Sanctuary Cities—A Dangerous Game We All Lose: The BorderLine
Simon Hankinson /
All across America, people are feeling the effects of four years of mass immigration parole programs and the release at the border of millions of aliens we know nothing verifiable about. Many aliens head for big cities that have adopted “sanctuary” policies, whereby their police officers and prosecutors don’t cooperate with federal authorities on immigration enforcement.
The most common outcome of this noncooperation is that when Immigration and Customs Enforcement issues a detainer asking local law enforcement to hand over a suspect or convict rather than cut him loose, they ignore it——putting their own citizens in peril. The consequences of this are playing out in the news every day.
On Nov. 21, 20-year old Venezuelan illegal alien Jesus Alberto Pereira Castillo was charged with raping a 14-year-old girl in Denver, Colorado. Castillo appears to have entered the United States illegally in September 2023, after which he was most probably released with a notice to appear in immigration court. ICE has filed a detainer notice with Denver authorities, but with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston determined to keep his city a sanctuary for all aliens, including criminals, they might not hand him over.
In New York City a few days earlier, another young Venezuelan named Brandon Simosa was arrested and charged with sexually motivated robbery and burglary. At 2 a.m. on a Sunday, a female lawyer from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office caught him in her apartment building with his pants down. The young man exposed himself to the woman and took her phone. New York City Police say Simosa is a member of Tren de Aragua, the vicious Venezuelan gang that has spread throughout the United States.
Not surprisingly, given Alvin Bragg is New York’s district attorney, police said Simosa has already been arrested six times this year for charges including assault and robbery. Like Castillo, it looks like he arrived illegally and was either released at the border or paroled into the country.
Simosa, seen smirking as he was arrested, is just one of untold numbers of existing criminals allowed in under the Biden administration’s open border policies and encouraged to come to New York City by blank checks for housing, income, health care, education, and other services Americans don’t get for free. Once in a sanctuary city with a rogue, left-wing local prosecutor, they can commit crimes with little fear of timely prosecution, let alone incarceration.
On Nov. 20, Jose Ibarra, yet another illegal immigrant from Venezuela and likely Tren de Aragua associate, was convicted for the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. Deborah Gonzalez, the district attorney in charge of prosecuting the case, took the death penalty off the table for Ibarra.
Gonzalez said she was “unapologetically a Democrat” and “a progressive prosecutor” and her policies were tilted toward offenders over victims. She even pledged to “take into account collateral consequences to undocumented offenders,” meaning she was willing to go easy on illegal aliens so they don’t get deported.
But how is making Americans unsafe and denying them justice “progressive”?
Maybe that’s why Gonzalez lost reelection to independent Kalki Yalamanchili by a landslide in this November’s election.
In Chicago on Oct. 26, an illegal alien from Mauritania in Western Africa named Sidi Mohamed Abdellahi apparently identified targets before deliberately shooting a Jewish man on the Sabbath. Under President Joe Biden, thousands of people from Mauritania, a poor African country where both modern slavery and terrorist group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb still thrive, have been allowed to enter the U.S. with no verification of their identity or background checks from their home country.
In Herndon, Virginia, a woman was allegedly raped on Nov. 18 on a popular biking and walking trail by Denis Humberto Navarette Romero, an illegal alien from Honduras. Despite a history of nude flashing and sexual assault, Romero kept getting released thanks to local policies that favor offenders over their victims.
Americans keep being told by the legacy media that illegal alien crime isn’t a thing, but the police chief in Herndon said it was the only “stranger rape” in her 12 years in office. She said Romero “has continued to reoffend” yet is released every time. It seems like for progressive prosecutors and sanctuary cities, an offender has to kill someone before they care.
Under the Trump administration, enforcement of immigration laws will recommence with gusto. In the 1980s Kurt Russell movie “Escape from New York,” Manhattan was an open-air prison full of criminals where civilization stopped and mayhem ruled. If they are not careful, this will be the fate of sanctuary cities. As more helpful jurisdictions are cleaned up, the worst illegal immigrant offenders will head for the places that will harbor them.
States and cities that prefer coddling their illegal residents over protecting their voters and taxpayers will earn the rewards of their policies—both on the streets and at the ballot box.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
Read Other BorderLine Columns:
How Trump Reverses the Destruction Biden’s Pro-Illegal Immigration Ideologues Wrought
To Have a Serious Talk About Immigration, You’ve Got to First Debunk the Myths
The Mass Hysteria Over Deportation