The twisted morality of sanctuary policies.
J udge Hannah Dugan surely believes she was acting righteously when she allegedly secreted an illegal alien out of her courtroom to evade capture by federal authorities.
Her subsequent arrest on obstruction charges makes the jurist a martyr for progressive sanctuary policies that the Trump administration seeks to punish and defeat.
This isn’t just a fight over immigration policy and between federal authority on the one hand and state and local authority on the other; it is a moral struggle over the legitimacy of immigration enforcement.
The supporters of sanctuary policies act as though they are the equivalent of the antebellum resistors to the Federal Slave Act, bravely defying federal authority, engaging in subterfuge to protect targeted people, and using every legal recourse at their disposal.
After Judge Dugan’s arrest, an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel made this point explicitly. It compared Dugan’s effort to keep an illegal alien from federal officers to the abolitionist crowd that saved an escaped slave living in Racine, Wis., from federal marshals seeking to return him to bondage.
In the first Trump administration, the progressive writer Harold Meyerson also discerned echoes of the Fugitive Slave Act in Trump’s immigration enforcement:
Now, as then, one part of the country (President Trump’s disproportionately rural, white nationalist base) has enlisted federal power to enforce a legal regime in a different part of the country (racially diverse, immigrant-heavy cities) that views the law as morally repulsive and destructive of the social fabric.
Just as the slave catchers argued, speciously, that freed Negroes imperiled the antebellum North, today’s anti-immigrant forces, beginning with Trump, argue that immigrants pose a threat to public safety, though crime has fallen precipitously during the past quarter-century.
The only “crime” that most undocumented immigrants have committed—and the only one that places them in federal legal jeopardy — is that of being undocumented. Likewise, the only “crime” that most escaped slaves had committed — and the only one that placed them in federal legal jeopardy — was escaping.
And in yet another rhyme, cities and states are fighting back. Police are enjoined from cooperating with ICE. Citizens groups have formed rapid response teams to support apprehended immigrants and, when they have reason to believe raids are imminent, send out a warning.
This is almost as lunatic as the frequent comparisons of Trump to Hitler.
Needless to say, fugitive slaves (or their forebears) didn’t come here of their own volition to get a better job than the ones they had in their native lands. They were kidnapped, sold, and held in bondage, before taking enormous risks to try to gain their freedom.
Illegally entering the United States to earn more money in better conditions than back home obviously bears no relation to the transatlantic slave trade or chattel slavery.
The Fugitive Slave Act comparison, though, speaks of the worldview that informs progressive support for open-border policies. Just as slaves had a moral right to be free in the North no matter what morally bankrupt federal laws said, so illegal aliens have a moral right to be in the United States.
This is why Joe Biden blew up the border — it wasn’t so much a cynical play for future voters as an act of misbegotten principle, opening the country to people we supposedly had no business excluding.
And if we can’t keep them from coming in, it’s even worse to make them leave. Hence, sanctuary resistance to enforcement of our immigration laws.
But nations have an inherent right to defend their borders and determine who is admitted and excluded, whereas no one has an inherent right to own another human being. Reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy, and there is an open, democratic process for determining the rules. These laws can be — and, of course, have been —changed in response to the public will.
By subverting the enforcement of the law, sanctuary jurisdictions — and judges — are committing an offense against democracy itself.
They also aren’t, as they imagine, protecting innocent victims. Put aside the notion that an illegal alien’s only offense is being “undocumented” (the reality is that living and working here often involves other offenses), the fact is that once sanctuary jurisdictions are keeping illegal aliens from federal detention, the immigrants are entangled with the criminal-justice system in other ways.
The illegal alien assisted by Judge Dugan is a case in point. He’d already been deported once, and had reentered the United States again, a felony. He was in the courtroom on three criminal charges of battery, domestic abuse, and infliction of physical pain or injury. If he were a model noncitizen, Judge Dugan wouldn’t have encountered him in the first place.
Rendering aid to a lawbreaker and potential threat to others is a travesty, no matter what morality play Judge Dugan may have thought she was enacting.