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Washington, D.C. (September 11, 2019) [Excerpt from a blog by Andrew Arthur] - On the 18th anniversary of the darkest day in the last seven decades of American history, it is natural to look back at not only the events that led to the attacks of September 11, 2001, but also to review the lessons that were learned from the series of missed opportunities to prevent those attacks. Regrettably, many of those lessons have been forgotten, and many of the protections that were implemented in response have started to erode. Nowhere is that more true than in the so-called "sanctuary jurisdiction" movement that has gained strength in states and localities across America in recent months and years.
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For all of the breaking down of the "stovepipes" that existed between federal government entities in the aftermath of 9/11, recent years have seen many new barriers erected with respect to information relating to immigration violations, particularly between sanctuary states and localities on the one hand and the immigration-enforcement agencies on the other with respect to criminal aliens.
View the entire blog at: https://cis.org/Arthur/Back-September-10th-World
I have written, in recent posts, about such sanctuary policies (as well as "sanctuary-lite" policies) that have been instituted by two localities, Montgomery and Baltimore Counties in the state of Maryland. In one, I analyzed a sweeping executive order in Montgomery County captioned "Promoting Community Trust".
The following excerpt from the local news about the reaction of County Executive Marc Elrich (D) to that order and his county's attitude toward ICE will give you a flavor:
Speaking from the podium in a room full of activists and members of the press, Elrich opined that the mandate will strengthen trust and safety within the county of nearly 1.1 million residents.
"If ICE thinks it's really important, they can probably get here. You know, they've got cars. They know where the jail is. They know where the pre-release center is. ... It's not my job to do that part of their job," Elrich stated with a slight grin on his face. "If ICE manages to be outside the [jail] door when someone walks outside the door, I can't do anything about that, but if they ask us on anything other than a judicial order, then we're not holding them."
Elrich further explained that President Donald Trump's directives to ICE have discernable parallels to terrorism.
"It's really partly the definition of terrorism, to take the civilian population and subject them to constant fear, that is terrorism in its basic form," Elrich remarked. [Emphasis added.]
Yes, you read that correctly. Immigration enforcement is now akin to terrorism, and Montgomery County, Md., refuses therefore to aid in the effort to enforce the immigration laws.
It bears repeating that all 19 9/11 terrorists were aliens present in the United States, that Hani Hanjour (who flew America Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at 9:37 AM that morning) obtained a Maryland ID card on September 5, and that "Ziad Samir Jarrah, who was on board United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11, was issued a speeding ticket on September 9 in Maryland for driving 95 miles an hour in a 60-mile-per-hour zone."
More mundanely, however, sanctuary policies (and attitudes such as that expressed by County Executive Elrich) impede the ability of ICE agents to apprehend and remove criminal aliens, and to thereby prevent them from committing additional offenses (often if not usually targeting other aliens in their own communities). Future victims will suffer because there are sanctimonious public officials hustling for future votes and/or higher office, who believe that the simple enforcement of the immigration laws written by Congress is the equivalent of the murders committed on that awful Tuesday morning. There will not be (I hope) 2,977 victims killed in a matter of a couple of hours again, but there will be even more who will be killed, maimed, or robbed, or have their innocence stolen from them, one crime at a time, as criminal aliens are allowed to walk free instead of being removed, as the law stipulates.
The intelligence stovepipe of September 10, 2001, has now become the sanctuary jurisdiction brick wall of September 10, 2019. Trust me – I have lived through this scenario before, and I know how it ends: not well.
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