Sanctuary cities become staging area for crime, infect neighboring communities: Oversight report

Sanctuary cities create “staging areas” for illegal immigrant criminals and their violence spills over into neighboring jurisdictions that do try to cooperate with federal authorities, the House Oversight and Reform Committee said in a new report Thursday.

The staff report, shared first with The Washington Times, catalogued the scope of resistance and the costs borne by taxpayers for the resistors, and set the groundwork for new legislation Congress could pass.

Among the calls were for bills stripping sanctuaries of federal money and requiring proactive information-sharing with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The report also urged the Justice Department to figure out ways to charge officials in sanctuary jurisdictions with harboring illegal immigrants or obstruction of justice.

“These reckless policies are a clear and present danger to Americans across the country and turn every state into a border state,” said Rep. James Comer, Kentucky Republican and chairman of the committee. “These policies also allow illegal aliens to drain taxpayer-funded resources and encourage more illegal immigration. Congress must work alongside President Trump to protect the public from further abuses by lawless sanctuary cities and states.”

Since the start of last year, Mr. Comer has led multiple hearings with governors and mayors to explore their policies, and his staff also pored over accounts of crimes attributed to illegal immigrants in sanctuary jurisdictions. The result is the 27-page report being released Thursday.

A chief finding was that sanctuary policies serve as a home base for illegal immigrants, but the crime spills over.

“Criminal aliens use sanctuary jurisdictions as staging areas, knowing they can avoid federal detection while planning operations across state and national borders,” the study said. “Thus, sanctuary jurisdictions make all Americans less safe, even those who live in states and cities that cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.”

Investigators also said sanctuaries become “blind spots” that criminal organizations use to traffic drugs, weapons and people.

The report also argues that the Biden administration turned parts of the government into a sanctuary by limiting the Health and Human Services Department’s ability to share information with Homeland Security about adults who stepped forward to take in unaccompanied alien children, or UACs as they are known in government-speak.

Biden officials feared scaring away illegal immigrant parents and other relatives who were already in the U.S and wanted to sponsor their children.

But the result, the committee said, was that some migrant kids were placed in troubling situations. More than 31,000 were placed with sponsors who gave bogus addresses.

While there’s no strict definition of what makes a sanctuary jurisdiction, the general characteristic is a level of resistance to cooperating with the federal government on picking up illegal immigrants from their prisons and jails.

Some places will refuse to hold migrants for pickup by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but will still notify ICE before a release so officers can be on hand.

Others refuse even the notification and release deportation targets back onto the streets without ICE knowing it. And the strictest of sanctuaries attempt to block communication with ICE — a former top agency official has said they have encountered jurisdictions whose email systems refuse to accept messages from ICE.gov.

The Oversight Committee said some sanctuaries refuse to acknowledge that’s what they are.

Officials say they want to cooperate with federal authorities, but only in the criminal context. They demand a judicial criminal warrant to cooperate.

But the report said that’s a canard.

Deportation is a civil affair, not a criminal matter, and regular magistrates and trial judges have no role to play, so there is no judicial warrant available.

“This is not a mere failure by these sanctuary jurisdiction leaders to understand basic principles of the law, but a deliberate effort to intentionally mislead and confuse the public to further the goal of obstructing federal immigration law enforcement efforts,” the committee said.

The committee singled out Virginia’s Fairfax County, which has a large migrant population and where officials regularly decline to cooperate with ICE.

Recently, that’s included Marvin Morales-Ortez, an illegal immigrant whom authorities say has connections to MS-13. The county’s prosecutor dropped a case against him in December, and the county sheriff’s office then declined to honor an ICE detainer. A day later, police say, Mr. Morales-Ortez killed his roommate.

The committee, in its report, highlighted a case earlier last year where the county declined to honor a detainer on Marvin Mateo-Alberto, an illegal immigrant accused of sexual battery and incest with a young teen. ICE had to track him down in the community nearly three months later.

“Thanks to the malicious negligence of Fairfax County’s sanctuary policies, we may never know what other horrific crimes Marvin Mateo-Alberto committed during his months on the lam from federal law enforcement,” the committee report said.

The committee has held hearings with the governors of New York, Illinois and Minnesota and the mayors of Chicago, Denver, Boston and New York and identified each of them as sanctuaries.