Op-ed: Sanctuary Is a Corrupt Bargain

By Kent Lundgren on December 2, 2024

The word “corrupt” stresses a loss of moral integrity or probity causing betrayal of principle or sworn obligations. Sanctuary for illegal immigrants, protecting them from arrest by immigration authorities, is corrupt in concept, corrupt in effect, and illegal.

Take California as a good example of a bad practice found nationwide. It is the largest and most unapologetic sanctuary state. It has laws that forbid state and local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with immigration enforcement. If the Highway Patrol stops a van full of illegal immigrants being driven to their destination in a sex trafficking scheme, they are not allowed to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

These practices hold true in many places across the nation.

Such a release is a corrupt act mandated by a corrupt law passed by a corrupt conspiracy of legislators. In the first place, every legislator, judge, and officer of the law in California swore an oath that they would protect and defend the United States and their state constitution. There is no language in the oath that allows the flouting of immigration laws because one finds them disagreeable or inconvenient. Deliberate noncooperation is a corrupt act.

Furthermore, it is a federal crime to encourage immigrants to come illegally to the U.S., to harbor or conceal them, or to conspire to do so. The entire California legislature should be arrested and held for trial. Those in authority should consider the introduction to the law and ethics of the U.S. this practice offers to immigrants. Most of them come from places where laws are often taken as suggestions, whimsically and corruptly enforced. They find the same to be demonstrably so here. We are not educating millions of new arrivals, legal or otherwise, that in the U.S., law matters. We clearly demonstrate to them it does not.

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[Read the rest at the Washington Examiner.]