Sanctuary cities and “bad hombres”

Kudos for The Olympian publishing “She voted for Trump. Now her husband is getting deported for a 16-year-old incident” (March 23). ICE is deporting a father of three children who runs a restaurant that employs twenty people. He has no criminal record.

This is why we support sanctuary cities. ICE is under pressure to deport the “bad hombres” President Trump mentioned in his campaign. Those “bad hombres,” however, are hard to find. They have extensive criminal records, know how to hide from ICE and the police, and often have the means to avoid deportation. So who does ICE go after? The low-hanging fruit: grandparents, students, families, wage-earners, and so on.

Who can blame them? After all, they have quotas to fill. But we who support the sanctuary city movement want to pressure ICE to do its real job, namely, going after those who have entered our country to fatten their own pockets at others’ expense — not to mention to murder, rape, and deal drugs. We would rather ICE devote its time and energy to apprehending those, rather than picking the low-hanging fruit. We prefer quality (apprehending the criminals) to quantity (apprehending productive members of our society.)

As for the complaints that immigrants reduce job opportunities for citizens, ever seen immigrant elevator operators? Telephone operators? Travel agents? Film developers? Automobile assemblers? If you really want to bring those jobs back, deport the robots and their technological buddies!

This story was originally published April 12, 2017 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Sanctuary cities and “bad hombres”."