Despite growing pressure from members of both parties, President Obama has remained mute on the issue of “sanctuary cities” – cities that refuse to comply with federal immigration laws.
Sanctuary cities have been in the headlines again since Kathryn Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco earlier this month. Despite having been convicted of a number of felonies and deported five times, the killer was set free before the murder because San Francisco refuses to observe federal immigration restrictions.
On Tuesday, the House Appropriations Committee voted to block sanctuary cities from getting certain federal grants as part of a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security. House Republicans also grilled Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson over why Obama has allowed these cities to disobey federal law.
In one particularly disgraceful exchange, Johnson was asked by Rep. Steve Chabot whether the administration had reached out to the Steinle family.
Johnson’s mind-boggling answer was “To who?”
The President himself has been totally AWOL, failing to so much as acknowledge Steinle’s tragic preventable murder.
Perhaps he is keeping his mouth shut because he knows that Kathryn Steinle’s blood is on his hands. For too long, he has taken a completely hands-off approach to immigration, refusing to simply enforce the laws as they are written. Instead, he has let local politicians choose for themselves which laws they want to obey.
Kathryn Steinle is not the first American to pay the price for Obama’s permissiveness. As Marc Thiessen pointed out in a Washington Post column earlier this week, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently admitted that the Obama had released no less than “121 unique criminal aliens who had an active [deportation] case at the time of release and were subsequently charged with homicide-related offenses.”
All 121 of those people died for one simple reason – the President refused to do his job.
