The Latest Casualty In America's Immigration War
If San Francisco had been more cooperative with federal authorities, Kate Steinle might still be alive.
To the delight of Democrats and the talk-radio right, Donald Trump moved to the front of the GOP pack by gratuitously insulting Mexico, the ancestral home of 28% of America's foreign-born population. But Mr. Trump's antics aren't the only reason that illegal immigration is grabbing headlines.
Earlier this month, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant with seven previous criminal convictions, was arrested in the San Francisco shooting death of 32-year-old Kate Steinle. The murder has prompted an overdue discussion of sanctuary policies, even if the debate so far has been more emotional than constructive.
Excluding border-patrol personnel, the Department of Homeland Security employs around 5,000 people responsible for removing illegal aliens from the country's interior. Those DHS officials rely on the nation's 750,000 police officers to lend them a hand. The problem is that local authorities increasingly are reluctant to cooperate with the DHS. In some jurisdictions the two sides essentially are at war, and Kate Steinle was a casualty.
“Sanctuary policies vary, they range,” Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute told me in an interview. “Places like San Francisco and Cook County, Ill., are at the least-cooperative end of the spectrum.” In most cities, the policy is to honor DHS requests—known as detainers—that the police or sheriff's department hold someone for an additional period so it can be determined whether the person should be deported.
But in places like San Francisco and Cook County, which includes Chicago, “they put very high hurdles to conditions under which they will honor a detainer,” said Mr. Rosenblum. “They basically say, we won't honor any detainers, period. They are uniformly noncompliant.” Ms. Steinle's alleged killer didn't fall through the cracks. San Francisco ignored the DHS request to hold him because that is their policy.
How did we get here?
Like employers, local police departments have long resisted efforts to have them double as immigration agents, and it's not because police precincts are populated with left-wing immigration advocates. Rather, they've argued that immigration is a federal responsibility. The job of police officers is to maintain order and keep residents safe, not determine who should be a resident. In addition, good policing is based on trust, and immigrant communities which fear that cops are looking to nab an undocumented father or daughter or cousin may be less likely to report crimes or assist investigations, which could make a city less safe.
The federal government had the authority to force the issue but generally declined to do so until 2006, when the Bush administration made a concerted effort to dial up immigration security and, it hoped, get some buy-in from restrictionist conservatives on comprehensive immigration reform. To that end, an existing program for extending immigration enforcement powers to local police officers was expanded, and in 2008 the DHS launched its Secure Communities initiative, which involved asking local police departments to send fingerprint data from everyone arrested to the FBI for a criminal-background check.
Under the Obama administration, the Secure Communities program was ramped up even further. In 2011, 188,000 illegal aliens were removed from the U.S. interior, up from 75,000 in 2006. Liberals began referring to President Obama as the “deporter in chief,” and law-enforcement agencies complained that the new policies were harming relations between police and immigrant communities.
In addition, states and localities began dropping out of Secure Communities. According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, more than 360 jurisdictions—including 326 counties, 32 cities and four entire states—now limit or bar transferring arrestees to the DHS. Sanctuary cities are now believed to house more than half of the country's illegal population.
This month the administration watered down Secure Communities, renamed it the Priority Enforcement Program, and promised local jurisdictions that the DHS would only issue detainers for felons or other perceived threats to public safety. This may help stem the growth of sanctuary cities and improve federal-local cooperation, but it's no guarantee. Cities are also under pressure from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union which maintain that cooperating with the federal government on immigration enforcement is illegal.
Court rulings in Oregon and Pennsylvania last year went against local authorities who had detained arrestees for an additional period at the request of the DHS. In Oregon, a federal judge ruled that Clackamas County officials violated the rights of a woman arrested for ignoring a restraining order when they turned her over to DHS officials. The county settled the case by paying the woman $30,000 and picking up her court costs. In a Pennsylvania case involving a man arrested on drug charges, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that local authorities are not required to honor federal detainers. The man sued and was awarded $145,000 in damages and legal fees.
Other cities are taking note, said Mr. Rosenblum. “This local jurisdiction fear of lawsuits, there's something to that. It's a big issue, especially in the Ninth Circuit, where the Oregon case was. After that, you saw a big wave of California, Oregon and Washington state counties opting out.”
Increasingly, sanctuary city policies are less about bleeding hearts and more about bottom lines. And so long as Congress continues to duck comprehensive immigration reforms that weigh security, economic and humanitarian interests, don't expect much improvement to the status quo.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal