Time to End Lawless City Policies

Would you want to live in a lawless city? Never heard of 'lawless cities'? Well, you have heard of 'sanctuary cities', the self-description of cities that have decided to forbid their police and courts from enforcing immigration law.

Here is a consequence of such policies, described here:

In December 2007, a woman was savagely raped in a Queens park by four Mexican illegals. Once arrested, they were found to have long rap sheets and a long record of missed court appearances, which made them deportable. The Times did not report their illegal status, referring to them merely as “homeless men.” Nor did it connect the dots back to New York City’s sanctuary policies, which protected three of the four from deportation for offenses such as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses.

The above stary was embedded in an article about the bias of the New York Times in its immigration reporting: Failing to tell the whole story in cases like these, and cheerleading for policies that undermine immigration law. The article notes:

Around this time, however, the Times hailed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reversal of a proposal that city workers check identities of illegals, declaring that doing so would “deny privacy rights for immigrants” and that “at the end of the day mandatory status disclosure would hurt everyone’s public safety” by “chilling illegals from coming forward to report crime and abuse.”

The very term 'sanctuary city' needs to be reconsidered. When you have deportable criminal aliens out on the streets and creating victims, as the above story shows, that's a lawless city, and a sanctuary only for lawbreakers. "Sanctuary city" policies are prescirptions for lawless cities. This issue is a top priority in the current legislative session, and hopefully we will see a bill that ends flawed policies, such as Houston's, that forbids cops from determining immigration status of arrestees.