Enforce the Law for Sanctuary Cities Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. LOFGREN. Madam Speaker, we have an immigration system that is badly broken. There are 11 million undocumented people in this country. Contrary to what Donald Trump may think, the majority of these people are not rapists.

They are hard-working people, spouses and parents of U.S. citizens, DREAMers, entrepreneurs who want an opportunity to come forward, submit to background checks, and become fully American.

Faced with a broken system, State and local law enforcement have adopted policies to enhance public safety and maintain community trust.

Because when people are afraid of the police, when they are afraid that the police might ask them or their family about their immigration status, they are afraid to report crimes, unlikely to cooperate with investigations, and then criminals thrive and the general public suffers.

This bill puts an impossible choice between State and local law enforcement agencies. They can either abandon policies that work or they can lose the Federal funds they rely on to police their communities and protect them.

The dangers posed by this bill are real. 144 national, State, and local advocacy organizations have written opposing this bill because of the detrimental impact it would have on public safety, big cities, but also little ones like Dayton, Ohio, a place that most people don't think of as a sanctuary city.

In Dayton, police officers are told not to check immigration status of witnesses and victims, nor to ask about immigration during minor traffic stops.

The police chief there has explained that this policy has helped them have a safer community. According to the chief, after the policy was adopted, serious violent crime dropped nearly 22 percent and serious property crime decreased almost 15 percent.

Madam Speaker, why should Dayton, Ohio, be barred from receiving funds for policing when their policies work?

Now, punishing the law enforcement officers by withholding the funds they need is not only incorrect, it is why the bill is opposed to by the Major County Sheriffs' Associations, the Fraternal Order of Police, dozens of sheriffs and police chiefs.

The President has said we should deport felons, not families, and that is what his priority enforcement program does.

The Secretary of Homeland Security told the Judiciary Committee just last week that withholding funds from communities would be a huge setback in efforts to improve the relationship between DHS, State, and local law enforcement in communities across the country.

It has been said that this bill is a response to the tragic murder of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco, just up the road from my district.

However, nothing in this bill would have prevented that outrageous murder of Ms. Steinle. Nothing in the bill would have required the Bureau of Prisons and ICE to consult with San Francisco, to ascertain whether or not the 20-year-old warrant would lead to a prosecution.

Nothing in this bill would have required ICE to obtain a warrant, as is necessary to hold people beyond the term of their criminal sentence.

Nothing in the bill would even have affected the sheriff of San Francisco's decision to release the individual charged with murdering Ms. Steinle.

So that tragedy should not be used to advance a different agenda, this bill.

Over the last year we have come to the floor to vote on bills to deport the DREAM Act kids, to deport the parents of U.S. citizens, to deport vulnerable children fleeing persecution and sex trafficking.

Today we are asked to vote on a bill that overrides the public safety mission of State and local law

enforcement agencies and to increase deportations all around.

We had the votes to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the last Congress, and I hope we can get back to that point.

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Ms. LOFGREN. Madam Speaker, I would note that we have an opportunity here to learn from the tragedy in San Francisco to come up with real solutions that would make our community safer instead of using that tragedy as an excuse to promote a different agenda.

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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Community trust policies result in more efficient policing. When State and local law enforcement agencies promote community trust policies, public safety is increased.

The current New York police commissioner and former chief of police in Los Angeles, William Bratton, said: ``When officers can speak freely with victims and witnesses, it goes a long way towards making every American neighborhood much safer.''

Here is a case study in New Haven, Connecticut. According to a 2010 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, New Haven, Connecticut, developed a community trust policy in which New Haven police assured immigrant communities that the police department's goals were to address crime and to make the streets safer.

They encouraged people to report crime and to cooperate, regardless of their immigration status. The city law prohibited immigration status inquiries of crime victims, witnesses, or others who approached police for assistance.

I would note that the bill before us would prohibit this policy, this law that New Haven adopted. The result of New Haven's policy and their other community trust policies were stronger ties between law enforcement and the immigrant community. Over the next several years, New Haven experienced a 46 percent decrease in murders and a 13 percent decrease in rape incidences. This policy, which this bill would prohibit, worked.

This was a very important result. After learning of it, the United States Conference of Mayors, a group that most of us trust pretty much, did a survey of cities around the United States who adopted the same trust policies.

They include Alameda, California; Augusta, Georgia; New Brunswick, New Jersey; and a whole host of others. They found that all of these cities also reported the same kind of reduction in crime after they adopted these policies. Adopting these policies is an important component of keeping communities safe, and this bill would prohibit that. It would prohibit it.

Now, I understand the outrage over Mr. Lopez-Sanchez. In fact, I share it. Obviously, he has been accused of murder. Even when we have a situation like this, we have to have a trial, but I believe personally that he is guilty, based on all the evidence.

I believe he should not have been out on that street in San Francisco. If you look at his record--and I will go through it a little bit--it actually makes certain points. I have heard people say, Well, we have got open borders, and that is why he was here.

In fact, that is not the case. This individual attempted to enter the United States repeatedly, and he was caught by the Border Patrol, just as they are supposed to do their job.

What happened then is he was deported repeatedly in the nineties, and then they started prosecuting him for felony reentry after removal. He served 16 years in Federal prison for the felony of reentering after removal.

Our laws went after him. He should not have been released in San Francisco, but I think some of what we need to do is see what policies would have kept him off that street, and I will deal with those later.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Becerra).

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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I just want to close by posing some of the questions that this bill does not deal with and that I think should command our attention.

In this case, we had an individual who had a criminal record. He had attempted to enter the United States, was apprehended, deported, was prosecuted and convicted for illegal entry after removal. After serving over 4 years for the last felony prosecution, he was ready to be deported, but they found, even though he had been deported many times before with an outstanding bench warrant from 1995 where the underlying offense was marijuana possession, all of a sudden, this year, he was sent to San Francisco.

I think one of the questions we need to ask is: What is the process of outstanding warrants and its interface with the Bureau of Prisons when someone really should be deported?

Apparently, there was no communication between the Federal Government and the prosecuting attorney in San Francisco. He was sent to, apparently, San Francisco, but the district attorney did not see this matter until he was already in custody.

Now, I don't fault the district attorney for not prosecuting on a 20-year-old marijuana possession case. Where would you find the witnesses? And, in fact, in California today, marijuana possession is an infraction, not a misdemeanor. But the point is he should never have been in San Francisco to begin with.

So I think we need to take a look at the processes that we have to make sure that we don't have this kind of situation again. Clearly, he should not have been released when the district attorney declined to prosecute.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to my colleague from California (Mr. Farr).

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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. I would just close by saying that we have been asked by law enforcement agencies, by domestic violence advocacy groups, by the faith community not to adopt this bill. I know we can come together to make a safer community. This bill is not the answer, and I urge Members to vote ``no.''

I yield back the balance of my time.

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