Yesterday, Mayor Adams joined the mayors of Boston, Denver and Chicago in marching into the lion’s den for a six-hour House Committee on Oversight hearing on sanctuary jurisdictions. Even before it started, it was clear that this was not a fact-finding enterprise but one directed at berating the mayors for not marching in lockstep with President Trump’s harsh and cruel immigration agenda.
Prior to the hearing, the committee’s official Twitter account posted a movie trailer-like video set to ominous music attempting to tie the mayors and their cities’ policies to violent crime and disorder.
For a group of people with such a self-professed focus on crime, GOP officials and legislators seem to profoundly misunderstand — or more likely, intentionally obfuscate — what are actually crimes and what are not. It is not and has never been a crime to be present in the country without legal status.
Undocumented immigration status, such as a visa overstay, is a civil violation; even crossing the border without inspection is a misdemeanor. But that wasn’t the purpose of Wednesday’s show trial of sanctuary cities, said Chairman James Comer: “Let’s be clear, these policies only create sanctuary for criminals.”
A mayor presiding over a city that has duly passed laws preventing certain types of active cooperation with a federal police force pursuing civil violation is home rule, it’s federalism, it’s pushing back against an overbearing central government, all principles these exact same people otherwise claim to hold dear.
When there is a criminal warrant presented, the local cops, like the NYPD, of course join in to arrest the wanted offender.
Yet members of Congress kept insinuating or outright stating the falsehood that it is the responsibility of state and local governments to allow their law enforcement entities and other agencies to be co-opted in service to a federal function.
Aside from their own policy preferences, these mayors are constrained by their local laws. Adams — who also fielded questions from angry Democrats about his alleged deal with the White House and border czar Tom Homan to exchange the temporary dropping of federal charges against him for closer cooperation on immigration enforcement — could not snap his fingers and undo NYC’s sanctuary status even if he wanted to.
Florida GOP Rep. Anna Paulina Luna went a step further and announced that she would refer all four mayors to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. This follows Homan’s repeated calls for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be investigated over her “know your rights” education efforts, which are meant to educate constituents about the specific rights they have under the Constitution and federal law.
These investigations would be over what, exactly? The political crime of not supporting the president’s agenda and exercising lawful local power not to participate in it? Following local laws? Giving people a crash course in their existing legal protections against an aggressive and overzealous state police going after the ruler’s domestic enemies du jour?
That sort of thing certainly can be a crime in certain places, but not in the kind of government that we have long cherished here in the United States. If there’s one thing the GOP legislators demonstrated, it’s not that these mayors are out of control and ignoring the law, but that they are.
