Tag: Sanctuary Cities

Last night I had the honor of joining guest host Jesse Watters on Fox News Channel’s top-rated O’Reilly Factor. Our topic was sanctuary cities.

Listen carefully to the actual questions I was asked and tell me if I answered them. One of my goals as a guest is to always answer the question asked, since I get frustrated when people avoid my questions when I’m the host.

One of the things I find incredibly hypocritical (as so much is in politics) from the right, is this topic in particular: states rights and sovereignty. I understand concern for the rule of law and sovereignty of our nation. I’ll provide the answers to that in a moment. But here, the federal government cannot force your local sheriff to do their bidding. The locally elected sheriff is responsible to the people who elected him or her.

Federalism

Why can’t the federal government make your sheriff do what they want, like hold a prisoner past his/her release date due to an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) retainer? This was clearly answered by the late Justice Antonin Scalia writing the majority opinion in Printz v. United States in 1997.

Here, the federal government wanted your local sheriff to do background checks on firearm sales. A sheriff sued saying that he didn’t have to do the work of the feds. And won.

For the second amendment supporters, Scalia wrote that we have a system of dual sovereignty, states rights and federal rights, and they are independent of one another. Therefore, the federal government cannot violate states rights by making them act in a federal role. This would violate the Constitutional separation of powers.

Hence, when ICE issues a detainer to your sheriff to hold someone, that is ICE’s job to not burden the sheriff and they are solely responsible. The sheriff can choose to cooperate, but is not compelled to do so.

And for the guns rights folks: When the Democrats are in power again and pass an even stricter gun law, do you want your sheriff compelled to take your gun by Washington D.C.? No? This is that rule that prevents your sheriff from doing the bidding of the federal government.

In the communities that have chosen to be sanctuary cities, those communities have the power over the sheriff on whether or not to cooperate with ICE. Nobody in another state or in the federal government has the power to control your local sheriff.

Further, I strongly support all sheriffs working with ICE today to deport criminals with a citizenship other than U.S. This means people in the U.S. who are drunk driving, theft, assault, felonies, etc. What I don’t support is ICE grabbing undocumented parents while dropping off their U.S. citizen children at school. And yes, there are 5.5 million Americans with undocumented parents.

Now, we never did directly address Governor Abbott of Texas. I am not familiar with the Texas Constitution, but that would be up to how they structured their state government and whether the governor has the right to jail sheriffs for not cooperating with ICE.

Solution

I used to be harder on illegal immigration, although I’ve always been against mass deportation or a deportation force. There really is an easy, three-part solution.

1. Implement functional work visa programs that are strictly enforced for violations. Many undocumented people are here to work and are not interested in becoming citizens. If we have the available jobs, make sure the employers pay a fee to the enforcement agency that allows full enforcement and implement hefty fines for violations.
2. Enforce E-Verify on all employers in the United States. Click HERE to learn all about it. And then strictly enforce a very large fine for each infraction found, something like a firm $25,000 fine per infraction.
3. Once the first two are done, we can re-address the remaining people without documentation and sanctuary cities. There is no need for an expensive and barely functional wall. It is economics, not physics.

What do you think?