The result of the 2024 presidential election was about more than just selecting our country’s chief executive for the next four years. It effectively closed the curtain on America’s flirtation with several seductive but ultimately ruinous policies, chief among them the concept of sanctuary cities. Like all ideas that promise utopia, it has delivered hellish outcomes.
Whatever voters thought of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris personally, the election served as a referendum on the anti-borders immigration policies of the Biden administration. By a respectable margin, the people rejected those policies and demanded a return to government prioritizing its own citizens over foreign lawbreakers.
It is no mystery what prompted the clear thumbs-down. After being propagandized for years about how “immigrants make us stronger,” the majority of Americans finally reached their threshold for accepting the crime, squalor, and cost that comes with allowing more than 10 million illegal aliens to flood the country in just four years.
The central drivers of this misery have been sanctuary cities. The idea that left-leaning communities could act as lawless fiefdoms by harboring illegal aliens was wildly popular in college faculty lounges and among progressive social media influencers, but was an utterly calamitous when put into practice.
For several decades, sanctuary laws were not a national issue. As long as the number of illegal aliens in the country stayed at a somewhat manageable level, the policies of a few wacky mayors and city councils were tolerated by most Americans as an annoyance rather than a five-alarm fire.
That all changed on Jan. 20, 2021, when the newly inaugurated Joe Biden signed a flurry of executive orders that reversed Trump’s law-and-order border policies and essentially put the illegal immigration activists in charge of the federal government. What followed was an historic stampede of foreign nationals into the country. Sanctuary mayors claimed with great bravado that their cities could handle the stress test. As it turned out, they failed miserably.
With a tsunami of illegal aliens pouring into the country, the lure of welfare benefits, and protection from deportation, every dark scenario predicted by sanctuary critics seemed to come true. Cities were overrun with illegal migrants and were forced to use schools, airports, and even police stations as ad hoc shelters. Laken Riley, Mollie Tibbets, Aiden Clark and too many other innocent Americans lost their lives due to the crimes or negligence of people who should never have been in the country. Taxpayers picked up the tab to house illegal aliens in luxury hotels, while Venezuelan gangs terrorized cities that were now bankrupt and strewn with the homeless veterans displaced from shelters to make room for these new arrivals.
In the dying days of the Biden presidency, the criminal behavior of illegal noncitizens has gone from appalling to shocking. A Guatemalan illegal alien is facing murder and arson charges for allegedly lighting a sleeping woman on fire on a New York City subway train. As Los Angeles County battled with historic fires that destroyed roughly 12,000 homes and other structures, police arrested Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, a Mexican national in the U.S. illegally, after onlookers said he was trying to start fires with a blowtorch.
The surest sign that public opinion is dramatically shifting is to watch the behavior of fence-sitting politicians. In 2016 when Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.) was the state’s lieutenant governor, he said sanctuary cities “make everybody safer.” This week he co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, which requires law enforcement officials to arrest and detain illegal aliens who have committed crimes. Fetterman said he doesn’t know why anyone finds it controversial that people illegally in the U.S. who commit crimes “need to go.”
Make no mistake, there will always be dead enders who will cling to their fantasies of sanctuary utopia. That would include Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who virtue signaled on cable news that he was willing to go to jail for interfering with Trump border czar Tom Homan’s coming deportation operations. It should be noted, however, that Johnston quickly did an about-face when Homan called his bluff and welcomed the chance to arrest the mayor.
As Los Angeles was being Dresdenized by wildfires and struggling with a lack of water, personnel, and supplies, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration believed it was important to devote resources toward working to “Trump-proof” the state against the deportation of alien criminals. Even in a deep-blue state like California, residents who have lost their homes may finally see the folly of supporting sanctuary policies to the detriment of basic community needs.
Sanctuary cities will not go away overnight, but their days are clearly numbered. The American people were more than generous in entertaining this quixotic social engineering experiment but have now rejected it as the catastrophe it is. Future generations may someday embrace sanctuary cities as a new, feel-good idea that needs to be implemented against all historical precedents. The burden will be on those of us who lived through this time to loudly say, “never again.”
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