Speech #1100060432

I believe. in the last session. The fact is that we need to. unfortunately. run at it again. My amendment would prevent State and local governments who refuse to share information with Federal immigration authorities from obtaining Federal funds under this act. These are socalled sanctuary policies. and they are not only misguided and dangerous. but they also are illegal. That is an interesting aspect of this that we have brought to the attention of the Congress many times in the past. There is in fact a law. It has been on the books now for over 10 years. Section 642 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 already makes it illegal for a State or local government to block communications between State and local police and Federal immigration enforcement authorities. Unfortunately. there are no provisions for enforcement. Therefore. many local governments adopt policies that explicitly prevent their police officers from cooperating with immigration and Customs enforcement agents. A recent example of this increasingly brazen defiance of Federal law is the City of San Francisco. Just a couple of months ago. Mayor Gavin Newsome assured a concerned audience that he would "not allow any of his department heads or anyone else associated with the city to cooperate in any way. shape or form with these immigration raids." Unfortunately. San Francisco is not is not the only jurisdiction in this category. When local governments refuse to share information with Federal immigration authorities. police departments often stop and/or arrest criminal aliens time and time again. only to release them without ever checking their immigration status. As a result. instead of being deported. these aliens move on to commit other crimes. The City of Denver also has a sanctuary city policy that violates Federal law. Their police manual explicitly prohibits officers from initiating actions whose objective is to "discover the immigration status of a person." Mr. Chairman. I can tell you from my own experience that there have been numerous occasions where this sanctuary city policy in Denver alone has resulted in the deaths of individuals. and certainly other kinds of crimes being perpetrated. because people that were involved with these murders and/ or manslaughter charges that were brought against them were illegal aliens. They had come in contact at some time in the past with the authorities. but because of these sanctuary city policies. none of the authorities were able to communicate with ICE and therefore. of course. these people went undetected and otherwise almost certainly would have been taken into custody and deported and those crimes would not have been committed. Mr. Chairman.