I and many of my colleagues have, collectively, spoken many times about sanctuary jurisdictions, and the harm that they do to their own communities.
When state and local governments enact laws or policies that shelter illegal aliens — most specifically including alien criminals — it makes the public less safe by releasing alien criminals back to the street, where they may reoffend, creating new victims along the way. What's more, when immigration agents must engage in after-the-fact investigations to find and arrest an alien off the street, instead of in the secure confines of a city or county jail, it raises officer safety issues and subjects bystanders to a level of risk that could have been avoided.
Less spoken of, though, is the harm that sanctuary jurisdictions cause elsewhere, to other communities as well, because once released by authorities instead of being turned over to federal agents, nothing stops the alien from leaving the sanctuary jurisdiction and moving on to another community that had no say-so about his release.
A tragic confluence of the two — release by one sanctuary jurisdiction and loosey-goosey policies of cooperation with immigration authorities in the "receiving" jurisdiction — seems to be what led to the recent, unnecessary deaths of Indianapolis Colts player Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver, Jeffrey Monroe.
Examining media accounts (e.g., here and here), one finds that Jackson and Monroe were standing on the emergency shoulder of the road after Jackson became ill, when both were struck by a drunk driver who had no license, but was nonetheless behind the wheel of a large pickup truck.
The drunk driver was Guatemalan alien Alex Cabrera Gonsales, who was caught by police attempting to flee the scene despite the fatalities. News reports tell us that Cabrera Gonsales illegally returned to the United States despite having been deported twice previously. They also tell us that he had a string of misdemeanor convictions, and at least two prior driving under the influence convictions in San Mateo, Calif., (where both the county and the state are sanctuary jurisdictions).
It's worth noting that Indiana is unambiguously not a sanctuary state and, unlike California and some other states, also refuses to grant driver's licenses to illegal aliens.
More troubling, though, is that the city of Indianapolis, although not a declared sanctuary, flirts around the edges of such a designation. Apparently at least some of the "string of misdemeanors" I mentioned earlier took place there, notwithstanding which Cabrera Gonsales was footloose, drunk, and fancy-free, climbing behind the wheel of his Ford F-150 because he wasn't turned over to immigration agents for federal prosecution as a felonious reentrant after deportation, and then deported a third time — hopefully for good, once he had actually spent some quality time in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Needless to say, President Trump once again renewed his call for cities, counties, and states to do the right thing and cooperate with federal authorities in enforcing the immigration laws of the United States. Also needless to say, this call will be blithely ignored by those wrong-headed politicians who value virtue signaling over public safety.
In an ironic footnote, in both the last and the present sessions of Congress, Rep. Todd Rokita of Indiana filed an identical bill, currently labeled as HR 4915, the "Stopping Lawless Actions of Politicians Act of 2018", which would punish politicians who enact sanctuary laws or policies, and provide police and sheriff's departments clear statutory authority to honor immigration detainers. Sadly, despite a Republican majority in both chambers of Congress, chances are high that it will likely go as far as it did last time it was introduced: Nowhere.
Meantime, alien criminals like Cabrera Gonsales will be left free to wander the nation's highways wreaking death and mayhem wherever they go.