No, they don't. Sanctuary laws and mainstream liberal thought don't think vehicular homicide is not serious. Sanctuary proponents believe that many other crimes are not serious enough to warrant being thrown to ICE, especially the minor misdemeanor and drug possession charges that make up the majority of arrests.

And yet, they don't discriminate - much less define - "serious" vs. "not serious".

They don't lack it at all.

Yes they do. I get that blue states and cities feel like their emotional impulses should be the defining reasons why something is in the actual law or not but that's not the way it is.

They have power over their own resources. They can't prevent the federal government from making immigration law or the federal government from enforcing it however they want. But they get to decide whether a particular use of their own resources is for the benefit of their community.


Sure. They can avoid arresting *anyone* for a federal crime if they want to. They can avoid helping the feds track down terrorists, money launderers, drug runners, child traffickers, any of it.

But they never frame it that way, do they?

They're not ignoring immigration laws. There's no law that says that local governments have to comply with ICE detainers. ICE doesn't even claim that. These are requests, not statutory obligations. If ICE tried to turn them into orders, or Congress tried to enact a statute forcing states to do this, it would probably be unconstitutional. But we're not at that point. States are perfectly free to choose not to put their own resources in service of enforcing federal immigration law.

This playing games with words, sorry. There's no law that says Illinois authorities have to arrest an Al Capone either but they would have if J. Edgar Hoover had asked them to. If Osama Bin Laden had been spotted in Chicago ca2002 CPD would have been happy to slap the cuffs on him.

But because of their emotional decisions, they've passed these statutes in an attempt to impose their (very much not agreed to by the general population) views on national immigration policy on the rest of us.

And the results? Dead citizens because politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions "just know better".