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My, How Far [Immigration] Sanctuary Policies Have Come
Oregon’s state attorney general (the state’s top law enforcement official) has rolled out her “Sanctuary Promise Community Toolkit,” with instructions for residents on how not to cooperate with federal immigration and law enforcement personnel.
The “Toolkit” claims its authority from a 1987 Oregon law on immigration sanctuary policy. The attorney general’s office notes that the 1987 law was passed almost unanimously, contrasting that with the current partisan nature of immigration sanctuary policies.
One of the benefits of being old is I have seen a lot. I don’t always remember details, but I’m pretty good at noting and remembering patterns and themes. So, no, I do not have documentation of what I am about to recite. I am relating my “lived experience,” as the kids seem to say these days. I think I have a pretty clear recollection of the “gist” of the discussion as immigration sanctuary policies were initially developed.
I cannot speak to how immigration sanctuary policy was debated in Oregon in 1987, but I was living through a concurrent debate on the topic in southern California and watched early versions of immigration sanctuary policies develop. Early immigration sanctuary policies did have widespread public support. But those policies and their application were quite different from what those policies have become in the third decade of the 21st century.
The immigration sanctuary policies discussed and adopted in the 1980s grew out of frustration that criminals were targeting immigrant communities and groups but, given the status of the victims, such crime was going unreported and thus unpunished. People in some communities were afraid to report crime because they or someone near to them was an illegal immigrant. People were afraid that just reporting a crime would trigger their own deportation or the deportation of someone in their family or household. Criminals exploited this fear and targeted immigrants or their families for criminal activity.
The initial immigration sanctuary policies were often somewhat informal and adopted by police departments as part of their community outreach programs. They were along the lines of: “We will not check your immigration status just because you report to us that you were the victim of a crime.” At the time, immigration sanctuary policies were simply part of campaigns to encourage residents to report crime so the police could enforce the criminal law. There were no promises that if you were arrested for a crime, or otherwise drew the scrutiny of law enforcement, your immigration status was not going to be checked, nor that if there was a problem with your immigration status you were not going to be handed over to federal immigration authorities.
The original immigration sanctuary policies were to enhance law enforcement, not to encourage official harboring of criminals. No one at the time had any thought that such policies would expand into a wholesale rejection of federal immigration law. Anyone discussing an immigration sanctuary policy in the 1980s would, I think, have been shocked to the point of disbelief if told that eventually such policies would be used by state law enforcement agencies to instruct and aid criminals in evading federal law enforcement.
Immigration sanctuary policies have gone from a tool to aid law enforcement to a tool to evade law enforcement. Quite a distance to travel in four decades.
Published in Immigration
I think it’s worse than that, FST. We are really encouraging ordinary citizens to break the law. It’s really despicable. Your memory is probably better than mine; I don’t remember the 80’s and sanctuary cities guidelines, but it would make sense to me.
Attention all illegal immigrants! Move to Oregon as soon as possible, they will take care of you!
Lotsa luck, Oregon.
Maybe our new federal legal officials will deem those behind the issuance of the toolkit as obstructing federal law enforcement. Certainly Tom Homan has committed to act that way.
Right. Just like some people deem the actions of January 6, 2021 to be an insurrection.
Are you likening the two situations? That the toolkit to help hide illegal aliens is like the events of Jan. 6? What am I missing?
@susanquinn The toolkit as obstruction would be under federal statutory law not Jan6 as an insurrection. That’s a big difference. I think some have used the 14th Amendment as a basis for insurrection on Jan6.
Whether or not what state officials are doing violates the law, the state immigration sanctuary policies are a long ways from simple community relations programs to encourage people to report crime. They are now certainly at least closer to aiding and abetting criminal behavior.
I was practicing law in Orange County at the time. Although I did not practice either criminal law or immigration law, I had friends who did, and I had some interest in being aware of the legal world beyond my specialty.
I am likening the arguments. If the argument is good, it can apply to different situations. If it applies only to a particular situation, it isn’t an argument. It is just political hackery.
Also note that under current policy implementations some state and local officials actively go out of their way to thwart federal law enforcement with known and sometimes convicted criminals. Again, a long way from, “We won’t look into your immigration status if all you’re doing is reporting that you were the victim of a crime.”
If you want to shut down all possibility of state governments helping us resist federal mandates during the next pandemic or other “emergency,” then by all means go after state governments when they resist federal mandates on border control. That will be a useful precedent to stomp on the people good and hard next time they try to resist vaccine mandates.
Correcting and undoing Biden’s border policy is going to be a tough slog that will need the support of a lot of sectors of our society. Going after the states’ rights crowd first with smashmouth policies before even demonstrating the worth and results of the new policy is not the most effective way to go about it.
There is something backwards about this reasoning. The so-called red states are the ones normally thought of as states rights advocates and most of them deplored the federal effort to mandate vaccines but they support proper legal border and immigration enforcement. California was a leader in implementing federal mandated related actions during Covid. California is a leading sanctuary state. I think if you look at states across the country this pattern repeats.
Yes, but your points don’t make the reasoning backwards. They make it effective.
You do understand that border control and immigration policy along with foreign affairs and national defense are the most primary functions of the federal government and the President. Forcing medical treatment on Americans is not in that category. So you will have to explain to me what your last comment means.
It took a long time before our country gradually decided that immigration control needed to be a national issue rather than a state issue. It isn’t so fundamental that it was written into the constitution like national defense was. It does now seem that it needs to be a national issue, but there is no need to make the first action of the Trump administration one that forces states to give up their own role in the matter. We can work it out as we go along.
Remember when Texas wanted to use its own police to enforce national border policy on its own border, and Biden stepped in with a hammer to say states should not encroach on fed business? I don’t think it’s such a clear case and don’t think Biden should have done that.
If your first action now is to take the hammer to Oregon, you’re turning the states into more of the obedient servants of the feds that Biden and the left have long wanted them to be.
There may come a time when it becomes clear that the nation cannot remain half one way and half the other in carrying out deportation policies. Let it come to that. There is a long list of things that need to be done for Trump to carry out his border policies, and maybe by the time he gets it well underway it will be clear to the citizens of Oregon that it would be best for them to get with the program. In the meantime, I think it’s good that states are not lapdogs of the federal government. We should encourage that. And we shouldn’t be seen as hypocrites who care about it only on so-called red-state issues.
I think Homan should prioritize his efforts in the states that cooperate with him and let the sanctuary states that don’t choose to cooperate suffer through the conditions that their own policies bring on them. We’ve seen a bit of this already in New York City. I think that approach will keep Homan busy. One area that might warrant slightly different approach is California’s southern border with Mexico.
Some of the “sanctuary city/state” legislation and policies seems to me to resemble Jim Crow days.
Yes, that’s sort of what I meant. Also, I got the impression that Homan was going to be pretty smart about that, and would also be effective in communicating what he is doing. I hope so.
Thank you. I’ve been trying to model your motivation and mindset. This helps.
OK, but your earlier comment noted the wrong set of states as favoring states’ rights. California, Oregon, Washington, and Illinois are not proponents of states’ rights in the sense most understand that terminology.
Of course they aren’t thinking of it that way. That’s irrelevant for now. It’s our job to make it relevant when the time comes.
The numbers are likely much larger in the sanctuary states and since they are the same states that don’t confine criminals, Homan should, and likely will, first deal with cases where illegal entrants are already in custody. This will be serving the populous that supports Trump. Yea!
I see where Democrats in blue states are already working on a strategy to prevent Trump deportations led by California. This will encourage more to go to those states. Since this is an overt effort to prevent the federal government from executing the federal law, which is the federal government’s responsibility, I think while this is going on no federal funds for legal activities should go to California and others doing this. This includes all state and local law enforcement. Law schools should not get any either.
I would urge you to make that a 2nd-to-last resort and not a first resort.
Give the sanctuary states a chance to prove that they are the bad guys, and let them be the aggressors. (President Lincoln understood the importance of this when states were threatening to leave the union. He was a smart politician and bent over backwards to let them start the war, even when they had already been disobeying the law and defying the federal government.)
Give Homan a chance to do his job. With him, Trump seems to have made one of his best appointments. Don’t mess it up for him and for Trump.
Remember, the point is to stop the illegal immigration problem and fix the problems left by the last administration, and not to start a civil war or show the states that they must obey the new boss man.
The federal government already uses the power to withhold transportation funds to make the states comply with the feds on things like drinking age laws and speed limits. That clearly demonstrates what is bad about federal funding: Federal funding means federal control. Let that be something bad that the Democrats and their administrative state do. Don’t let them have the excuse that Trumpists are control-freaks, too, and even more so, because they don’t limit the withholding of funds to just one kind of funding that is relevant to the problem.
It is possible that the issue could eventually come to that, where such measures are necessary, but let the blue states be the ones who make it impossible in actual fact and not just in theory for the nation to allow them do things their own way.
I think of it as a back-pocket thing, no need to take it out early. There’s already been a SCOTUS ruling on the jurisdictional issue and it went against Arizona, they rule on Constitutional issues, so Trump and Homan are in good position. I suspect we will continue getting floods of bad news on crimes against persons committed by illegal entrants. Some in California are already acting to reverse soft-on-crime punishment for crimes against property like we saw in Orange County today for shoplifting.
Your thoughts on this are good.