Prince William County has a deficit of around $10 million. Solution? Spend over $14 million over the next five years to deny services to immigrants:
Yup. Free bus tours for seniors is what keeps illegal immigrants in the country. Meanwhile, Takoma Park is living up to its reputation as the uberliberal municipality of the region by denying its police permission to pickup immigrants wanted for serious crimes, as Gilbert of the Granola Park blog reports:The supervisors committed just $325,000 yesterday toward the police measures, which are projected to cost $14.2 million over five years. County staff members have said that the costs will be minimal for the new service restrictions.
Programs that are now off-limits for illegal immigrants include bus tours for senior citizens, leadership training programs for adults, and rental and mortgage assistance. The measures also prohibit illegal immigrants from getting business licenses.
The INS agency, since renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now part of the Department of Homeland Security. It now maintains a data base of wanted persons that includes “deported felons.” According to the city’s background paper “deported felons” includes “persons who have been convicted of felony drug trafficking, felony firearms trafficking, or a serious violent crime” who have been deported but have re-ported themselves.
Chief Ricucci requested the council review sanctuary law and create a loophole that would allow city police to arrest these deported felons. This small change would keep the law, and the spirit of the law intact, he said.
The huge crowd that turned out to speak against any changes to the law disagreed with that, however. There were a few exceptions, notably a foreign-born woman who said that her family had played by the rules and waited their turn in line to become legal immigrants, so she urged the council to make the changes requested by Chief Ricucci in order to keep the city safer.
That was not to be however. The Mayor and council, following a long, impassioned citizen comment period and a presentation from the police chief, turned him down unanimously. It was not a hard put-down, though. It wasn’t an unreasonable request that the chief was making, they said, but, as the Mayor said, she was concerned with the impression even a small change to the law would give. She did not want to feed the current national anti-immigrant hysteria, nor did she want to create anxiety among the city’s immigrant population.
Maybe it's just the unseasonably warm fall weather but local governments around the region seem a little touched at the moment on the immigration issue.
