Washington Examiner, 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.
Turning to the practical results of sanctuary, we see several results that diminish public safety.
Upon completion of sentences to jail and prison, immigrant criminals are released back to the street to continue their depredations, despite detainers placed by ICE. California law on the matter makes no distinction between violent and nonviolent offenders — everyone gets help evading the law. Why would any rational society do that when the criminal has shown that he has no place in a nation that claims to be a nation of laws? Unlike a criminal sentence, deportation is not punishment. It is intended to protect the U.S. from malign actors by removing them from our midst. Congress expressed that intent when it passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, and many courts have upheld that position.
Sanctuary apologists say that police and government agencies must not cooperate with ICE because it inhibits the development of trust in the police. Wrong! It develops contempt for the law, especially because so many of the beneficiaries of sanctuary come from places where such corruption is taken for granted — and such corruption is being demonstrated to them here.
Sanctuary laws and practices preclude state and local officers and prosecutors from working with ICE agents and attorneys. That prohibition renders task forces, for example, less effective than they would be if assisted by ICE officers. Immigration records provide information about immigrant criminals, and immigration officers can make arrests and then prosecute for charges not available to other agencies. Furthermore, when the threat of deportation hangs over an immigrant criminal’s head, he is often motivated to provide information in exchange for temporary permission to remain in the U.S.
There is no evidence that sanctuary develops respect for the law. To the contrary, think tank studies and law enforcement officers’ testimony before Congress tell us that it is, at best, a false narrative. In fact, immigrants reporting crime are one of the main ways ICE launches investigations against criminal immigrants. The sanctuary falsehood is repeated so often that its truth is taken for granted by many, yet a lie widely accepted remains a lie.
Immigrant criminals are a significant presence in the U.S. Society should use every tool available to bring them down — immigration law enforcement is formidable in that battle.
Corruption is antithetical to an orderly society. It eats away at the foundations of trust upon which a democratic country is built. And yet, we permit it. We encourage it. We make it sound like virtue. Alas, we pay a price when we ignore laws passed for good reasons.