After schools, hospitals and most recently courthouses, are intercity buses and bus stations the next place the open-borders crowd has decided should be immigration enforcement free zones?\u00a0 Where upholding our country\u2019s laws would, for some reason, be yet again some kind of inhumane outrage?\u00a0 It sure seems like it.<\/p>\n
Unlike the airlines, the bus lines don\u2019t always check ID<\/a>, or have ID requirements<\/a> as strict<\/a> as air travel.\u00a0 They\u2019re cheaper than flying.\u00a0 They don\u2019t typically scan baggage.\u00a0 And according to a spokesperson for Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)<\/a>, \u201ctransportation centers, including bus terminals, are often used by alien-smuggling and drug-trafficking organizations to move people, narcotics and contraband to interior destinations throughout the country.\u201d\u00a0 To a reasonable observer, that sounds like a dangerous law-enforcement priority, not somewhere that should be off limits.<\/p>\n But on October 1, the Spokane, Washington, City Council\u2019s Public Safety & Community Health Committee considered a proposed city ordinance (pgs. 82-95<\/a>) that would try to keep federal immigration authorities out of \u201cnonpublic areas\u201d of city property \u201cabsent a judicial criminal warrant\u201d signed by a judge.\u00a0 While the ordinance is much broader than just one building, all the documentation supporting it and news coverage<\/a> surrounding it focused entirely on the Spokane Intermodal Facility, a city-owned building that houses the local intercity bus terminal.\u00a0 And while the terminal\u2019s interior is open to the public, the council claims \u201c[t]he bus platform [itself]is a restricted area of the facility[.]\u201d<\/p>\n Since 2013, CBP indicates they\u2019ve made nearly 200<\/a> arrests there.\u00a0 According to the city council, \u201c[i]ndividuals who are detained are interrogated in an \u201cEmployee Area\u201d inaccessible to the public.\u201d\u00a0 So the ordinance would be far from academic, and set up the immediate possibility of a serious and potentially dangerous conflict between federal and local authorities.\u00a0 It appears to be the first of its kind, though it almost certainly won\u2019t be the last.<\/p>\n That\u2019s because illegal alien supporters have been gradually building up and pushing out their \u201coutrage\u201d narrative on the subject for a while now, presumably expecting local legislation like this to spring up at some point as just the next step.\u00a0 In January<\/a>, CBP boarded a bus in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and arrested an illegal alien from Jamaica; in part because it was recorded on cell-phone video, the incident went viral and was immediately taken up as a cause celebre<\/em> and deemed an outrage by all the usual suspects.\u00a0 In May, the ACLU sued the agency over immigration checks at a bus station in Maine.\u00a0 And in June<\/a>, Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckert claimed Greyhound might already be violating the city\u2019s anti-discrimination law by allowing immigration authorities access to their buses at the Intermodal Facility, which led both to the drafting of the proposed ordinance as well as yet another predictable ACLU lawsuit<\/a>.<\/p>\n Spokane City Councilmember Breann Beggs say the full council could consider the proposed ordinance before the end of October.\u00a0 But how\u2019s this for a crazy idea instead?\u00a0 Federal immigration law applies everywhere in the country, and law enforcement officers should be allowed to enforce it everywhere.