El Paso Is a Sanctuary City but That Doesn’t Mean It Will End up Like San Francisco
San Francisco is catching a lot of heat for their sanctuary city policy of not turning over criminals who are illegal aliens to Immigrant and Customs Enforcement. City employees in San Francisco are banned from turning over illegals to ICE, and that led to Juan Francisco Lopez Sanchez shooting and killing a woman on a San Francisco pier while she walked with her dad. Sanchez was arrested, but he had been deported five times and returned to San Francisco because he know about the sanctuary city policy.
El Paso is also a sanctuary city, but officials with ICE in El Paso say local law enforcement cooperates with the feds in removing criminal aliens from the U.S. El Paso Sheriff Richard Wiles says his department sends fingerprints of everyone who is booked on a Class B misdemeanor or above to state and federal authorities regardless of that person's immigration status.
Wiles said they do that because it is the best interest of the community, and that releasing Sanchez back into San Francisco was a shame that ended in the death of a woman. Some 70 other communities have similar policies limiting local law enforcement in federal immigration matters.