On June 17, 2021, AOL published an Associated Press report under the title, Justice Dept.: Missouri governor can’t void federal gun laws. This from frontpagemag.com.
This report began with this excerpt:
The Justice Department is warning Missouri officials that the state can’t ignore federal law, after the governor signed a bill last week that bans police from enforcing federal gun rules.
In a letter sent Wednesday night and obtained by The Associated Press, Justice officials said the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause outweighs the measure that Gov. Mike Parson signed into law Saturday. The new rules penalize local police departments if their officers enforce federal gun laws.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Boynton said the law threatens to disrupt the working relationship between federal and local authorities, they said in the letter, noting that Missouri receives federal grants and technical assistance.
“The public safety of the people of the United States and citizens of Missouri is paramount,” Boynton wrote in the letter.
The DOJ did not have to wait long for a response. Just hours later, as reported by ABC News, Missouri responds defiantly to Justice Dept. over gun law, which noted, in part:
Similar bills were introduced in more than a dozen other states this year, including Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Wyoming, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia and Iowa. In Texas, the governor has called for the state to become a so-called Second Amendment sanctuary.
Wow! A new form of “Sanctuary policies” enacted by state governments and the federal government under Mr. Biden’s “leadership” is upset!
Having uttered the magic word “Sanctuary”, we cannot ignore that over the past several decades a growing number of cities and states, almost invariably led by radical leftists, have implemented so-called “sanctuary policies” that, to varying degrees, hamper cooperation between local and state police and federal immigration law enforcement authorities.
Certainly, our nation’s immigration laws are serious laws that were enacted to protect national security, public safety, public health and the jobs and wages of Americans.
Frequently these sanctuary policies have increased to the point where detainees lodged by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel have been blatantly ignored so that aliens who have serious criminal histories were released from custody rather than be turned over to ICE so that could be deported from the United States.
A few of these cases received attention from the media, but in reality a huge number of such criminal aliens who should have been removed (deported) from the United States were permitted to roam freely in towns and cities across the United States, all too frequently, with tragic results.
Consider the horrific case of 32 year old Kate Steinle who was shot to death by Jose Ines Garcia-Zarate, a citizen of Mexico who was illegally present in the United States and had and extensive criminal history in the United States. He had been previously deported from the United States five times, so that his mere presence in the United States constituted a felony under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA): 8 U.S. Code § 1326.
On December 1, 2017 Business Insider published a report about this case, Kate Steinle’s death at the hands of a Mexican national became a flashpoint in the immigration debate — here’s the story behind her killing. Here is an excerpt from this report:
At the time of Steinle’s death, Garcia Zarate had been convicted of nonviolent drug crimes and deported five times since the early 1990s.
He faced a sixth deportation in 2015, and was in Justice Department (DOJ) custody that March after serving 46 months in prison for a felony re-entry into the US, but instead of transferring him into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation, the department transferred him to the San Francisco County Jail for prosecution of a 1995 marijuana charge.
San Francisco prosecutors, who had long ago deprioritized marijuana charges, dismissed the decades-old charge and released Garcia Zarate on April 15, 2015. Due to San Francisco’s policy of limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities — which some refer to as a “sanctuary” policy — the city did not inform ICE when they released Garcia Zarate.
There is a huge number of similar cases around the United States, where “sanctuary policies” that contradict federal immigration law has resulted in the death and injury of thousands of victims at the hands of aliens who were illegal in the United States, subject to deportation but were shielded, aided and abetted by the jurisdictions who declared themselves to be “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens, in apparent violations of a number of laws, beginning with 8 U.S. Code § 1324.
When President Trump acted to end sanctuary policies that harbor and shield illegal aliens, out of his well-founded concerns about public safety and national security, he was rebuffed in the courts and by globalists who complained that his efforts were based on “xenophobia” and God knows what else!
Our nation’s Constitution and laws are not a menu from which picky eaters can decide what to order or not order. It is hypercritical and beyond outrageous that the DOJ would attack Sanctuary policies regarding the Second Amendment while not only sanctioning immigration sanctuary policies, but actually emulating those extremely dangerous policies in clear violation of standing federal law.
