Jay Fleitman’s column in the April 4 Daily Hampshire Gazette (“Sanctuary city advocates protect criminals”) is as close to journalistic negligence as I imagine one can get.

Let’s start with his ubiquitous use of the term “illegal immigrant,” which the Associated Press (and most mainstream news organizations) stopped using because it was imprecise. In addition to being imprecise (i.e. someone cannot be “illegal”), it obscures the basic fact that not being documented is not a criminal offense! Describing someone as “illegal” perpetuates a discredited myth about people who are undocumented.

Still in the first few sentences of his piece, Fleitman states that certain sanctuary cities make a commitment that “offers illegal immigrants a haven from … U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” which is also demonstrably false. ICE agents, who operate under the federal Department of Homeland Security, have the legal authority to go to any city or state, and they often do. No city or state entity in the country “offers a haven” to anyone against ICE, but some police departments simply do not respond to voluntary requests by ICE for notification when someone who is suspected of being undocumented leaves custody.

ICE also issues voluntary “detainer requests” to police departments that may have custody of someone who is suspected of being undocumented, but (1) those are only requests — not mandatory, even in the view of ICE — and (2) at least two federal courts have ruled that those requests are actually unconstitutional violations of the Fourth Amendment.

Fleitman goes on to state a number of scary “grounds for deportation” that ICE is “directed by federal law.” But in fact it is a set of priorities that the executive branch establishes that direct ICE, not federal law. Furthermore, under President Trump, those priorities have expanded to include literally any criminal offense, not merely violent felonies like “murder” and “rape,” as Fleitman writes.

Even under the Obama administration, 66 percent of the nearly two million people deported in the first five years of that administration had committed either no crimes or minor traffic violations. The claim about “wholesale deportation” that Fleitman insists is a “straw man” is actually borne out by both recent reporting and the statistics and stories of the last few years. We should expect at least the same, if not escalated destruction to our communities under the Trump administration.

Fleitman goes on to assert that advocates of sanctuary protections do not want police to work with federal agents to aid in tracking down undocumented folks because of the “curious thought process” that this will “frighten law-abiding immigrants” from reporting crime. If only Fleitman had turned on CNN Tuesday morning, he could see Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck himself report that since the beginning of this year, sexual assault reporting has decreased by 25 percent and domestic violence reporting by 10 percent, and his fear that this is directly tied to fears of being targeted by ICE.

This is in addition to many other news stories which confirmed exactly that “curious thought process,” as well as the assertion by the Major Cities Chiefs Association that local police collaborating with ICE “undermines the trust and cooperation with immigrant communities which are essential elements of community oriented policing.” When people are afraid of reporting crime, crime goes unpunished and goes up.

In cities where residents are free to report crime and aren’t afraid to come forward as witnesses, crime goes down. As reported by NPR this past January, “sanctuary” cities are “safer in the aggregate and enjoy stronger economies.” This is common sense, hardly a “curious” trend.

In yet another leap of logic, Fleitman makes the wildly false analogy of preventing the police from arresting a thief in one’s home. Yet not one “sanctuary” municipality or state hinders anyone from being held accountable for any criminal offense. All police departments honor criminal warrants, including those in “sanctuary cities.”

But what is just as important to point out is that immigration violations mostly fall in the realm of civil law, not violations of criminal law. We already know that – despite assurances that “violent criminals” were going to be targeted, a majority of those deported in recent years committed no or minor criminal offenses – so a better analogy would go along the lines of: Do we want to break up families and exile individuals from our community because they were caught jaywalking?

The fact of the matter is that most respected police chiefs, as well as the U.S. Conference of Mayors, recognize that enforcing immigration law is entirely separate from enforcing criminal law – and it’s been that way for nearly all of modern U.S. history.

The extremist call for muddling criminal and immigration law enforcement comes from an uninformed understanding of the consequences of that action. It is undergirded by the presumption that immigrants are an existential threat, rather than a foundational demographic of this country, and that presumption is wildly misguided (and dangerous) in these times.

Jeff Napolitano, of Northampton, is director of the Western Massachusetts Program for American Friends Service Committee.

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