over the past eight months.
That’s a staggering degree of lawlessness perpetrated against the American people by our elected officials. People should be going to jail over this, not just sweating through press conferences while Democrats and their business allies frantically try to change the subject.
Contrary to the little soft-shoe dance currently performed by amnesty shills about how the sanctuary city problem has been overstated, there are far more sanctuary jurisdictions than most of us previously suspected. In fact, CIS data shows there are sanctuary policies in 43 states, plus the District of Columbia, which is already grappling with a decades-long crime wave perpetrated by people who got there by winning elections.
“Sixty-three percent of the individuals freed by local authorities had prior criminal histories or were labeled a public safety concern at the time of their release,” writes CIS, demonstrating that these weren’t just a few paperwork snafus or innocent mistakes by bumbling bureaucrats.
And yes, these people were dangerous: “Nearly 1,900 of the released offenders subsequently were arrested for another crime within that eight-month period. ICE arrested approximately 750 of the recidivists, but just over 1,000 (60 percent) remained at large.”
Worse yet, many of those individuals have been arrested more than once since their release – those 1,900 freed alien criminals are responsible for 4,300 subsequent arrests between them. “They accumulated 7,491 new charges in total, after their release,” the CIS report states. “Ten percent of the new charges involved dangerous drugs and seven percent were for driving under the influence of alcohol (DUI).”
Fully one-quarter of the offenders released by sanctuary cities were charged or convicted of felony offenses, while “1,909 had a prior misdemeanor conviction or charge related to violence, assault, sexual abuse, DUI, weapons, or drug distribution or trafficking.” At least 239 of them had three or more misdemeanor convictions.
The report spotlights “six instances of very serious crimes committed by criminal alien felons who were sought by ICE with a detainer, but nevertheless released by a local law enforcement agency with sanctuary policies.” One of them was an individual with nine prior convictions, seven of them felonies, who was busted for a first-degree burglary and slapped with an additional felony charge of “resisting an officer causing death of significant bodily injury.” He was released anyway, and subsequently re-arrested for a “controlled substance crime.”
Two other aliens highlighted in the report were arrested for the sexual abuse of children, released by sanctuary cities, and then charged with additional acts of child sexual abuse. In both cases, the aliens preyed on victims under 10 years of age.
Another alien who had already been deported twice was arrested on robbery and drug charges, released, and subsequently re-arrested for rape, false imprisonment, and witness intimidation. Several of the cases mentioned in the CIS report involved sanctuary cities releasing aliens who had not only been arrested and charged with serious crimes, but actually deported in the past, sometimes more than once… just like Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who was bounced out of the United States five times, and was on his sixth tour as an “American-in-waiting” when he allegedly murdered Kate Steinle in San Francisco.
One of the strangest features of our Mad Hatter’s Tea Party debate over illegal immigration is that amnesty shills routinely assure us they’ll take steps to keep alien criminals off the streets.
They’ll make sure only nice, hard-working “dreamers” who violate our borders in an “act of love” (Jeb Bush’s phrase) to provide for their families will stay in America. It’s absolutely insane to let them get away with such claims, because it’s obviously not true. It’s not happening now, in part because the amnesty chorus is so clearly willing to lie, break promises, and openly defy the law to get what it wants. There is no reason to trust any assurances they give about what they’ll do in the future, because they’ve spent the past few decades proving they cannot be trusted, not even with their sworn legal duties.
The only way to hold alien drunk drivers, criminals, gangsters, and terrorists at bay is to have proper border security and a functioning immigration system, at which point the actual citizens of the United States – native-born and legally immigrated – can have a rational discussion about how many immigrants they want to accept. That number might be very high, or it could be lowered to give current immigrants more time to assimilate, and the U.S. workforce a chance to recover from job-killing economic policies.
But the key is to have a functional system which combines border security and internal enforcement, not an anything-goes game in which the authorities have no idea who is coming across the border… and, contrary to the copious promises of the amnesty lobby, cannot manage to evict even repeated criminal offenders, on the rare occasions when it has them in custody.
There is no national security without border security. No matter what the statistical crime rate of the illegal alien community is – how can anyone claim to accurately measure than, when they also say they can’t keep tabs on all those people “living in the shadows?” – every crime committed by an illegal is a crime that shouldn’t have happened, especially when the perpetrator has already been taken into custody by U.S. law enforcement, only to be released by dangerous scofflaw traitors who think their personal belief in open borders and imported liberal voting blocs transcends both public safety and the rule of law.