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The City Council passed two bills last week to ensure that New York remains a sanctuary for illegal aliens — even if they’re violent, convicted felons, known gang members or on the terrorist watch list.
Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has spent years chipping away at the ability of the federal government to detain and deport illegals who wind up at Rikers Island.
Now she’s taken it to a new level: She’s shutting down Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s offices at Rikers, and ending virtually all city cooperation with ICE.
Until now, arrestees at Rikers had their names run through a federal database of illegal immigrants. ICE then went after those most likely to pose a threat, particularly previously-convicted felons.
The feds would issue a “detainer,” a request for the city to hold these people for an extra 48 hours, so it could pick them up and put them into deportation proceedings.
These weren’t just people who were in the United States in violation of the law. They’d also been arrested for a crime serious enough to wind them up on Rikers Island, and had other serious “risk markers,” from gang membership to terror ties to actual US violent-felony convictions.
In other words, the policy was not a means of generally rounding up otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants, but a way to ensure that the few truly bad apples among them were sent home.
But the council-passed bills — set to become law once Mayor de Blasio signs on, as he’s said he will — essentially offer sanctuary for all but the most egregiously violent offenders.
