Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal
aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot
use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for
example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into
town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon,
and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence
in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious
reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule
against enforcing immigration law.
The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities
around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These
“sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from
reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.
Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so
irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime
wave. “We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain.
“People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a
predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of
criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].”
Neither captain would speak for attribution.
But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader
disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years
ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive
policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to
dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea
of national borders.
It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask
police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not
done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will
give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break
off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel,
and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the
immigration law.
I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his
employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a
Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the
suspect in custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration
status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable
offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from
unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his
words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”
Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis,
but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:
• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total
1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants
(17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60
percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police
officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with
the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution
schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every
day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by
recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and
Mexico.
• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and
racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60
percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez,
a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while
serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.
Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the
L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood,
targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in
Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans,
smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off
their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative
that line of work is and stay in the business.
Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang
“Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is
assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal
dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status,
or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into
the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating
Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.
The ordinarily tough-as-nails former LAPD chief Daryl Gates enacted Special Order 40 in
1979—showing that even the most unapologetic law-and-order cop is no match for
immigration advocates. The order prohibits officers from “initiating police action
where the objective is to discover the alien status of a person”—in other words,
the police may not even ask someone they have arrested about his immigration status until
after they have filed criminal charges, nor may they arrest someone for immigration
violations. They may not notify immigration authorities about an illegal alien picked up
for minor violations. Only if they have already booked an illegal alien for a felony or
for multiple misdemeanors may they inquire into his status or report him. The bottom line:
a cordon sanitaire between local law enforcement and immigration authorities that creates
a safe haven for illegal criminals.
L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing
discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a
“minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and
turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration
violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even
more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the
time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the
corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country
after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their
first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a
deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I
can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon
has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale,
can the cop accost him—but not for the immigration felony.
Though such a policy puts the community at risk, the department’s top brass brush off
such concerns. No big deal if you see deported gangbangers back on the streets, they say.
Just put them under surveillance for “real” crimes and arrest them for those.
But surveillance is very manpower-intensive. Where there is an immediate ground for
getting a violent felon off the street and for questioning him further, it is absurd to
demand that the woefully understaffed LAPD ignore it.
The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime
victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they
encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to
whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has
never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these
goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of
intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be
honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration
violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status
police already know.
The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting
and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The
immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating
it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a
breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included
descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members),
revealed the rate of illegal-alien membership in the gang. In response to the public
outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You
would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned
the council: “This is going to open a significant, heated debate.” City
Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she
declared firmly.
But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of
gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs,
spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never
equal a politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination
process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work
closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the
streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often
futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the
police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer
right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.
But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the
policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal
law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan
Lewis told the L.A. Police Commission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look
at Special Order 40.”
Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief
moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense
of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had
cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local
politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into
their station houses. In turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By
now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary
policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see
daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring.
Immigration politics have similarly harmed New York. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani sued
all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend the city’s sanctuary policy against a
1996 federal law decreeing that cities could not prohibit their employees from cooperating
with the INS. Oh yeah? said Giuliani; just watch me. The INS, he claimed, with what turned
out to be grotesque irony, only aims to “terrorize people.” Though he lost in
court, he remained defiant to the end. On September 5, 2001, his handpicked
charter-revision committee ruled that New York could still require that its employees keep
immigration information confidential to preserve trust between immigrants and government.
Six days later, several visa-overstayers participated in the most devastating attack on
the city and the country in history.
New York conveniently forgot the 1996 federal ban on sanctuary laws until a gang of five
Mexicans—four of them illegal—abducted and brutally raped a 42-year-old mother
of two near some railroad tracks in Queens. The NYPD had already arrested three of the
illegal aliens numerous times for such crimes as assault, attempted robbery, criminal
trespass, illegal gun possession, and drug offenses. The department had never notified the
INS.
Citizen outrage forced Mayor Michael Bloomberg to revisit the city’s sanctuary decree
yet again. In May 2003, Bloomberg tweaked the policy minimally to allow city staffers to
inquire into immigration status only if it is relevant to the awarding of a government
benefit. Though Bloomberg’s new rule said nothing about reporting immigration
violations to federal officials, advocates immediately claimed that it did allow such
reporting, and the ethnic lobbies went ballistic. “What we’re seeing is the
erosion of people’s rights,” thundered Angelo Falcon of the Puerto Rican Legal
Defense and Education Fund. After three months of intense agitation by immigrant groups,
Bloomberg replaced this innocuous “don’t ask” policy with a
“don’t tell” rule even broader than Gotham’s original sanctuary
policy. The new rule prohibits city employees from giving other government officials
information not just about immigration status but about tax payments, sexual orientation,
welfare status, and other matters.
But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start
enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved
immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.
PART
TWO ILLEGAL ALIENS CRIME WAVE CLICK HERE |
