DAN STEIN: 'Sancutary' policies are lethal

By Dan Stein
On a warm August 2007 evening, three college students, Terrance Ariel, Dashon Harvey and Iofeme Hightower, were gunned down on the streets of Newark, N.J. Charged with the killings was Jose Carranza, an illegal immigrant with known gang affiliations who had been in police custody, charged with a violent offense. Newark maintained policies that prohibited law enforcement from inquiring about immigration status and so, rather than being remanded to federal authorities, Carranza had been released on bond.

Across the country in Los Angeles, Jamiel Shaw Jr., a high-school football star, was walking near his home last March when he was shot and killed. His mother, Army Sgt. Anita Shaw, was serving in Iraq at the time. Police arrested Pedro Espinosa, also a known gang member, in the shooting. He was walking the streets of Los Angeles because, a day earlier, he had been released from police custody. Los Angeles and many surrounding communities have long-standing policies that prevented police from ascertaining Espinosa was an illegal immigrant.

In June, Edwin Ramos, an illegal immigrant with gang ties and a case of extreme road rage, allegedly sprayed bullets into a car driven by Anthony Bologna in San Francisco, killing him and his two sons, Michael and Matthew. Like Carranza and Espinosa, Ramos had many brushes with the law but found himself back in the community because San Francisco's sanctuary-city policies did not allow police to determine he was an illegal immigrant.

In none of these cases did the politicians who instituted or maintained the sanctuary policies that put deportable criminals back onto the streets have the moral fortitude to look the families of the victims in the eye and explain to them why making people who violate U.S. immigration laws feel welcome and comfortable was more important than protecting the lives of their loved ones.

If and when a similar avoidable tragedy occurs in Hartford, Mayor Eddie Perez and city council who this month declared Hartford a sanctuary city similarly will be absent.

Sanctuary policies are purely political acts by local governments. They are a way for politicians to express their personal opposition to federal immigration policies. Such policies have nothing to do with community safety or the expenditure of local law-enforcement resources, the pretenses used to justify these acts.

No one has ever asked or expected Hartford police, or any other local police department, to enforce immigration laws.

Even cities and states that cooperate with federal immigration authorities do not have local police looking for illegal aliens. However, when Hartford police, in the course of their normal duties, come across an individual who they reasonably suspect is in the country illegally, they have a moral and ethical responsibility to remand that person to federal authorities.

Hartford police routinely cooperate in such a manner with other law-enforcement agencies. When, for example, a Hartford police officer stops someone for a traffic offense and, in the course of checking the driver's license, discovers there is a warrant for that person in another state, the officer will hold that person on behalf of that other jurisdiction. There is no reason other than politics for the city to make violators of immigration laws the lone exception to that policy.

Nor are open-ended sanctuary policies necessary to gain the cooperation of illegal residents. Hartford officials could just as easily have written an ordinance assuring people no inquiries would be made about immigration status when an individual is the victim of or witness to a crime. That the ordinance went way beyond what is necessary indicates the council's motivation was politics, not concern for public safety.

Political gestures come with consequences. All across the country, innocent people have paid for politically driven sanctuary policies with their lives. When that day comes, the politicians who made Hartford a sanctuary city must be accountable to their victims.

Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.
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