The Senate will vote on Tuesday on a bill that would deny federal law enforcement funds from going to cities that do not cooperate with the government in deporting illegal aliens.
“Under this commonsense legislation, sanctuary cities would lose federal funds if they maintain these dangerous policies,” he said. “We have to take this step in order to get these cities to do the right thing and stop undermining our immigration laws.”
Toomey said the GOP-led Senate will vote on the anti-sanctuary cities bill, which he is co-sponsoring with Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) next week.
“The Senate will vote on this legislation Tuesday,” he continued. “I urge you to speak out and encourage your Senators to vote for the Stop Sanctuary Policies Act and help keep our communities safe.”
The fight over sanctuary cities comes at time when Congress is gridlocked over reforms to federal immigration policies.
The Senate approved a high-profile immigration bill in 2013, but the House has refused to take up the measure.
The Obama administration has threatened to veto previous efforts to block funding to sanctuary cities, citing a 2014 executive order from Obama that directs federal officials to focus deportations on convicted criminals.
Toomey said in the weekly address that cutting off funding to cities that ignore federal immigration laws “should be a bipartisan effort.”
Unfortunately, it won’t be. Democrats see illegal immigrants as wards of the party and will never do anything to increase enforcement of immigration laws.
Meanwhile, the mighty New York Times editorial board has directed its wrath at Republicans for their “slander” of illegal immigrants:
These laws are a false fix for a concocted problem. They are based on the lie, now infecting the Republican presidential campaign, that all unauthorized immigrants are dangerous criminals who must be subdued by extraordinary means.
Of all the putrid lies ever published by the Times, that one might be the worst. Which Republican candidate has made the point that “all unauthorized immigrants are dangerous criminals who must be subdued by extraordinary means”? Not even Donald Trump has claimed that all illegal aliens are criminals. And no one has talked about “subduing” them by “extraordinary” means. It is partisan political fiction masquerading as an editorial.
The laws are a class-action slander against an immigrant population that has been scapegoated for the crimes of a few, and left stranded by the failure of legislative reform that would open a path for them to live fully within the law. And because crackdowns on sanctuary cities seek to thwart sound law-enforcement policies and the integration of immigrants, they are an invitation to more crime and mayhem, not less.
This is not what the Republicans want you to believe. They have seized on the tragic death of a woman, Kathryn Steinle, shot in July on a San Francisco pier by an unauthorized Mexican immigrant, to denounce that city’s sanctuary policies and those of other cities. Donald Trump, who began his campaign by slandering Mexico as a nation of drug-toting rapists, used the accused, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, as exhibit A. Like a racist pied piper, Mr. Trump has gotten his party to fall in line behind him. Two of his rivals, the demagogic Ted Cruz and the former immigration moderate Marco Rubio, have signed on to the Vitter bill.
The Daily Signal easily demolishes this partisan nonsense:
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.
Amazing how a “few” becomes thousands when a little scrutiny is applied. And CIS published another study that showed Homeland Security trying to deport about 25% of illegal aliens with criminal records — 195,000 out of 720,000.
And into this mess, sanctuary cities refuse to assist the government in deporting illegal aliens who pose a threat to the communities in which they are hiding. President Obama may veto the bill, or Senate Democrats might derail it. But sanctuary cities are now officially on notice that toleration of their defiance has an expiration date: January, 2017.
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