Sanctuary Cities

Floor Speech

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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I first want to thank Senator Alexander, and I have a few remarks to make about sanctuary cities and how they threaten the safety of our country.

I am cosponsoring Senator Cotton's amendment to this bill that would withhold Federal law enforcement funds to sanctuary jurisdictions. The amendment, based largely on the provisions of the Michael Davis, Jr. and Danny Oliver in Honor of State and Local Law Enforcement Act, which we introduced a few weeks ago, ensures that jurisdictions that choose to endanger their communities and the public at large by adopting these reckless policies receive no Federal law enforcement funding.

It is a fundamental principle of law enforcement that individuals who are tried in one jurisdiction and who also face charges in other jurisdictions are held and turned over to the next jurisdiction before being released because it becomes an extremely dangerous problem if they are released before charges are disposed of in another jurisdiction. That is being violated deliberately and openly by a number of cities in the country as an act of defiance and disrespect for those traditions of courtesy between Federal and State jurisdictions and even county and city jurisdictions.

Congress has an obligation to ensure that limited taxpayer dollars are not given to those cities and counties that refuse to cooperate with basic Federal law enforcement efforts to remove criminal aliens from the country.

I would like to take a few moments to talk about the life of Kate Steinle. Kate was a 32-year-old young woman who grew up approximately 40 miles east of San Francisco in Pleasanton, CA. She graduated from Amador Valley High School and California Polytechnic State University. She worked as a sales representative for a medical device equipment company and was precisely the type of person every parent aspires for their child to become. Kate's family described her as ``loving, smart and beautiful.'' Kate's brother said that ``she was the most wonderful, loving, caring person.'' Kate's friends described her as an ``amazing, very compassionate person'' with an infectious smile and the kind of friend who was always there.

Last Wednesday, Kate had plans to visit her brother and his wife in Pleasanton with the hopes of learning whether she would soon have a new niece or nephew. Before leaving, she spent some time with her father strolling around San Francisco and taking pictures at Pier 14--one of the busiest and most popular tourist destinations in the city.

While on Pier 14 and in broad daylight, Kate was shot to death by an illegal alien. Kate's mother, Liz Sullivan, described the horrific encounter to the San Francisco Chronicle, explaining that Kate just kept saying, ``Dad, help me, help me.'' Kate's father performed CPR until the paramedics arrived and took her to the hospital, where she fought for her life but ultimately passed away.

Her death was at the hands of Francisco Sanchez, an illegal alien with seven felony convictions who had been deported to Mexico at least six separate times, most recently in 2009. According to information obtained by my office, this individual's criminal history includes multiple criminal convictions and lengthy Federal and State prison sentences dating back to 1991, including felony heroin possession, felony manufacture of narcotics, revoked probation, and at least four convictions for illegal reentry after deportation, among others.

In an interview with local media, this individual admitted to shooting Kate. In the same interview, the individual stated that he repeatedly returned to San Francisco because he knew San Francisco was a sanctuary city where he would not be pursued by immigration officials.

Make no mistake--in essence, that is what a sanctuary city is. Not only do they not honor detainers--the basic law enforcement requirement between jurisdictions--but they send a signal that ``No matter whether you are legal or illegal, you are safe in our city, and we will do nothing to facilitate your apprehension for violations of law.''

Despite this extensive criminal history of approximately six prior deportations and no obligation to release this individual to local custody in San Francisco--a jurisdiction that is known to release illegal immigrants back into the public--Federal authorities turned this individual over to San Francisco on March 26.

I question whether the Federal Government should have ever turned him over to San Francisco. Perhaps they should have deported him on the spot. But, courtesy says, San Francisco indicated they had another criminal charge and they turned him over. The charge apparently was for distribution of a controlled substance. On April 15, for reasons which at this point are unclear, this individual was released from San Francisco County Jail--an action that led directly to the death of Kate Steinle on July 1.

So San Francisco filed a detainer with the Bureau of Prisons, which had this individual in custody, and the Bureau of Prisons dutifully--according to, it appears, normal procedures--turned him over to San Francisco for processing of San Francisco's criminal charge. Then, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, doing its job, filed their detainer with San Francisco in effect saying: San Francisco, when you finish handling this case, he is ours to be deported. Being a sanctuary city, however, San Francisco did not honor it.

Notably, within the same 24-hour period, across the country in another sanctuary jurisdiction--Laredo, TX--Angelica Martinez was brutally murdered with a hammer by her husband, Juan Francisco De Luna Vasquez, an illegal alien. He had been deported from the United States four times. Local police said this was the third violent encounter between this couple and that Vasquez had also had a previous driving-while-intoxicated charge and a charge for evading arrest. As a sanctuary city, Laredo refused to even tell the Department of Homeland Security of the arrest and denied Homeland Security the ability to file a detainer with their jurisdiction. They just denied it.

These cases, colleagues, highlight the tragic and completely avoidable consequences of sanctuary jurisdiction policies. Indeed, if not for sanctuary cities and the Obama administration's continued destruction in other areas of immigration enforcement, Kate and others surely would be alive today. Her death could have been prevented, but the extreme open borders ideology that rejects even the deportation of criminals--that is, people who commit crimes other than the crime of entering the country illegally--led to her death, as it has led to the death of many others.

Although sanctuary jurisdictions are not a recent development, they have been allowed to flourish under this administration. Let me repeat that. This administration has allowed sanctuary cities to flourish. On a few occasions, officials in the government have complained, once about Chicago, Cook County, but no action was ever taken to pressure Cook County to change. The administration has not only refused to stop cities from acting in this way but has emboldened them with this systematic dismantling of immigration enforcement.

In fact, while this administration has taken legal action against State and local jurisdictions that have simply attempted to help the Federal Government enforce our immigration laws, they sued them to block their efforts to enforce the law or help the Federal Government enforce the law--States and counties which have never attempted to deport people, but they have taken efforts when they capture somebody for a crime or for a DUI and find out they are illegally in the country--they would like to be able to turn them over to the Federal Government in some fashion so they can be deported.

This has been resisted by the Federal Government, unfortunately. In 2010,

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the Federal Government openly announced it would not undertake any legal action against sanctuary jurisdictions for refusing to cooperate with the enforcement of our immigration laws. Thus, while it had the time and resources to sue States like Arizona and litigate such cases all the way to the Supreme Court, this administration has not spent a dime to take similar actions against sanctuary jurisdictions around the country, and the administration was well aware of the dangers posed by these policies.
Former ICE Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Gary Mead said that sanctuary cities--and in particular Cook County, IL--were ``an accident waiting to happen.'' That was obviously a sound prediction, and we have seen the tragic results.

Not only has the government failed to stand up to sanctuary jurisdictions, but two days ago--the White House is now claiming that if Congress had just passed the Gang of 8 bill, the comprehensive amnesty bill, then this would never have happened. But the Gang of 8 bill the President pushed so hard for would have dramatically increased incidents of criminal alien violence, officially legalizing dangerous offenders while handcuffing immigration officers from doing their jobs. Law enforcement professionals told us the Gang of 8 bill would have undermined the rule of law in America, not strengthened it. These are the people who know.

Chris Crane and Ken Palinkas, presidents of the National ICE Council that represents all ICE officers, and the USCIS union, respectively--these two leaders of these two important organizations issued a statement on behalf of their officers--the key officers who enforce immigration law in America. This is what our Federal law officers had to say about the President's idea that the Gang of 8 bill would fix these kinds of problems:

The [Gang of Eight] proposal will make Americans less safe and it will ensure more illegal immigration--especially visa overstays--in the future. It provides legalization for thousands of dangerous criminals while making it more difficult for our officers to identify public safety and national security threats. .....

They go on to say:

The legislation was guided from the beginning by anti-enforcement special interests and, should it become law, will have the desired effects of these groups: Blocking immigration enforcement. .....

They go on to say:

[It is an] anti-public safety bill and an anti-law enforcement bill.

Imagine if the country's chief law enforcement officer--that is, the President of the United States--had spent that year trying to end sanctuary cities and deport criminal aliens and enforce the laws of the United States instead of trying to empower open borders activists and fighting against law enforcement and refusing to enforce whole sections of plain law through his Executive amnesty what could have been done to end unlawfulness in this country and turn this country around.

Just to show how deep the disagreement was between the Federal law officers and their supervisors--their politically-appointed supervisors--they actually filed a lawsuit in Federal court contending that their superiors were ordering them to violate their oath to enforce the laws of the United States. They sought relief in the Federal court. The district judge found merit in their claims, but ruled against them on a procedural issue. That case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

It is an incredible spectacle that law enforcement officers were suing their supervisors--the political appointees of the President--because they were being ordered to violate the plain law they had sworn to uphold.

It is time to get our priorities straight. We need immigration reform all right but reform that serves the interests of the American people--not international corporations, not anti-enforcement zealots, not the open borders lobby. They don't get to dictate to America how laws should be enforced. Immigration reform should mean improving immigration controls, not further weakening or eliminating them.

Just yesterday it was reported that a six-time deported illegal alien in Arizona was charged in a felony hit-and-run of a mother and her two young children who were seriously injured in the crash--six times deported, he returns.

When they return, do they not go to jail? Are we just going to continue to deport them time after time with no real consequence?

Mr. President, 121 homicides have been committed by aliens who were released from ICE custody over the last few years. People who were released after being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, illegally here--not deported but were released--have murdered 121 people.

So over 170,000 criminal aliens with final orders of removal are walking our streets. ICE releases tens of thousands of criminal aliens every year into our communities. The policies of this administration have effectively nullified law in a host of areas. That is plain fact.

I have talked to the officers personally. I know what the policies are. I know the effects of these policies are exactly what the administration wanted, exactly what the special interests wanted, exactly what the ACLU wanted, exactly what La Raza wanted. That is what they have been asking for. That is what this administration has delivered.

Now, when a murder occurs which becomes national news, they say that it is not our fault; it is Congress's fault.

These actions have effectively nullified plain law. George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley--who supported President Obama's reelection--has documented that. These are facts. The number of acceptable crimes committed by illegal aliens is zero.

Congress must take action now to protect all Americans, including the millions of dutiful immigrants who are in our country, many of them in high-crime areas, to protect them from criminal gangs and violent offenders.

Just recently, I, along with Senators Vitter, Perdue, Cotton, Inhofe, and Boozman, introduced the Michael Davis, Jr. and Danny Oliver in Honor of State and Local Law Enforcement Act, a bill named for two sheriff's deputies in California who were murdered by an illegal alien with an extensive criminal record, and, I thought, three deportations. Talking to the widows of these officers recently, I am told that he may have been deported four times--and had an extensive criminal record.

So this bill is a companion to the House bill introduced earlier this year by the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security Trey Gowdy. It is a good bill.

Our bill is similar. In addition to enhancing cooperation with States and local law enforcement and eliminating loopholes that allow criminal aliens to obtain immigration benefits, this bill would constitute a clear, strong, and responsible response to sanctuary jurisdictions and other government actions. Specifically, it would withhold Federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with the enforcement of Federal immigration laws or do not honor Federal immigration detainers, provide immunity to jurisdictions that honor detainers and hold aliens until ICE can pick them up, and provide a general sense of Congress that ``the Department of Homeland Security has probable cause to believe that an alien is inadmissible or deportable when it issues a detainer'' for an alien. That would clear up one of the loopholes being cited here to excuse some of these actions.

By the way, I believe it is 300 sanctuary cities and counties in the country out of 17,000 or so law enforcement jurisdictions. Some of them are quite large cities: Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles.

The passage of these sections alone could do more to combat sanctuary jurisdictions and protect the people of those communities and really the country from criminal aliens than what this administration has accomplished in the 7 years or so it has been in office.

It is time for Congress to make its first item of business the immediate passage of legislation to cut off Federal law enforcement moneys to sanctuary cities. Not one more parent should lose a son or daughter because American cities are harboring criminals. In any State--like mine, I was attorney general of Alabama--one jurisdiction is prosecuting a person for a crime, and when that is completed and another one has a warrant against them, they

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file a detainer. When you are finished with the criminal, he is sent back, whether he is acquitted or whether he is convicted. This is basic law enforcement. It goes on in every jurisdiction in this country.
The Federal Government holds people for State jurisdictions and the State jurisdictions hold people for the Federal Government. I was a Federal prosecutor for 12 years. It is done all the time. It is shocking to me--absolutely shocking--that a great city of the United States of America would not honor a detainer by the U.S. Government.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should not second-guess why it is issued or not. It is up to that jurisdiction to try or acquit or treat responsibly the person they are now prepared to release to them. To ignore that is a breach of the most fundamental relationships between Federal law enforcement, and it is done for political reasons by political mayors, generally, and city councils to try to win votes, I suppose. It has no principle in fact.

I am also calling on Congress to move toward a series of measures, whether as stand-alone bills, in appropriations measures or in any other planned legislation, to establish immigration reforms that serve the interests of all lawful residents of the United States living here today. These are some things we need to do:

End the release of criminal aliens from Federal custody. We cannot just let them go after having been convicted of a crime. They need to be deported. The law says they shall be deported. It has been ignored.

Cut off visas to foreign countries that will not repatriate their aliens. It is an absolute outrage that countries like China refuse to take back people who are lawfully deported by the United States. Yet they want us to give visas to them. We should cut off funding. We should cut off their visas until they agree to promptly take back these individuals. That is the whole basis of international visa law. All nations know that. Most nations take their nationals back promptly. This refusal by these countries backs up our system, costs us millions of dollars in housing, and all kinds of other additional problems. It needs to end. We can end it just like that if the President would take action. The law requires it. The President doesn't really need a law to fix that one.

Suspend visas to countries with high overstay rates. Some of these countries have this huge number that get a visa and never return home and they reach these higher rates. We don't have to keep giving visas to countries whose residents don't return like they are supposed to and at the time they are supposed to.

We need to close the asylum loopholes and eliminate fraud. This is a huge issue and can be greatly abused. We need to end the catch and release at the border with mandatory detention and repatriation for illegal border crossers. This administration has ended Operation Streamline, which is a very effective policy. It started during the Bush administration and was continued for a while under President Obama. Now they have undermined that.

We need to protect the work site with E-Verify. If a person can't establish they are here lawfully with a lawful Social Security number, they don't need to be employed.

We need to curtail an oversupply of foreign work visas to protect American jobs first. The only immigration measures politicians should be discussing today are those that protect Americans, that protect American security and safety and American jobs and American communities. More than enough has been done for the special interests. They have had their day. They had their day too long.

Whether we are talking about employees at Walt Disney in Florida, unemployed construction workers in California or truck drivers in North Dakota, it is time for the needs of Americans who are out of work to come first. We don't have enough jobs for Americans. We don't need to bring in more foreign workers.

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Mr. SESSIONS. There is no more basic need than ensuring that all Americans live in a safe, secure, and peaceful community. I believe the legislation I have offered will take us in that direction. It is sound. It is responsible. It is consistent with American law. It is well within all of the constitutional requirements. I hope my colleagues will be able to study it as time goes by and pass it into law.

I yield the floor.

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