Top Ten List of Sanctuary Cities and Counties with the Worst Crime Rates
By Deborah Lambert
If you think it’s unusual to see a Top Ten List of the “worst” in a category, you’re not alone. However, The Washington Examiner recently provided some important information, especially for those of us who live in the Washington, DC suburbs, by releasing a list of Sanctuary Cities and Counties with the Worst Crime Rates, which includes three counties located right outside our nation’s capital.
The TOP TEN communities on the Immigration Reform Law Institute list are as follows:
- San Francisco
- New York
- Minneapolis
- Philadelphia
- Seattle
- Chicago
- TIE: Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia
- Prince George’s County, Maryland
- Boston
- Santa Clara County, California
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) is the affiliated legal organization of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. It is described as “the only public interest non-profit law firm in the United States devoted exclusively to protecting the rights and interests of Americans in immigration-related matters.”
“Sanctuary policies are absolute poison for America,” according to Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “They are unconstitutional — a violation of the Supremacy Clause — and threaten the integrity of our republic. More importantly, sanctuary policies bring violent crime and murder that is entirely preventable.”
The Trump administration has tried to rein in sanctuary policies, and The Washington Examiner disclosed that “ICE officials have long claimed that having access to criminal illegal immigrants in jails is safer for them than hunting them down once they have been released.”
Information for the IRLI report was based on community crime statistics, which named San Francisco, New York City, and Minneapolis as the Top Three cities on its list. Not surprisingly, the cities with the most serious crime rates are represented in Congress by its top sanctuary city supporters, namely House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
Using Freedom of Information Act requests, the IRLI, which supports more stringent immigration controls, catalogued the number of “particularly egregious crimes” that have occurred since the communities adopted sanctuary policies.
Several cities, such as San Francisco, have experienced situations where information concerning several crimes by illegal immigrants has been requested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but refused access under sanctuary policies. The murder of Kate Steinle in 2015 on a San Francisco pier by an immigrant who was repeatedly deported became the inspiration for one of the most important issues on President Trump’s 2016 presidential platform.
Recently, the increase in sex crimes by illegal immigrants in Montgomery County, Maryland stirred a great deal of controversy that resulted in concerned citizens staging a rally with several hundred participants in front of the county courthouse that featured a prominent list of nationally known speakers.