Last summer, Kate Steinle’s name suddenly dominated the national news cycle. Five-time deported, seven-time convicted felon Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a Mexican national, brutally murdered Steinle in sanctuary city San Francisco. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 340 cities and counties are considered sanctuaries whose goal is to protect aliens from deportation by refusing to comply with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers.
Sanctuary cities are, according to the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, illegal. Per Section 642:
“Federal, State, or local government entity or official may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.”
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Ryan, Administration keep pouring taxpayer money into sanctuary cities; CAPS demands dangerous policy end before another life is senselessly lost. |
While Steinle’s case is the most infamous, the complete list of illegal aliens’ murder victims is tragically long, and includes perpetrators who had been previously deported and had long rap sheets with drunken driving or drug charge, as well as aliens released back into U.S. communities. Some are suspected MS-13 gang members; others worked illegally. Even though 58 percent of likely voters think that the federal government should defund sanctuary cities, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s recently passed 2,000-page, $1.1 trillion omnibus bill defiantly fully funds them.
To begin 2016, CAPS has launched a campaign here to end sanctuary cities, and to bring to more Americans’ attention the Department of Homeland Security’s indifference to the dangers this egregious policy poses.
In 2014, federal immigration officers released 30,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records that included murder and sexual assault, following the 36,000 they released in 2013. Sanctuary cities encourage more illegal immigration, bad news for public safety since aliens are three-times more likely to commit murder than American citizens.
The CAPS campaign provides an opportunity for concerned citizens to send sanctuary cities’ elected officials a blindfold which symbolizes their willful blindness to the life-threatening dangers that allowing criminal aliens to remain in the United States represents.