RUTHFULLY YOURS

That is the suggestion of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who followed the righteous indignation of those condemning Trump for suggesting Muslim immigration be curtailed until we get our terrorist act together, a suggestion not unlike President Jimmy Carter’s halt to Iranian immigration during the hostage crisis. Jindal made the case on Monday on Boston Herald Radio:

“Absolutely, I would hold them as an accomplice. Make them criminally culpable,” the Republican presidential candidate said when asked if he’d arrest mayors of sanctuary cities. “I’d also make them civilly liable so that families, victim’s families could sue. Especially if the prosecutor isn’t taking action or the mayor’s not changing their ways, I’d allow the families to go to court as well to recover damages.”

While mayors that say Trump’s proposal is illegal and immoral are free to criticize the GOP frontrunner, they are not free to break federal immigration law and refuse to cooperate with federal authorities regarding the detention and deportation of illegal aliens. It’s not a small point, but one that is lost on a bunch of mayors led by Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who has declared Trump persona non grata in the City of Brotherly Love. Nutter is joined in shunning Trump by Rick Kiseman, mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida, and a handful of others.

Nutter signed an executive order proclaiming Philadelphia a sanctuary city in 2014, barring city police and prison officials from cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. It was just such a policy that condemned American citizen Kate Steinle to death at the hands of an illegal alien criminal, Juan Francisco Lopez, who had been deported five times and had seven felony convictions. That policy also led to the death of Jamiel Shaw Jr. in Los Angeles. Being a sanctuary city is illegal. State and local authorities cannot refuse to enforce federal law. Of course, who is going to call sanctuary cities to account when the President of the United States refuses to enforce our immigration laws. As Investor’s Business Daily noted in February, President Obama ordered those in charge of border security to obey his executive orders on amnesty and not our immigration laws:

If President Obama, who has warned ICE agents of consequences if they do their job, had a son, he might look like Jamiel Shaw Jr., a young African-American killed by an illegal alien who shouldn’t have been here.

Shaw was a Los Angeles high school star dreaming of a good life ahead when he was gunned down on March 2, 2008, while walking home. He was picked at random, police said, possibly as part of a gang loyalty test for the illegal alien who shot him.

The sanctuary policies that led to the murder of Shaw are now full-blown federal policies under Obama. “We’re not in the business of deporting millions of people or of breaking up families,” he says. We’re also not in the business of deporting criminal illegal aliens….

…President Obama was telling employees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they had better enforce his executive amnesty orders or else.

Speaking at a Miami town hall meeting sponsored by MSNBC and Telemundo, Obama said “there may be (an) ICE official or Border Patrol agent not paying attention to our new directives. If somebody’s working for ICE . . . and they don’t follow the policy, there’s going to be consequences to it.”

Well, there are consequences to following it, crimes up to and including the murder of American citizens. In his Sunday address in which he, like his Attorney General Loretta Lynch, worried more about a backlash against Muslims than about defeating the Islamic State in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre, did not list ending sanctuary cities as a way of protecting the American people from both terror and crime.

Why aren’t liberals and sanctuary city mayors outraged at protecting criminal aliens? It is not Donald Trump, whose mouth that roars is not being defended here, who is releasing dangerous criminals en masse to the streets of American cities. As Judicial Watch reports:

As the U.S. Senate considers a bill to slash funding for local governments that protect violent illegal immigrants, a new study reveals that hundreds of sanctuary cities nationwide released thousands of criminal aliens from jail rather than turn them over to federal authorities for deportation….

… in less than a year 340 sanctuary cities, counties and states around the U.S. released 9,295 alien offenders that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was seeking to deport. More than half had significant prior criminal histories and 600 were released at least twice by jurisdictions that protect criminal aliens from deportation by refusing to comply with ICE detainers. The figures were made public recently by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a nonprofit dedicated to researching the consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States….

Of those still at large, 1,377 (20%) had another criminal arrest following the one that resulted in the original ICE detainer. This is why a violent criminal, Francisco Javier Chavez, is on the loose. In August 2015 he was arrested for beating his girlfriend’s 2-year-old daughter and, despite an extensive criminal record that includes felony drug and drunk-driving convictions, a California sheriff’s department ignored an ICE detainer and released him.

So the sanctuary city mayors who are condemning Donald Trump are releasing rapists, murders, and assorted predators to harm Americans. Where is the outrage about that? And why shouldn’t Attorney General Lynch show up at City Halll with an arrest warrant?

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.