The nation’s top immigration enforcer challenged the left-wing narrative that promotes “sanctuary cities,” saying that liberal-run places that embrace illegal immigrants without following the law are “inherently” more unsafe than other areas.
Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Patrick Lechleitner told Fox News in an interview Friday that sanctuary cities make all of America less safe.
“Sanctuary jurisdictions are inherently more unsafe because they’re letting these individuals out who have serious convictions,” Lechleitner said.
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Sanctuary areas are called such because they have declared their unwillingness to cooperate with federal authorities in deporting illegal immigrants, including those who commit crimes. Couple that with a liberal soft-on-crime philosophy often found in Democrat-run communities, and sanctuary status readily tends to put more people at risk.
“What makes it very important is — people lose sight or maybe not aware if they’re not in this space as much — is there is a surge of individuals, noncitizens at the border, but those individuals go somewhere,” Lechleitner told Fox News.
“Every time you’re dealing with increased numbers, there is increased risk,” he said.
“These individuals, many of them have various forms of criminality, are coming through. And these, the migrants that are, you know, going through are being preyed upon either by human smugglers, traffickers or other criminal organizations,” Lechleitner added.
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“Anything that happens out there in the community is going to be inherently more dangerous, because you don’t have control of the situation, even if you have a very good operational plan,” he said. “It’s just more dangerous and has more room for error than something in a controlled environment.”
Underscoring his point is a study released last month by the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter enforcement of immigration law.
The group looked at federal enforcement of immigration law under President Joe Biden relative to former President Donald Trump. The results were startling, as under Biden the federal government reports:
- 57% decrease in arrests of criminal aliens
- 68% decrease in at-large arrests of criminal aliens, which tends to happen during sweeps of certain areas
- 44% decrease in detainer requests issued on criminal aliens
- 67% decrease in deportations of criminal aliens
- 55% decrease in immigration-related criminal convictions
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As CIS noted in its study, “Despite the Biden administration’s claim that their immigration policies are designed to focus ICE on dangerous criminal aliens, its own data reveals that critics of its policies are correct to raise concerns that the administration’s real intention is to undermine ICE’s mission and gut immigration enforcement, rather than improve public safety.”
“Tens of thousands of criminal aliens have been allowed to remain in the United States as a result of the Biden administration’s extremely narrow immigration enforcement policies,” the report added.
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