Two influential publications in the Capital today ran stories on NumbersUSA's arguments that people serious about greatly reducing the number of Americans murdered, raped, maimed and otherwise injured by illegal aliens have to consider the role of the federal government and not just the misbehavior of "sanctuary cities."
See Politico's story on our letter to Members of Congress, and see the full text of the letter here.
In addition, The Hill ran my op-ed today at: http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/248643-sanctuary-cities-legislation-mus.... It began:
It isn't just cities that release criminal foreign citizens with felony convictions into our local communities, often with tragic results like the ones that recently have caught the public and congressional attention.
Yes, Congress must act to defund sanctuary cities until they cooperate with federal enforcement agencies. But Congress must also address the largest sanctuary jurisdiction of all: the federal government.
Federal entities release nearly four times as many criminal aliens as do cities and other local jurisdictions with sanctuary policies.
Thanks to help from my staff, the op-ed is full of citations to government data that provide the rationale for why we have been asking our activists this week to phone this:
Message to House Leadership: I urge you to end all sanctuary policies by insisting that, instead of H.R.3009, Congress pass legislation like the Gowdy bill (H.R.1148) that will end the practice of releasing convicted criminal aliens into our communities by all law enforcement agencies, including DHS.
The Hill op ed noted:
According government data released to the Center for Immigration Studies through a Freedom of Information Act request, 276 sanctuary jurisdictions nationwide refused to comply with ICE detainers and released more than 8,000 criminal-alien offenders over eight months. In less than a year's time, nearly one-out-of-every-four released criminals had been arrested for subsequent offenses.
But ICE itself released 30,000 convicted criminal aliens in 2014 (and another 36,000 in 2013), according to data obtained by the House Judiciary Committee.
The president's executive actions are part of a larger strategy to allow as many illegal aliens as possible to remain in the United States. That policy has added to the 347,000 convicted criminal aliens who are currently released into the interior, 1,400 of whom are known to have committed new crimes. Their victims are collateral damage of federal government's sanctuary policies.
(Read the full op-ed at: http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/248643-sanctuary-cities-legislation-mus....)
Some news media and politicians want to distract the public with questions about whether illegal aliens are more or less likely than Americans to commit violent crimes. (The answers are more complicated than some of the media make it seem.) But those questions are not what are at stake in this particular discussion about Sanctuary Cities and Sanctuary Federal Agencies.
What matters is that once an illegal alien has been convicted of a felony, our governments should have a pretty good idea that these are not foreign citizens who should be released into our communities. And that we ought to have border and visa operations that prevent these convicted criminals from so easily moving back into this country if they are among those who ARE deported.
Many of us in NumbersUSA sat through the emotional testimonies in the Senate today of families who have lost loved ones at the hands of criminal foreign citizens allowed by our governments to move freely in American communities. Afterwards we spent time with them near the east steps of the Capitol hearing their frustrations about politicians who say in front of cameras how sorry they are about the losses and that they will work to keep these tragedies from happening to so many other American families. Their promises don't seem very serious when congressional leaders are considering only stopping some local jurisdictions from releasing some criminal aliens into the public but allowing most of the criminal releases to continue, especially those by the federal government.
ROY BECK is Founder & President of NumbersUSA
