Sanctuary cities do exists and there are hundreds of them, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) fired back at CNN’s Chris Cuomo Monday after the anchor took issue with the term “sanctuary cities.”
“If there are not ‘sanctuary cities’ then I suppose the multiple bills that have been introduced to cut off funding for sanctuary cities will be adopted unanimously?” Sessions spokesman Stephen Miller asked rhetorically in a statement to Breitbart News Monday.
“There are, of course, hundreds of sanctuary cities that release criminal aliens from prisons and jails without notifying the feds and who refuse – as a matter of policy – to honor ICE requests for detention. They act in open defiance of federal immigration law,” he added.
Earlier Monday Cuomo sparred with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s advisor Michael Cohen over the term “sanctuary city.”
Cuomo argued that sanctuary cities as a “misnomer,” that, “They are not safe havens.” Instead they are “cities that are in dispute with ICE about how you deal with people they are holding.”
Miller added that the sanctuary cities contribute to the problem of deportable, dangerous criminals being released back onto the streets.
“Bear in mind that Obama’s ICE already refuses to deport a great many criminal aliens, so the ICE detainers represent only a fraction of the criminal aliens eligible for deportation. Countless preventable crimes occur every single year because potentially dangerous aliens are released from prison and jail instead of being returned home.”
The issue of sanctuary cities has been front page news in recent weeks following the murder of Kathryn Steinle by a multiple-deportee, multiple-felon illegal immigrant in the sanctuary city of San Francisco.