How 30 Democrats Plan to Handcuff ICE While Flooding Communities With Illegal Aliens

Thirty Democrats just cosponsored legislation that would essentially tell Immigration and Customs Enforcement to go pound sand. The Protecting Sensitive Locations Act sounds reasonable enough until you read past the title and realize what it actually does. This bill would ban immigration enforcement within a thousand feet of schools, hospitals, churches, playgrounds, and doctor’s offices. Let that sink in for a moment. A thousand feet isn’t just the building itself. That’s entire neighborhoods in most cities.

You know what happens when you create safe zones where the law can’t reach? People who don’t want to be reached by the law congregate there. It’s not complicated. The Democrats sponsoring this bill either understand basic human incentives and don’t care, or they’re so wrapped up in their ideology that common sense has left the building entirely. Either way, American kids and families pay the price.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have already lined up behind this thing. Two of the biggest teachers unions in America think it’s a great idea to make schools into de facto sanctuaries for people who entered our country illegally. Never mind that teachers and students would be the ones dealing with the consequences. The unions get to signal their virtue while classroom teachers wonder why that guy who’s been hanging around the playground for three days straight can’t be questioned by authorities.

We’ve already seen what happens when illegal immigrants use schools and daycares as shields. Last November in a case reported by the Department of Homeland Security, ICE tried pulling over a vehicle with Diana Galeano, an illegal immigrant. The driver bolted straight into a daycare center where Galeano worked and barricaded himself inside. Picture the terror on those kids’ faces. Picture the helplessness their caregivers felt. This is the reality Democrats want to expand, not prevent.

Then there’s Dr. Linda Davis, a special education teacher in Savannah who dedicated her career to helping kids who needed extra support. She was reportedly killed earlier this month by a Guatemalan national fleeing a traffic stop. She was probably headed to school that morning, thinking about her students, when someone who shouldn’t have been in this country allegedly crashed into her car and ended her life. Her students lost a teacher. Her family lost everything.

The bill goes even further than schools and hospitals. Public libraries become safe zones. Courthouses too. Any active march, rally, or parade gets the same protection. You see the game here? Activists could shield any illegal immigrant simply by organizing a protest within a thousand feet. Suddenly every enforcement action becomes impossible because there’s always a “parade” or “library” conveniently nearby.

Welfare offices also make the list, which tells you everything about the priorities at play. Democrats want to ensure illegal immigrants can collect public benefits without any risk of facing consequences for violating our immigration laws. American taxpayers fund the benefits. Illegal immigrants collect them. And ICE has to stand outside an invisible perimeter like kids playing an absurd game of tag.

The exceptions carved out in this legislation are telling. ICE could only act in “exigent circumstances” like stopping an imminent terror threat. So unless someone’s literally about to detonate a bomb, hands off. Never mind the illegal immigrant from Mexico who allegedly threw a rock through a school bus window in New Jersey last month, fracturing a third grader’s skull. That little girl needed surgery. She was coming back from a field trip with her classmates when violence shattered her day and nearly killed her. Under this proposed law, would ICE have been able to arrest him near that school? Doubtful.

The practical effect of this bill would be paralyzing law enforcement with an ever changing maze of restricted zones. In dense urban areas, you’d be hard pressed to find any location that isn’t within a thousand feet of some protected site. ICE agents would spend more time consulting maps and lawyers than actually enforcing immigration law. Which is precisely the point. Democrats can’t politically afford to abolish ICE outright, so they’ll just make the agency useless through regulation and restriction.

At the State of the Union, congressional Democrats sat on their hands when protecting American citizens was mentioned. That moment of honesty revealed what many Americans already suspected. The party has decided that enforcing our borders and immigration laws is somehow cruel or unjust, consequences be damned. This bill is just the latest proof that they’ve abandoned any pretense of putting Americans first.