Speech #1140103592

We are living through this. Well. in my view. we have lived through too muchway too much. So today I am continuing my ongoing fight to end these sanctuary cities that endanger all of our communities. I am introducing the Stop Dangerous Sanctuary Cities Act. S. 3100. and it tackles two problems. Part of the reason some communities have chosen to be sanctuary cities is in response to court decisions. There are two court decisions that we need to addressone is by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and the other by a Federal district court in Oregon. These court decisions hold that if the Department of Homeland Security makes a mistake in issuing a detainer in a request to hold someone. if it turns out that the Department of Homeland Security made a mistakemaybe they got the wrong guyand if the local law enforcement cooperates. as we think common sense has suggested we would like to see. according to these court decisions. the local law enforcement and the local government would bear the liability. They can be sued. That is a problem for communities. In fact. it has driven over a dozen Pennsylvania communities. counties. and municipalities to say: We cant take that legal risk. so we will. quite reluctantly. become sanctuary cities. There is a simple solution to this. In my bill. the first action my bill takes says that when a local officer is complying with a legitimate. bona fide immigration detainer duly issued by the Department of Homeland Security. then the local officer has the same authority as the DHS official. A way to think about it is that the local police would be considered agents of the Department of Homeland Security for this purpose. If an individuals rights are violated somehow. the individual would still have every right to sue. but they would not sue the local police department. which was just acting in good faith in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security. the person would sue the Department of Homeland Security. There would be no diminution of the persons legal rights or their ability to redress anything that went wrong. it is just that the liability ought to attach to DHS. not the local police department. With this change in the law. there would no longer be any pretext or any justification whatsoever for these sanctuary cities and denying the cooperation with Federal officials which we need. The second part of my bill says that once that is in place. once we fix that legal liability problem. if a community nevertheless decides they still want to be a sanctuary city. they still want to refuse to cooperate with Federal law enforcement. then they would lose some Federal funds. They would lose some of the CDBG money. the community block grant money. and I know every Senator is very familiar with how much every city and every municipality gets because the local politicians get to decide how to spend it. In my view. if you are going to impose the kinds of costs on all of us that sanctuary cities impose. the additional cost for Federal law enforcement. the additional cost to the American people in living in an area where they are at greater riskit is unbelievable and impossible to quantify the cost to people like Jim Steinle. who lost his daughterif you are going to impose those costs. then it is reasonable for the Federal Government to choose not to subsidize that. That is my goal. It is pretty simple. Frankly. I dont think it should even be controversial. Leaders across the political spectrum have criticized sanctuary city policies. Former Pennsylvania Governor. lifelong Democrat. and former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Ed Rendell. has criticized the sanctuary city policies of Philadelphia. The Secretary of Homeland Security has clearly gone out of his way to try to get Philadelphia to change its misguided policy. Pennsylvania law enforcement officers from across the entire political spectrum. across the entire Commonwealth. all agree we got this right.