The
Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement
In
a healthy country, the American experiment with the sanctuary movement would be
widely recognized as a deadly failure.
Patriotpost.us
7-28-26 By Sean Davis Co-Founder and CEO, The Federalist
The following is adapted from a
speech delivered on June 19, 2026, aboard the Silversea Silver Dawn, during a
Hillsdale educational cruise through the fjords of Norway.
On July 1, 2015, 32-year-old Kathryn “Kate” Steinle was killed
while sightseeing in San Francisco with her father and a family friend.
According to federal prosecutors, Steinle was walking on Pier 14, a popular
tourist attraction in San Francisco’s Embarcadero area, when she was shot in
the back by Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate, an illegal immigrant from Mexico with a
lengthy criminal record.
It wasn’t Garcia-Zarate’s first illegal trip into the U.S. Federal
immigration records show that he had been deported six times prior to Steinle’s
killing: in 1994, 1997, twice in 1998, 2006, and 2009. And he had been arrested
by San Francisco police in March 2015, four months before the murder, for an
outstanding drug possession warrant.
Following his arrest, U.S. immigration officials
lodged an immigration detainer on Garcia-Zarate — in other words, they
requested that the police hold him for an additional 48 hours to allow them
time to assume custody and deport him. Instead, San Francisco’s prosecutor,
George Gascón, dropped the drug charges and the San Francisco police, as a matter
of policy, disregarded the federal immigration detainer and released
Garcia-Zarate on April 15. Less than three months later, Kate Steinle was dead.
Although it seems impossible, the story gets worse. Garcia-Zarate
claimed that he had accidentally picked up and fired the pistol that killed
Steinle, and a San Francisco jury found him innocent of murder. He was
convicted on a minor charge of illegal possession of a firearm, but not even
that held up. In 2019, a California appeals court tossed the conviction on the
grounds that if Garcia-Zarate had only held the gun for a little while — even
if it was just barely long enough to shoot and kill an innocent woman — the
jury should have been given the option to acquit him on the grounds that he
didn’t technically possess it. In the end, Garcia-Zarate was simply deported in
2024 — three decades after his first of seven illegal incursions into the U.S.
and nearly nine years after he killed Kate Steinle.
Such is life, death, and injustice in a so-called sanctuary city
like San Francisco and a sanctuary state like California. How could this
happen? How could a foreign national repeatedly enter our country, violate our
laws, kill one of our fellow citizens, and never be held accountable? To answer
this question, you have to understand the nature of the sanctuary movement in
America and the threat it poses to the safety and security of Americans and to
the rule of law.
***
Where does the word “sanctuary” come from? The Oxford English
Dictionary tells us its first use in English dates back to the mid-14th century
writings of Richard Rolle, a Christian hermit who translated large swathes of
the Latin translation of the Old Testament into Old English and provided
commentary on them. Rolle’s first use of the word in English unsurprisingly
corresponds with the first use of the word in the Bible, in Exodus 15, when
Moses praises the Lord for redeeming His people from Pharaoh and delivering
them to safety: “You will bring [your people] in and plant them on your own
mountain / the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode / the
sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.”
In this context, sanctuary refers to a holy place where the Lord
resides. It can also be a place of refuge. Following the exodus from Egypt, for
example, God commanded His people to establish “cities of refuge” where those
suspected of unintentional manslaughter could flee while awaiting trial.
Murderers, on the other hand — those who killed intentionally out of enmity —
were given no quarter.
If a man accused of manslaughter was tried by the people of the
city where he sought refuge and was found guilty of murder, then he was to be
punished for murder. If he was found to have committed manslaughter, he would
be spared, but only as long as he remained in the city of refuge.
One sees in this arrangement the balance between
justice and mercy, the benefits of separating victims and perpetrators in cases
of accidental deaths, and the practical wisdom of preventing cycles of violence
and retribution between aggrieved parties in close contact with one another.
Avengers are not given carte blanche to wreak vengeance. Nor are perpetrators
allowed to continue on as if nothing happened. Even the interplay between the
words “refuge” and “fugitive,” which share the same root, suggests that the
goal of the original sanctuary city was not a permanent escape from the
consequences of criminal behavior but rather justice in accordance with the
law.
***
The American sanctuary movement, by contrast, rewards criminality
and endangers innocent citizens. Its history began in 1971 in Berkeley,
California, at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests, when city officials
passed a resolution declaring Berkeley a “City of Refuge” for draft dodgers.
Eleven years later, Gus Schultz, a left-wing Berkeley pastor, expanded the idea
by declaring his church a safe harbor for asylum seekers fleeing El Salvador,
Honduras, and Guatemala.
In early 1985, the city of Berkeley passed the following
resolution:
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that no employee of the City of Berkeley
violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigations, public or
clandestine, by engaging in or assisting with arrests for alleged violation of
immigration laws by the refugees in the sanctuaries or by those offering
sanctuary, or by refusing established public services to the established
sanctuaries.
City councilors further resolved that the “sanctuary
originally offered by the churches be expanded to include the entire city and
that BERKELEY become a CITY OF REFUGE[.]” San Francisco, across the bay from
Berkeley, followed suit in 1989, and the sanctuary city concept quickly spread
across the country to Tucson, Seattle, Duluth, and Ithaca.
The actions of those offering sanctuary at the time violated U.S.
immigration law, because the asylum claims being made by Latin American
refugees were in almost every case rejected during the Reagan administration.
The reasoning was that if the migrants were, as they claimed, fleeing violence
in their home countries, they could flee to the nearest safe country — whether
Mexico to the north or Venezuela or Colombia to the south — rather than to the
U.S. Because they were not seeking refuge in the nearest safe country, they
were determined by the U.S. government to be economic migrants, seeking
economic opportunities in our country, rather than war refugees seeking an
escape from violence. As such, they did not qualify for asylum.
Fast forward to 2021, when the Biden administration
threw federal immigration law out the window. In effect, under the guise of
granting asylum, it federalized and supercharged the sanctuary city efforts
that began in the 1980s, erasing the border and inviting anyone into the U.S.
who wished to come.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimated there
were more than eight million encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during the
Biden years, with some estimates north of ten million. Migrants arrived from
all over Latin America, often with the aid of drug cartel coyotes who were
either paid by the job or expected services to be rendered once their charges
reached the U.S. Coached by lawyers from so-called non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) to make asylum claims, they were then released into the
U.S. on their own recognizance and told to appear in court years later to have
their asylum claims adjudicated. The Biden administration even arranged to have
many of them flown — at the American taxpayer’s expense — to cities of their
choice.
Thus what had started as a narrow effort to take
care of a small number of needy refugees in a single city developed, after
several decades, into a sprawling global industry involving national
governments, NGOs, criminal syndicates, and hundreds of billions of American
taxpayer dollars a year. Every institution involved had either a political or
an economic incentive to ensure a never-ending flow of migrants into the U.S.
Forget vetting. Forget filtering out criminals and drug traffickers. Forget
ensuring that only those willing to assimilate into our culture should be
admitted into our country. The illegal immigration-industrial complex had
become a self-perpetuating machine.
Over the past year-and-a-half, the second Trump administration has
reestablished secure borders — without which a country can hardly claim to be a
country — and has attempted to begin deporting those who entered illegally
during the previous four years. But its efforts have been met at every turn
with opposition, often violent, even when it comes to deporting the most
dangerous illegal immigrants. And much of this opposition is sanctioned by
state and city officials enlisted in the sanctuary movement.
As of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice
calculated that twelve states and the District of Columbia — nearly one-quarter
of the country — had become sanctuaries for illegal immigration. In addition,
many major cities outside of those states — including Albuquerque, Boston, New
Orleans, Newark, and Philadelphia — had been designated as sanctuary cities.
The Center for Immigration Studies counts the number of sanctuary cities or
counties across the country at more than 200.
***
In a healthy country, the American experiment with the sanctuary
movement would be widely recognized as a deadly failure. Sadly, stories like
that of Kate Steinle have become commonplace. Not only does the sanctuary
movement foment and incentivize illegal immigration, it also shields known
violent predators from justice.
Philadelphia formally adopted sanctuary city policies in 2014. That
same year, Juan Ramon-Vasquez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras who had been
deported five years earlier, was taken into custody by the Philadelphia
Department of Prisons. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attempted
to remove him, but he was shielded from deportation by local officials and
released from jail, after which he went on to rape a young child repeatedly
over a period of 18 months. “If the ICE detainer had been honored by local law
enforcement,” said U.S. Attorney William McSwain,
this crime never would have happened, and the victim — an innocent
child — would have been spared horrendous physical and mental trauma. Criminals
like Ramon-Vasquez take note: my office will do everything in its power to find
you, to protect our community, and to seek justice for your victims. Unlike the
Philadelphia government, we are not on your side.
On February 27, 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at
Augusta University in Athens, Georgia, went out for a jog and was abducted and
brutally murdered by Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela
with ties to the Tren de Aragua terrorist cartel. Ibarra had been caught
illegally entering the U.S. near El Paso in 2022 but was released into the U.S.
as part of the official policy of the Biden administration. He found his way to
New York City where, according to The New York Times, he was put up at
the Crowne Plaza hotel in Queens. He eventually made his way to a city-run
migrant center at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan and requested to be flown to
Georgia, where his brother had told him he could find better work. U.S.
taxpayers paid for his flight from New York to Georgia, and less than five
months later, Laken Riley was dead.
On June 16, 2024, twelve-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was kidnapped,
sexually assaulted, and strangled to death in Houston, Texas. Two illegal
immigrants from Venezuela, Johan Jose Martinez-Rangel and Franklin Jose Pena
Ramos, are awaiting trial for these crimes. U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended
Martinez-Rangel three months before Nungaray’s murder and Ramos less than a
month before her murder. As part of the official policy of the Biden
administration, rather than being deported, they were released into the U.S.
with a notice to appear in court at a later date.
In Virginia in 2025, federal immigration authorities were able to
detain and remove from the U.S. an illegal immigrant named Edwin Antonio
Hernandez. A violent MS-13 gang member from El Salvador, Hernandez had entered
the U.S. in 2015 at the age of 16. Arrested by Border Patrol in 2017, he
confessed to five murders, including one by dismemberment. But he applied for
asylum, and his deportation was delayed. Under the Biden administration, he was
given a work permit. His 2025 capture and removal came only weeks before the
inauguration of Virginia’s new governor, Abigail Spanberger, one of whose first
acts was to implement what amounts to a sanctuary policy across her state.
Under the current policy, this confessed murderer would have been set free to
prey on innocent Virginians.
These are just a handful of examples that illustrate the deadly
reality of sanctuary policies, which create massive incentives for foreign
nationals, including violent criminals, to enter the U.S. illegally and hide
behind what has effectively become a taxpayer-funded cloak of invisibility.
This system perverts and corrupts the design and
purpose of the original cities of refuge as described in the Bible. Those
cities were intended to provide a balance between instant justice and mercy by
creating space between those responsible for death, possibly unintentional, and
those left to suffer its consequences. They were never intended to give quarter
to unrepentant lawbreakers.
Sanctuary as properly understood is not
characterized by lawlessness, disorder, or misery, which are often the fruits
of bad policy. Such is the case with modern sanctuary policies, which erase our
borders, erode our culture, annul federal laws designed to protect us, and lead
directly to needless death. It is not too much to say that they are an
abomination and that no just nation should tolerate them.
Sean Davis is co-founder and CEO of The Federalist. He received
a B.B.A. from Texas Tech University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at
the University of Pennsylvania. He previously served as the chief financial
officer of The Daily Caller, the chief operating officer of Media
Trackers, an economic policy adviser for former Texas Governor Rick Perry, and
the chief investigator for former U.S. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
