Put ‘sanctuary city’ on the ballot so NYC voters can halt the migrant crime crisis
Your kids aren’t safe even in broad daylight.
Last week, an Ecuadorian migrant held two 13-year-olds, a girl and a boy, at knifepoint in a Queens park as they walked home from school.
He was arrested Tuesday for allegedly sexually assaulting the girl and stealing the teens’ phones.
There is a remedy.
In November, voters nationwide will get to choose between the Democratic Party’s open-border policy and Republican Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions who have come to the US illegally.
But New York City voters deserve to have an added choice on Election Day: that of keeping our lunatic “sanctuary city” laws that shield migrant criminals from deportation, or repealing those local ordinances.
Repeal would allow migrant criminals to be deported after their first offense — before they have a chance to go on to rape and murder.
Last week, eight members of the City Council’s Common Sense Caucus fired off a letter to the Charter Revision Commission — the body that holds the power to put questions on the ballot in November — explaining that the City Council has refused to repeal our disastrous sanctuary city laws.
Since the City Council won’t act, they argued, let voters decide.
Mayor Adams is ducking the issue, despite previously voicing support for expanding the city’s cooperation with federal immigration officials.
Now, though, his office says it’s the Charter Revision Commission’s job to choose whether the ballot question can go before New Yorkers.
The Ecuadorian molester, identified as Christian Geovanny Inga-Landi, was nabbed outside a deli on 108th St. when good Samaritans recognized him from sketches circulated by police.
Jeffrey Flores pounced on the creep and dragged him to the sidewalk with help from others.
“I got two little sisters, and I’m about to have a daughter on the way,” Flores said of the capture. “I don’t like that.”
Across the nation, gruesome crimes are fueling opposition to illegal migration among every voter demographic.
On Monday, Trump blamed Biden for the murder of Rachel Morin, 37, a mother of five who was raped and bludgeoned to death on a hiking trail in Maryland.
The 23-year-old illegal immigrant from El Salvador charged in that crime is believed to have previously murdered a woman in his home country and attacked a 9-year-old girl and her mother in a Los Angeles home invasion.
Only a tiny fraction of migrants are dangerous criminals, but the migrant-advocacy industrial complex — including the American Civil Liberties Union — insists that even the worst thugs deserve sanctuary from deportation after committing crimes in the United States.
Biden deserves the blame for allowing ruthless criminals to come across the border.
But sanctuary-city laws have opened us to an epidemic of crimes committed by repeat offenders who entered illegally.
New York’s over-the-top generosity makes the crime wave even more infuriating.
The Ecuadorian mugger captured Tuesday gave a taxpayer-supported shelter as his address, as many arrested migrants do.
He was walking around Queens, enjoying the good life on our tab, until he was recognized and captured.
In Michigan, Republicans are renewing efforts to ban sanctuary cities statewide after an illegal immigrant with multiple arrests on his record murdered Ruby Garcia, 25, in March.
Sanctuary laws, said GOP state representative Matt Hall, “invite proven criminals like Ruby’s killer to come where they can hide from deportation, even if they’re arrested for another crime.”
Amen.
When Biden and Trump debate next week, expect Biden to vilify Trump’s deportation pledge, which leftists like writer Radley Balko have blasted as the “cruelest, most illiberal, most openly authoritarian campaign promise in modern US history.”
Truth is, Trump’s promise may be his most powerful political weapon — and it’s the opposite of authoritarian.
Deporting illegals is what the law, enacted by the people’s elected representatives, requires.
The federal Immigration and Nationality Act states that when someone crosses the border claiming to seek asylum, that person “shall be detained until their claim is adjudicated.”
Most of them never qualify for asylum protection — only 14% historically — but Biden is flouting the law and waving in millions of them nonetheless.
And he’s ignoring public opinion at his peril.
A whopping 62% of registered voters favor deporting anyone living in the US illegally, according to a CBS News poll.
Trump has yet to lay out the details of his deportation plan.
But deporting criminals is the place to start — and doing so will require the cooperation of local law enforcement, along with an end to sanctuary-city policies that coddle lawbreakers.
It’s time to give law-abiding citizens sanctuary and safety, not migrant criminals.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York.
Twitter: @Betsy_McCaughey