The Killing of Sanctuary Cities

If you were in the New York area on March 2, 2017, it would have been difficult for you to miss the news of thirteen members of the gang MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) charged by way of federal indictments for the murders of seven people in the Long Island community of Brentwood, NY.

Among the homicide victims were two girls, Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, who were both around sixteen years of age. According to NBC New York, “Mickens' brutally beaten body was found on a tree-lined street in Brentwood Sept. 13, a day before her 16th birthday. A day later, the beaten body of Cuevas, her lifelong friend, was discovered in the wooded backyard of a nearby home.”

Nisa Mickens reportedly was the sort to “clap back” at MS-13 members, in person and on social media. For that she was bludgeoned with baseball bats and slashed with machetes.  Kayla Cuevas died the same way for being Mickens’ friend.

People interviewed by the local newspaper spoke of their great “relief” after the indictments. And small wonder, for MS-13 has been terrorizing their community for some time now:

“In recent months, an estimated 125 suspected MS-13 members were arrested on Long Island. Law enforcers have linked to the gang to at least 30 other homicides on Long Island since 2010.” 

The MS-13 gang is so dangerous, in fact, that on the very same day these gang members were being arrested on Long Island, two more members were being charged in Houston, TX, for the “the kidnapping and torture of one victim, and the ‘satanic’ killing of a second.” The kidnap victim is a female who was held for about eighteen days by MS-13 and was repeatedly raped by them. She is only 14 years old.

What may have gone missing in the reports about MS-13’s day is that the gang is predominantly composed of illegals. In Brentwood, ten of the thirteen indicted gang members were illegals, as are the two on trial in Houston.

As Judicial Watch reported in 2015, “The MS-13 is a feared street gang of mostly Central American illegal immigrants that’s spread throughout the U.S. and is renowned for drug distribution, murder, rape, robbery, home invasions, kidnappings, vandalism and other violent crimes.” They grew in strength during the influx of unaccompanied children that swarmed our borders from Central America beginning in 2012 -- an influx that was encouraged by the Obama administration.

It is also important to mention that both New York City and Houston are essentially sanctuary cities. Houston's Mayor Sylvester Turner recently drew cheers from supporters by defying President Trump’s executive order to stop funding Sanctuary Cities with his proclamation that Houston is and will remain a “welcoming city” for illegals.

This, despite a Texas Tribune report:

“MS-13 has...evolved into a...sophisticated organization, sustaining itself through drug and human trafficking, extortion and forced recruitment. According to the 2016 Congressional Research Service analysis, some members also freelance and perform contract killings for some of Mexico’s drug cartels.

Only about 800 of the estimated 20,000 gang members in the greater Houston area belong to the MS-13, according to the [Department of Public Safety] . But the group’s notoriety is enough that the agency rates it a Tier 1 threat — the highest possible — in its annual gang threat assessment.” 

New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio similarly stated that “We’re going to defend all of our people regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status.”

New York City has defended illegals so well that city officials defied orders from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to hold Estivan Rafael Marques Velasquez, an illegal who confessed to being a MS-13 member.

The unwillingness of Sanctuary City mayors to cooperate with ICE, and the ability of criminals to exploit this unwillingness is nothing new. A 2014 report by the Center of Immigration Studies uncovered that 8,145 arrested illegals were released after local officials rejected ICE requests that they continue to be held, despite 1,909 (23%) of these illegals having a “prior misdemeanor conviction or charges related to violence, threats, assaults, sexual abuse or exploitation, driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol, unlawful flight from the scene of an accident, unlawful possession of a firearm or other deadly weapon, distribution or trafficking of a controlled substance, or other significant threat to public safety.”

1,867 of these illegals who were released by officials despite a detention request from ICE were subsequently re-arrested on other charges.

The most infamous example of an illegal alien released in defiance of a detention request by ICE is, of course, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who was in federal prison on March 26, 2015, but was sent to -- and soon released in -- the sanctuary city of San Francisco, despite the wishes of ICE. On the first of July, 2015, Mr. Lopez-Sanchez murdered Kathryn "Kate" Steinle, a 32 year old woman engaged to be married, on a pier where she was walking arm-in-arm with her father.

Mayors and other politicians who support sanctuary cities do so with righteous zeal, and have no regard for the price the citizens they are sworn to serve must pay for that zeal.

Sometimes that price is solely financial. In New Jersey -- arguably already the highest taxed state in the nation -- there is even a bill to raise another $15.7 billion in taxes to reimburse the funding that will be lost to the state’s sanctuary cities due to President Trump’s executive order cutting off their funding.

Too often however, that zeal must be paid for with the lives of American citizens. Sanctuary city pols who believe they are doing good should be required to attend the funerals of Nisa Mickens, Kayla Cuevas, Kate Steinle, and so many others victims of the illegals invited to live in and given shelter in communities that by right they did not belong. Perhaps that would dissuade them of that notion.

-- DK