Gimme Shelter
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 4/24/2007

Immigration: San Francisco's mayor makes common cause with cities that provide sanctuary to illegal aliens in violation of federal immigration laws. He may be violating federal law himself.

We're all for efforts to protect our borders with more technology, money and manpower. We're also for the enforcement of existing immigration statutes, such as employer-sanction laws dealing with businesses employing illegal aliens.

So we've been pleased to see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stepping up such efforts. An example was last Friday's arrest of 13 foreign nationals working illegally at Oakland, Calif.-based Eagle Bag Corp., a packaging manufacturer with clients including the U.S. military.

Since May 2006, ICE has conducted nationwide raids, including arrests in San Rafael, Richmond, San Pablo and other Bay Area cities.

The response by Mayor Gavin Newsom, however, has been to reassert San Francisco's status as a "sanctuary city," so proclaimed by its board of supervisors in 1989. On Sunday, Newsom declared that no San Francisco employee will cooperate with immigration enforcement efforts.

Newsom and others may be in violation of two obscure federal laws passed in 1996 — laws that are being broken by a growing number of cities and, yes, entire states.

They are preventing beat officers and other local officials from inquiring about someone's immigration status or from notifying federal authorities, even if they're deported aliens who have returned illegally.

In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Under both statutes, state and local governments could no longer bar employees from inquiring about immigration status or tipping off immigration authorities. An appeals court upheld both laws in 1999.

Los Angeles also has a sanctuary policy, enshrined in "Special Order 40," that bars police from arresting anyone based solely on their immigration status, or from notifying immigration officials about an illegal immigrant. It's being challenged in the courts.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, the court challenge cites a 2005 Government Accounting Office study involving 55,322 illegal immigrants incarcerated in federal, state and local facilities in 2003. The study found they'd been arrested an average of eight times each, with 49% previously being convicted of a felony.

Having local gendarmes not cooperate with the feds puts us all at risk, and no place is that more evident than on our roads. Earlier this month, Bob Clark, director of the classic film "A Christmas Story," was killed along with his 22-year-old son in a head-on collision with a vehicle driven by Hector Velazquez-Nava, a Mexican national who was living in Los Angeles illegally.

Velazquez-Neva was driving without a license and was found to have a blood-alcohol level of 0.24, three times the legal limit. He'd been convicted in 2004 of soliciting a prostitute and was given 24 months' probation. He was not deported or incarcerated.

Kent Boone, a 33-year-old pipe fitter and father of five was killed on March 31 as he drove to work when Isidro Pena Soto, also driving without a license and under the influence, slammed his SUV into Boone's vehicle on a Northern California highway.

As reported by World Net Daily, Pena — an illegal immigrant who'd been convicted six times previously of driving without a license — was found with two pounds of methamphetamines in his vehicle and more at home.

He was convicted of DUI in Contra Costa County in 2003 and 2005 and for a felony narcotics charge in the same county in 2005. Also in 2005, he was convicted of DUI in Solano County, where he would kill Kent Boone two years later.

"Cases like this certainly underscore why we want to encourage local law enforcement authorities to tell us when they encounter foreign nationals with multiple prior convictions for crimes that certainly present a potential threat to public safety," says ICE spokesman Virginia Kice.

Gavin Newsom thinks otherwise.

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