After years of complaining about liability lawsuits against doctors and businessmen that award millions to plaintiffs and enrich unscrupulous lawyers, conservatives may finally have a few lawsuits they can support.  Across the country, victims of illegal-alien crime are filing suit against businessmen who hire them and cities that protect them.  In other words, leftists who have used the law, courts, and police to shaft Americans on behalf of illegals may soon get the shaft themselves.

Two of the latest involve traffic fatalities.  In McMinnville, Tennessee, Steve and Bobbie Sweet have filed a $250 million lawsuit against Porter Roofing, which employed the illegal alien suspected of killing their daughter and friend in a hit-and-run wreck in September.  The Sweets allege Porter knew that Herlin “Gato” Alvarez was an illegal alien when they permitted him to drive its trucks without a valid driver’s license.  They also allege the roofing contractor created a shell company to skirt immigration law to hire illegals.  Alvarez is still at large.

Meanwhile, two women have filed a wrongful-injury claim against Denver, Colorado, in the case of an illegal alien, Francis Hernandez, who had been arrested 16 times.  In September, in the nearby city of Aurora, police allege, Hernandez plowed his Chevy Suburban at 78 mph into a Mazda pickup, killing its two occupants and sending the vehicle into a Baskin-Robbins.  The hurtling Mazda killed a two-year-old boy and injured the plaintiffs.  They may also sue the city of Denver because, they argue, it is a sanctuary city that protects illegals, in violation of state law.  “Despite these numerous arrests and the readily ascertainable illegal-immigrant status of Mr. Hernandez, at no time were proper procedures relating to the reporting, detention and handling of illegal immigrants followed by the law-enforcement agencies of the city of Denver,” their claim against the city says.  Other localities, including Aurora, may also be targets.

A third case involves San Francisco.  The Bologna family has filed a claim against and will likely sue the city because its sanctuary policy led directly to the murder of the family’s father and two brothers.  Edwin Ramos, a convicted felon and MS-13 gang member who was never deported, is charged with the crime.  The Bolognas got wise to the city’s illegal-alien shenanigans when the San Francisco Chronicle divulged Ramos’s juvenile-crime records, which included the attempted robbery of a pregnant woman.  “[O]fficials with the Juvenile Probation Department, relying on their interpretation of San Francisco’s sanctuary city ordinance, had not referred Ramos to federal immigration authorities for possible deportation,” the Chronicle reported.  The ordinance bars city officials from cooperating with federal crackdowns on illegal immigrants.”

Can the plaintiffs win?  Michael Heth-mon, general counsel of the Immigration Reform Law Institute, which has filed suits to challenge all sorts of policies that benefit illegals, told the Washington Times that these lawsuits usually fail, but as illegals keep murdering Americans and killing them in traffic wrecks, particularly by drunk driving, a plaintiff will eventually prevail.  “We’re on the cutting edge of the law, but it’s simply a matter of one case working its way through the court system, and as soon as one is successful, you’ll see the tort bar all over this.”

As well it should be.  Illegal aliens are routinely involved in drunk-driving fatalities and are conducting a crime wave against American citizens that would be considered an act of war in saner times.

Conservatives generally oppose liability lawsuits, particularly the patently fraudulent claims of negligence.  No one thinks a business should pay huge damage claims if its products are wrongly used.  Likewise, a city’s officials cannot predict when an illegal alien will commit murder or drunken vehicular homicide if they don’t know he’s in town.  But these lawsuits make a good point.  As with a business that knowingly sells a faulty product to an unsuspecting customer, officials who refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities know, in the legal-ese of the Ramos case, “it was reasonably foreseeable” that a violent felon released onto the streets would commit more crimes.  That’s called negligence.  Indeed, when it involves a convicted felon, it ought to be considered criminal negligence, and the officials should be prosecuted in criminal court, and not merely subject to civil damages for which taxpayers will pick up the tab.

Where this leaves the federal government, which has permitted illegal-alien anarchy to reign in big-city streets and refused to close the border, is open to question.  Lawsuits against Uncle Sam rarely succeed.

No matter.  These lawsuits will help average Americans bring some semblance of sanity back to their streets.  And they may do even more if a plaintiff collects millions for wrongful death from a city such as San Francisco.  For years, illegal aliens and their leftist allies have used lawsuits and the courts as weapons to steal property from and loot the bank accounts of Americans.

Now, those weapons have been turned around.