Sanctuary Cities
The left is currently in an uproar over the case of Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk who refused to issue a marriage license to a gay couple as an act of civil disobedience. Critics have rightly pointed out that as an employee of the government, Davis has no right to deny licenses based on her own beliefs. She is an agent of the government and thus must enforce the rules of the government, even if she disagrees with them.
What many people do not realize is that there are many more public officials just like Kim Davis all across the country. In fact, there are entire cities that similarly choose to ignore federal laws: sanctuary cities. These cities refuse to abide by federal immigration laws, ignoring the federal government and taking immigration into their own hands. Sanctuary cities, as defined by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), “protect criminal aliens from deportation by refusing to comply with ICE detainers or otherwise impede open communication and information exchanges between their employees or officers and federal immigration agents.” According to CIS, there are over 200 city, county, and state governments in the U.S. that meet this definition.
Were liberals consistent in their outrage, they would be fighting the continued existence of sanctuary cities and they would support recent measures taken by House Republicans to cut federal funding to these cities. Their refusal to do so is nothing short of unprincipled; apparently, it is okay for civil servants to pick and choose what laws to enforce as long as they choose to enforce laws that liberals like and ignore the laws that liberals don’t.
The arguments offered for the existence of sanctuary cities are thin. San Francisco’s Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi and Mayor Ed Lee have argued that the relaxed immigration policy allows those who are here illegally to feel safer. Oftentimes, they claim, illegal immigrants are scared of the police, creating environments that are ripe with crime. Thus, supporters allege that sanctuary cities lead to less crime.
Ignoring the questionable truthfulness of the alleged crime decrease, the issue with this argument and other arguments in favor of sanctuary cities is that they are essentially justifying allowing government employees to decide what laws to enforce based on their own personal beliefs. The government has a substantial national security interest in keeping track of who is and is not in the country, and sanctuary cities clearly undermine the government’s efforts to keep people safe. Illegal immigrants live outside of the system the government cannot keep track of them and doesn’t even know that they are in the country. This poses a serious security threat that government must deal with. Clearly, many liberals disagree with the government’s chosen method for handling illegal immigrants. But it is unreasonable for them to support ignoring the law due to this disagreement.
This is not to say that opponents of immigration laws should have no recourse to fight what they deem to be unjust laws. People can and should fight to repeal laws that they disagree with, and refusing to obey the laws as an act of civil disobedience is certainly one way to express disagreement. But civil disobedience is only justified in extreme cases, such as to protest laws endorsing slavery and segregation. To claim that laws which prevent people from illegally entering the country are on par with laws declaring that people can be bought and sold is a truly incredible leap. Civil disobedience cannot be justified when it threatens the security of innocent people. It cannot be justified simply because a law conflicts with one’s personal beliefs; if that were true, civil disobedience would almost always be justified, and that would lead to anarchy. Thus, just as Kim Davis was wrong to choose her personal beliefs over enforcing the government’s laws, so too are city and county officials who refuse to comply with federal immigration laws.