When Did Police Become Protection for Illegal Aliens?

Recently, the Vineland Police Department in New Jersey arrested alleged child rapist Luciano Trejo-Dominguez. Around the same time, the Westchester County Department of Public Safety in New York arrested another suspected child rapist, Joaquin Rodriguez Quiroz.

Both men are illegal aliens. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) filed detainers requesting that they be held for arrest on immigration warrants. Nevertheless, both were released from custody pursuant to sanctuary policies. Upon discharge, both Trejo-Dominguez and Quiroz disappeared and are now fugitives from justice.

In 2018, the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General issued the “Immigrant Trust Directive” which prohibits state and local law enforcement officers from assisting ICE in any meaningful way. Also in 2018, the Westchester County Board of Legislators passed a sweeping sanctuary bill known as the “Immigrant Protection Act.” That act, in essence, requires Westchester County employees to ignore all immigration violations unless an illegal alien has illegally re-entered the country after a prior deportation, has been convicted of an aggravated felony or is believed to have engaged in terrorist activity.

These deliberate attempts to hobble ICE in its efforts to protect the American public from violent, dangerous foreign nationals are part of a distressing trend that has swept across the United States like a dread disease. Since the election of Donald Trump, the number of sanctuary jurisdictions in the United States has nearly doubled.

That is particularly disturbing with regard to Trejo-Dominguez and Quiroz. Had the Vineland Police Department or the Westchester County Department of Public Safety acted responsibly, both offenders could have been removed from our streets pending trial, with a virtual guarantee that they would not prey upon any other children. However, they are now unlikely to be caught until they harm another innocent minor – or ICE happens to get extremely lucky and catch them in an enforcement sweep.

Vineland sits about 50 minutes from Philadelphia, which is the sixth largest city in the United States, with a population of roughly 1.5 million people. Westchester County is a suburb of New York City, which is the largest city in the U.S., with a population of approximately 8.4 million people. Both communities are situated within densely populated metropolitan enclaves with large immigrant communities. And neither the City of Brotherly Love, nor the Big Apple, cooperates with ICE.

In the summer of 2018, the Philadelphia Police Department began refusing to share information with ICE and terminated the Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System, a program that allowed ICE to access information about criminals arrested in the city. It is not known how many dangerous illegal alien felons have been turned loose on the streets of Philadelphia.

And, according to the Daily News, the New York Police Department denied all ICE requests to detain immigrants in custody from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2019. As a result, 2,916 illegal alien criminals were released into American communities, rather than being locked up by ICE.

Finding two bad guys in the nearly 23 million people who live in the New York – Philadelphia megalopolis makes looking for a needle in a haystack sound easy. And that’s if the two miscreants in question stay local. There’s now a web of safe zones crisscrossing America where police refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities makes local law enforcement agencies complicit in illegal alien crime against innocent members of local communities.

One wonders when our law enforcement officials got it into their heads that their primary responsibility is protecting the “rights” of illegal alien thugs, rather than looking out for the law abiding. But one thing is certain, irresponsible sanctuary policies will only lead to more innocent victims of totally preventable crimes, like Mollie Tibbets and Kate Steinle.