Sanctuary Jurisdictions in Florida Do Not Have Higher Crime Rates

Florida state Senator Joe Gruters (R-Sarasota) introduced a bill (SB 168) earlier this year to ban so-called sanctuary jurisdictions in Florida and require local governments to cooperate fully with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).   A sanctuary jurisdiction is any state or local government that has a policy to comply with fewer than 100 percent of ICE detainers, which are ICE requests for the local government to release an arrested or imprisoned person into ICE custody for deportation.  Local and state governments still pro secute illegal immigrants for crimes in sanctuary jurisdictions, but they only turn some illegal immigrants over to ICE and uniformly if they are charged with or convicted of serious crimes. The complaint over sanctuary jurisdictions is that they result in increased crime, but thelimited research on the topic finds no increase in crime in sanctuary jurisdictions relative to non-sanctuary jurisdictions.   Regardless, the methods employed in that paper, the potential for sample selection bias, and the poor quality of national crime data have impeded research into how sanctuary jurisdictions impact crime. Regardless, we decided to do our best in looking at how sanctuary jurisdiction policies affect crime in Florida.   According to the Center for Immigration Studies, Clay and Alachua counties in Florida will not honor ICE detainers without a judicial order or a criminal warrant and their policies were enacted in December 2014 and September 2015...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs