Sanctuary cities, illegal immigrants, and crime

Hans von Spakovsky writes at Daily Signal,

There has been a fiery debate over the past few weeks about illegal aliens and crime, which has intensified with the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco by a seven-time felon and five-time deportee as the direct result of the city’s sanctuary policy.

What seems to have been overlooked in the back and forth on this is some of the very disturbing, actual data on crimes committed by illegal aliens, which should concern every American—particularly those who live in sanctuary cities like New Orleans or San Francisco that release criminal aliens rather than turning them over to the Department of Homeland Security.

As Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Study outlines, Department of Homeland Security records show that in just one eight-month period in 2014, more than 8,100 deportable aliens were released by sanctuary jurisdictions. Three thousand of them were felons and 62 percent had a prior criminal record. Nineteen hundred were later rearrested a total of 4,300 times on 7,500 different offenses.

Thus, these sanctuary policies directly victimized thousands of the residents of these sanctuary cities who were subjected to assaults, burglaries, sexual assaults, thefts and even murders that would not have occurred except for these sanctuary policies.

...If the over 134,000 aliens released by the administration in just the past two years follow the pattern of those aliens studied by the GAO in 2005, they will commit hundreds of thousands of more crimes, victimizing countless innocent Americans in crimes that could have been prevented.

How many Americans have to be assaulted, injured, raped or killed, or have their homes, cars and personal property burglarized, stolen or damaged before both the federal government and local governments like San Francisco will finally do what is necessary to lock up criminal aliens who are a danger to the safety and lives of the public?

Read more here.