In the Trump era, politicians of every stripe have found innovative ways to use social media to draw attention to themselves. And in recent days, no one has drawn more attention than Oakland, Calif., Mayor Libby Schaaf.
After Schaaf learned that there would be an immigration raid in Northern California targeting about 1,000 illegal immigrants deemed “public safety threats” — most of them convicted felons or repeat immigration violators — she took to Twitter to warn everyone about it. As a result, federal officials say, they only managed to catch about 232 of their 1,000 or so targets.
Among those who slipped through the dragnet were at least two men who were both drunk drivers and convicted sex predators, one of them against a child.
It is important to note that the enforcement sweep Schaaf frustrated overwhelmingly targeted the same class of criminal aliens and illegal re-entrants that had remained high-priority targets under former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order.
But Obama isn’t president anymore, and now there’s an attention premium for acts of resistance. This may be why Oakland’s mayor chose to promote her own political career by helping people convicted of sex crimes, theft, assault, and illegal weapons possession escape deportation and continue victimizing the residents of her city.
Speaking of which, the weapons charges are especially interesting. Amid the current debate over Parkland, Fla., one might even ask what good it is to pass gun control laws and then give shelter to convicted criminal foreigners who have violated them.
In this era of #MeToo, it’s also worth asking how any reasonable person could help foreign sex criminals continue to prowl American streets when they could and should be expelled without another thought. It’s not as though the U.S. (and California in particular) is suffering from a shortage of sexual predators.
It was only very recently, during the 2016 presidential election, that Democrats embraced a new ideology that absolutely all immigration enforcement is evil, immoral, and racist. This is a thoroughly stupid position to take, such that not even an idealistic lefty like Obama was willing to embrace it in his governance. And insofar as it applies to criminal aliens, it is a political loser — a policy that polls show only one percent of the public agrees with.
We support making the United States welcome to many more legal immigrants than it is now. But every nation has a right to demand that immigrants enter as part of a lawful and orderly process that has been chosen through a constitutional legislative process. There is no right to sneak across the border or abscond on a visa and stay in the U.S.
Schaaf’s action, in helping violent criminals evade enforcement of duly enacted laws, has undercut both democratic participation and the rule of law. And more immediately, she has probably doomed some number of Californians — perhaps other immigrants — to be criminally victimized by someone who shouldn’t be in this country in the first place.
It would be a mistake to make a martyr of Schaaf by finding some legal justification for prosecuting her. It’s probably even a mistake for Trump to attack her on Twitter. Such things will only make her more popular, and in fact that was probably her plan all along.
But it would be an even bigger mistake for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to let this go, to continue to cooperate in the future with Oakland and other cities that have decided they are permitted to nullify federal law at the expense of their residents’ safety.
It’s not just that Schaaf and other mayors who seek to nullify federal law must be kept in the dark next time ICE conducts a sweep in their town. They must also lose whatever federal law enforcement grants they receive. These are wasted anyway on mayors who willingly endanger their citizens.
Those who thwart ICE’s apprehension of criminal aliens should also expect to have immigration agents find alternative means of doing their jobs. If local authorities choose not to share information with ICE but to share it instead with those whom ICE is trying to apprehend, then they should expect to have agents waiting outside their jails and courthouses to detain and deport convicted criminals.
No one wants that, but jurisdictions that try to nullify federal law should expect nothing less.
