Ending the Sanctuary City lies

 

Migrant hotel shelter by Penn Station-Photo by JQ LLC

NY Post

 New York City voters in November could have the power to repeal “misguided and dangerous” “sanctuary city” laws that severely limit the NYPD’s ability to cooperate with the feds on immigration matters and are a clear “threat to public safety.”

Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), Robert Holden (D-Queens) and six other members of the City Council’s “Common Sense Caucus” fired off a letter this week to a newly-appointed Charter Revision Commission, asking it to put a referendum question on the ballot to determine whether to roll back the “sanctuary” laws that help criminals avoid deportation.

“We are writing to urge the Charter Revision Commission to advance a ballot initiative asking voters if New York City should repeal recent so-called ‘sanctuary city’ laws that prohibit members of law enforcement and other agencies from cooperating with federal authorities to help detain or remove unauthorized, non-citizens who have committed crimes in our city,” says the letter dated Tuesday.

“We feel these laws, as currently construed, are not only misguided and dangerous, they have strayed far from their original purpose of fostering public safety. Ultimately it should be put to voters to decide who is right.”

Earlier this month, Holden and Borelli drafted legislation to repeal the sanctuary laws — but they realize it’s a pipe dream to think the Council’s left-wing majority would pass it.

So they’re hoping for better luck with the commission, which was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams, a retired NYPD cop and moderate Dem who has said the current rules are too soft on crime.

Some Common Sense Caucus members expect to pitch the referendum plan in person during a future public hearing hosted by the commission. Both Holden and Borelli said they believe voters would back their proposed ballot initiative.

There is no sanctuary here

NY Post

Overwhelmed city officials are struggling to provide a promised intake center and hotel rooms to migrants being shipped by the busload from Texas to the Big Apple, The Post has learned.

The Department of Homeless Services acknowledged to The Post that it has abandoned its initial plan to operate an intake and processing center dedicated to the recent arrivals alongside a 600-room shelter at the ROW NYC hotel on Eighth Avenue in Midtown.

Officials would only say Sunday that they have finally selected a finalist to operate the yet-to-open Manhattan facility but would not reveal the contractor’s name or its location.

Contracting documents obtained by The Post show that officials had hoped to have the Midtown shelter and intake up and running as soon as Aug. 15 — now 13 days ago.

DHS also admitted that it has yet to select and rent any of the 5,000 hotel rooms the agency said it is seeking to house migrants across the city.

Instead, officials are continuing to commingle migrants with New Yorkers in the city’s existing shelter system — which now includes 15 “emergency” hotel facilities to also help handle a summer population surge, according to the DSS on Friday.

City Hall has refused to say how much the city is spending on housing migrants in the homeless-system hotels, but a Post analysis found the cost could surpass $300 million.

 

Why are we protecting criminals?

From ICE:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Fugitive Operations teams arrested 498 individuals from 42 countries for federal immigration violations in multiple cities across the U.S. during a four-day operation that ended Wednesday. Operation ‘Safe City’ focused on cities and regions where ICE deportation officers are denied access to jails and prisons to interview suspected immigration violators or jurisdictions where ICE detainers are not honored.

The operation targeted individuals who have violated U.S. immigration laws, prioritizing aliens with criminal convictions, pending criminal charges, known gang members and affiliates, immigration fugitives and those who re-entered the U.S. after deportation. Individuals with active DACA were not targeted for arrest.

“Sanctuary jurisdictions that do not honor detainers or allow us access to jails and prisons are shielding criminal aliens from immigration enforcement and creating a magnet for illegal immigration,” said ICE Acting Director Tom Homan. “As a result, ICE is forced to dedicate more resources to conduct at-large arrests in these communities.”
“ICE’s goal is to build cooperative, respectful relationships with our law enforcement partners to help prevent dangerous criminal aliens from being released back onto the streets. Non-cooperation policies severely undermine that effort at the expense of public safety,” he said.

Operation Safe City arrests took place in Baltimore (28), Cook County, Illinois (30), Denver (63), Los Angeles (101), New York (45), Philadelphia (107), Portland, Ore. (33), Santa Clara County, Calif (27); and Washington, D.C. (14) and the state of Massachusetts (50).

Among those arrested during this week’s operation were: In New York, a citizen of Ecuador with lawful permanent resident status who was previously charged with sexual abuse of a minor and convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, and convicted of sexual abuse of a minor under 14. He was previously released from local custody before ICE could assume custody.

Of the 498 individuals taken into custody during this operation for immigration violations:

317 had criminal convictions, as noted in the chart below;
68 are immigration fugitives;
104 are previously deported criminal aliens; and
18 are gang members or affiliates.

NYPD is actually notifying ICE about court appearances

From the Daily News:

The NYPD alerts federal immigration agents to the Criminal Court appearances of immigrants facing deportation, the Daily News has learned.

As a “sanctuary city,” the city currently only complies with Immigration and Customs Enforcement “detainer” orders to hold a defendant until federal agents can take custody in cases involving violent or serious felonies.

But in the process of verifying warrants against a defendant, officials said the NYPD will contact relevant law enforcement, including ICE, thereby alerting the agency to an immigrant’s upcoming appearance in a city courtroom.

Advocates slammed the practice, saying it amounts to “collusion” with immigration officials that goes against the spirit of Mayor de Blasio’s pledge that the city will remain a sanctuary city.

NYC may stop getting some federal funds

From NY1:

The Trump administration is increasingly warning that if local law enforcement agencies don't cooperate with federal immigration officials, they could lose federal funding.

"A nation without borders is not a nation," Trump said.

It's been a Trump policy, signed in January in an executive order.

Attention lately is heightened after two Maryland high school students, including one here without papers, were accused of raping a classmate in a school bathroom. Henry Sanchez-Milian's lawyer says he is pleading not guilty.

Maryland lawmakers are considering a bill restricting how much local law enforcement can share with federal agencies.

"I would plead with the people of Maryland to understand that this makes the state of Maryland more at risk for violence and crime," Sessions said.

New York's rules limit cooperation with immigration agents. They don't end it. And its backers add the rules aren't just constitutionally sound, but make the city about the safest its been in generations.

Taking away federal funding jeopardizes that, they say. Not to mention, some of that money Trump is threatening to take helps protect his namesake tower.

Undocumented impact on NYC

This short Seth Barron piece in City Journal is the best essay I have seen thus far on illegal immigration in NYC. Give it a read.

Welcome to our vibrant, diverse sanctuary city

From the NY Times:

WHEN the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided to get rid of a colony of pigeons that roosted under the elevated subway that runs down the middle of Roosevelt Avenue in Queens several years ago, it installed anti-pigeon spikes and sound machines to drive the birds off. The birds decamped, but only to the trees next to the tracks, where they continued to befoul the street below, according to local residents. When the parks department pruned the trees, the birds headed back to the tracks to another spot. Now, the transit agency continues to power-wash the caked-on debris away.

That’s what the fight against vice is like on Roosevelt Avenue, where efforts by the city to clean up a street that is home not only to pigeons, but also to a host of criminal activities, often play out like the carnival game Whac-A-Mole: go after one form of wrongdoing and it will re-emerge somewhere else in a slightly different form.

A common refrain about Roosevelt, which slices across Queens from Queens Boulevard to Northern Boulevard, is that the seediness pushed out of Times Square merely re-established itself there, finding a new home especially in the Corona and Jackson Heights neighborhoods, according to residents, advocates and law enforcement officials. Today, prostitution and counterfeiting industries are tucked alongside the Mexican restaurants, Dominican bakeries, Colombian boutiques and the nightclubs where men — many of them new immigrants working to feed families left behind in their homelands — can buy the company of a woman by paying $2 for a dance.

Late at night, the sight of drunken men slumped on the streets outside bars is so common that in September, a young man who was stabbed bled to death on the pavement a few blocks off Roosevelt, ignored by pedestrians who thought he had passed out after a late night.

For decades, extraordinary policing efforts have been applied to the problems on this avenue, including a citywide task force and, more recently, a designation as a New York Police Department Operation Impact Zone, which means the area is flooded with patrols. And yet, even as overall crime in the city and along Roosevelt Avenue has fallen, certain crimes have stubbornly resisted stifling.

Ridgewood-dwelling murderous illegal alien fled to Mexico

From Metro:

The suspect in the fatal stabbing of a youth soccer coach near Union Square left a note saying he was "sorry" before fleeing the county, police commissioner Raymond Kelly said Thursday.

Orlando Orea, 32, paid cash for a one-way airline ticket to Mexico City and flew out of John F. Kennedy airport Tuesday, just hours before investigators identified him as the knife-wielding man caught on surveillance camera attacking Michael Jones, 25, on a 14th Street sidewalk before dawn on Sunday.

A search warrant of Jones' apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, turned up a note that referenced the attack, Kelly said.

Investigators have said that Orea was in an argument in a nearby bar before the attack, and may have mistaken Jones for one of the people who intervened to break up the altercation. Jones was never in the bar and didn't know Orea.

Orea was able to board a plane leaving JFK just hours before police identified him and put him on the federal "no fly."

Investigators know which village in Mexico Orea is from, Kelly said Thursday. New York investigators are preparing to travel there to assist in the manhunt, and are also working with Interpol, Mexican authorities, and the U.S. State Department to try to track down the fugitive.

Orea, who used several aliases and was in the county illegally, is expected to be indicted for the homicide.

And we wanted to opt out of Secure Communities?

So there won't be a million more people by 2030?

From the NY Post:

The feds say Brooklyn’s population grew by a scant 1.6 percent while Queens’ barely budged, up just 0.1 percent, which translates to 1,300 people since 2000. Other boroughs averaged about a 4 percent jump.

Overall, the city claims New York’s population is 8.4 million, compared to the census bureau’s estimate of 8.175 million.

The discrepancy could mean hundreds of millions in lost federal aid, and city officials vowed to fight to force the feds to revise the numbers upward.

City officials say other census numbers simply don’t add up. They point out that about 170,000 new housing units have sprung up in the past decade – while the census says the population increased by only about 166,000.

Well there are an awful lot of empty luxury units and unsold craphouses, in case you haven't noticed. Now, either your prediction of a million more people by 2030 is full of shit, or no one can truly estimate the number of people in our sanctuary city full of illegal conversions. Imagine that.

The Bloomberg solution to illegal immigration

From Yahoo:

Opponents of the Justice Department's lawsuit challenging the enforcement of Arizona's controversial illegal-immigration law have hit upon a strategy to highlight what they contend is a gaping inconsistency in the Justice Department's policy priorities. Why should federal attorneys be targeting the Arizona law as an alleged obstacle to coherent and centralized enforcement of federal immigration statutes, they argue, while Justice officials also have done nothing to challenge the legal status of so-called sanctuary cities, which effectively block enforcement of the same federal law?

More than 30 cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Denver, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, have local ordinances on the books that prevent police from asking about a person’s immigration status. The Arizona law would allow officers to question a person’s immigration status and report them to federal authorities if that person is believed to be in the country illegally. The crackdown could prompt illegal immigrants to seek refuge out of Arizona and into those sanctuary cities.

A Justice Department official told the Washington Times there is nothing hypocritical about the government going after Arizona while ignoring sanctuary cities and suggested it won’t step up enforcement. Administration officials say they want to seek and deport criminal immigrants. Indeed, a recent Washington Post report found that deportation of illegal immigrants has spiked significantly under the Obama administration. But federal officials insist they don’t have the capability or resources to remove the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who haven’t had run-ins with the police.

Okay, then how about stopping them from getting in?

From the NY Times:

Federal maritime law requires that foreign-flagged vessels contact customs officials when they arrive at American ports, even if arriving from another American port. Immigration officials are permitted to board foreign-flagged vessels anytime, said Officer John F. Saleh, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. Coast Guard officials, who joined in the stop, are allowed to board any vessel at any time in American waters.

Maritime laws and their enforcement have tightened since 9/11. In the past several years, for example, the Coast Guard division on Staten Island — which patrols New York Harbor, the western half of Long Island Sound and the southern Hudson River — has stepped up its scrutiny of smaller foreign-flagged vessels, said Charles Rowe, a spokesman for the Coast Guard in New York City.

Mr. Rowe said that under the program, “Operation Small Fry,” Coast Guard officials, along with federal and local law enforcement personnel, have boarded about 750 such boats a year, to enforce customs, immigration and maritime laws.

It is frustrating for those with foreign flags, said the manager of a luxury marina in the Hamptons, who insisted on anonymity to avoid offending any of his clients. But, he added, “They really can’t complain because the reason they’re foreign-flagged is to avoid paying taxes.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

The immigration debate is reviving the explosive idea of denying citizenship to children born on U.S. soil if their parents are in the country illegally.

A U.S. senator and a state lawmaker in Arizona, both central players in the battle over immigration law, separately proposed this week that "birthright" citizenship be denied to the children of illegal immigrants. They said the change would help stem the flood of illegal border crossings.

Immigration-rights activists say citizenship isn't a significant driver of illegal immigration, because a child has to reach age 21 to petition for permanent legal residency for his or her parents.

A federal judge changed Arizona's new immigration law, just before it went into effect.

In Arizona, Republican state Sen. Russell Pearce, the architect of the immigration law that drew a legal challenge from the Obama administration, said he wanted to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in his state to illegal immigrants.

At issue is the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted in 1868 to ensure that states not deny former slaves the full rights of citizenship. It states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

Mr. Pearce, like some other proponents of the change, argued that the amendment as written doesn't apply to illegal immigrants. Because illegal immigrants aren't "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S., as the amendment requires, they fall outside its protection, these people argue. A group of House lawmakers made a similar argument when they tried to pass legislation changing the birthright principle in 2005.

Given the controversial nature of this proposal, successfully amending the Constitution would be considered a long shot. It requires a vote of two-thirds of the House and of the Senate, and must be ratified by three-fourths of state legislators.

Why would it be a long shot? Sounds like common sense that would save us billions. Oh that's right...tweeding.

Murder suspect was to be deported

From Gothamist:

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said: "For whatever reason, he felt slighted ... And he went back and began this series of harassment, basically threats." Wu filed for nine orders or protection against the undocumented immigrant — the most recent filed last Friday. Chen was jailed in 2006 for punching and choking Wu, and sent to Texas where he faced deportation proceedings. However, he was let out under supervised release last week and returned to New York.

BLOOMTURD'S SANCTUARY CITY WELCOMES YOU BACK WITH OPEN ARMS!!!!

Photo from the NY Times