San Francisco Puts Sanctuary Before Funding

RealClearPolitics.com:

Ever since Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez shot and killed Kate Steinle on a warm July evening as she strolled along Pier 14 with her father, San Francisco's Sanctuary City policy has enraged swaths of the rest of America. Lopez-Sanchez, you see, had been convicted of multiple felonies and deported five times. Immigration and Customs Enforcement would have deported the Mexican national if he had not been handed over to the San Francisco Sheriffs Office on a decades-old marijuana charge.

When the city dropped the moldy case, then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi released Lopez-Sanchez without notifying ICE. He said he was being true to a 2013 Sanctuary City ordinance that directed law enforcement not to cooperate with detainer requests except for individuals with a violent felony conviction in the last seven years. Weeks later, Lopez-Sanchez shot Steinle with a gun stolen from a federal agent. Claiming that the shooting was an accident, Lopez-Sanchez has pleaded not guilty.

City Hall refused to kill the 2013 Sanctuary City policy. If conservatives want something, the board of supervisors will block it. Citizen safety be damned.

The Republican Congress is not of like mind. The new chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the Department of Justice, Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is poised to use Congress' power of the purse to withhold federal law enforcement funds from sanctuary cities. He told me, "There will be no more Kate Steinle murders, if I can help it."

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch is on board. Wednesday she told the subcommittee that the Bureau of Prisons will transfer released federal inmates who are undocumented and due for deportation directly to ICE -- not to sanctuary cities, unless the sanctuary agrees only to release the inmate to ICE. Culberson had nothing but praise for Lynch "for doing the right thing."

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