Sanctuary Cities Were Always Anti-American

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

New York City, Chicago and Boston are among the sanctuary cities collapsing after waves of migrants stormed across the open borders. Even cities that once boasted of providing sanctuary to illegal aliens from federal immigration enforcement are now running away from the name.
Sanctuary cities were always intended to be destructive. They were not, as many Democrats now wrongly claim, about providing safe harbor to refugees, but about bringing down America.

The sanctuary cities did not emerge in response to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or any actual genocide, but to provide support and sanctuary for Marxists fleeing the civil wars they had started in Latin America, and then later for Islamic terrorists after September 11.

Sanctuary cities were not about helping refugees, but about harboring America’s enemies.

The sanctuary city movement emerged in the first years of the Reagan administration as Quakers, Catholic Liberation Theology and other leftist churches allied with the Soviet bloc intervened to protect leftist radicals fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua from deportation. That’s why the original announcement of the sanctuary movement was timed to the anniversary of the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an El Salvadoran leftist activist whose death was used to campaign against U.S. aid to the country’s anti-Communist government.

The leftist churches did not offer to defy the law for all refugees, but focused specifically on the Reagan administration’s policy of deporting refugees from “El Salvador and Guatemala” as “illegal and immoral”. Their real complaint was that the Reagan administration was taking in the ‘wrong sort’ of refugees from Communist countries, instead of those from south of the border who were fleeing government crackdowns on Marxist revolutionary movements.

The sanctuary city movement described Reagan’s policy of deporting Latin American Marxist revolutionaries as “illegal” because the administration continued to favor refugees from Communist countries. Carter’s 1980 Refugee Act, which opened the door to the current border crisis, had been meant to shift the flow of refugees away from Communist countries by putting the UN in charge of defining who a refugee was. And that definition would favor leftists.

The larger agenda had less to do with refugees and more to do with aiding Marxist revolutions.

“I am looking for a confrontation,” Jack Elder, the activist who headed up Casa Oscar Romero, named after the archbishop, admitted. “There’s a moral force behind what we’re doing that has the potential to focus some light on foreign policy… There are bombing raids financed by the U.S. government.”

The sanctuary movement was smuggling migrants and then publicly announcing it to undermine the Reagan administration’s foreign policy and challenge American opposition to Communism.

At the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, one of the founding places of the sanctuary movement, Rev. John Fife, who would later be arrested and convicted, had put up a sign reading “This is a sanctuary for the oppressed from Central America”. Key figures in the sanctuary city movement did not just harbor illegal aliens, they helped them cross the border, leading to deliberate confrontations with the government that allowed them to play martyrs.

Even though the sanctuary movement had been initially cloaked in the religious guise of misplaced scripture and radical churches, the next stage depended on recruiting radical and not especially religious cities to create zones where immigration law would not apply. And radicals and migrants from south of the border then headed to those cities to overrun America.

When San Francisco announced that it would become the first sanctuary city, it did not open itself to all the refugees in the world, but focused on those coming from Central America.

The sanctuary city movement was meant to create a crisis that would force the Reagan administration to stop supporting anti-Communist movements south of the border by bringing the chaos and violence to the United States. This was in keeping with what had become the larger leftist mission to “bring the war home” in order to forcibly alter American foreign policy.

Much as the ‘Weathermen’ and their radical successors had carried out bombings to bring the Vietnam War home to Americans, the sanctuary city movement sought to bring the civil war in El Salvador to this country in order to dissuade Americans from fighting against Communism.

A year after the sanctuary city movement was announced, the number of illegal aliens rose 40% and hit 1.4 million by the end of 1983. Crime rates rose alongside the migrant invasion.

The sanctuary city movement led to the first manufactured border crisis. By acting as ‘magnets’ for migrants, sanctuary cities attracted large numbers of illegal aliens leading to the 1986 amnesty and eventually to the demographic shift of California to a Democrat majority state.

The number of illegals rose from 3 million before amnesty into the tens of millions.

The second wave of the sanctuary city movement occurred after 9/11. The end of the Reagan administration and some of the Central American civil wars had dampened interest in the movement, but the impetus for the second sanctuary wave, just as it had been for the original movement, was protecting an anti-American terrorist force by abrogating U.S. law.

The sanctuary city movement had been born as a protest movement against the Reagan administration and the second wave arose in response to a new popular Republican White House. The Bush administration’s crackdown on Islamic terrorism radicalized leftists in the early oughts the way that Reagan’s war against Marxist guerrillas had their radical forebears.

In Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, David Horowitz’s crucial expose of the red-green alliance, he described how the passage of the Patriot Act ushered in the next wave of the anti-American movement to cripple the country’s response to Islamic terrorism.

“As of June 2004, 320 cities, towns, and counties, as well as four states had adopted resolutions condemning the Patriot Act, many refusing to cooperate with Homeland Security officials in the enforcement of its security measures,” Horowitz wrote.

Horowitz described how the model for the second wave of sanctuary city resolutions came from radical leftists at the “ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and People for the American Way” who had been set up to protect Communist organizations under the guise of defending civil rights.

Veterans of the leftist domestic terrorist movements rushed to equate Marxist terrorists with the emerging Jihadists. Bernardine Dohrn of the Weathermen argued that “Prosecutions are underway that are reminiscent of the indictments of the early-fifties McCarthy period and the conspiracy indictments of the early seventies preWatergate Mitchell Department of Justice, the two most recent periods of overtly political repression. For example, John Ashcroft has orchestrated a series of high profile indictments against Islamic charities, including the Holy Land Foundation in Texas.” The Holy Land Foundation had been fundraising for Hamas.

Dohrn’s argument prefigured the formal leftist embrace of Hamas after October 7.

The sanctuary city movement was then revived with a third wave in the first Trump administration to protect illegal aliens and arrivals from Islamic terrorist states. The infrastructure that had been put into place during the original sanctuary city movement was mobilized to unite cities, states, universities and religious groups around lawsuits challenging the Muslim travel ban. And the third wave also brought together the two previous waves: protecting illegal migration from Central America and defending the activities of Islamic terrorist groups.

President Trump’s second term will be the ultimate test of the sanctuary city movement. Its defenders claim that they are only protecting refugees, women and children, but the real story is that it is a movement at war with America that came into existence to aid our enemies.

The sanctuary city movement was always anti-American. Its core motivations were countering America’s defense against Communism and Islamism. It rejected U.S. law, not just because it thought any one part of it was wrong, but because it rejected the existence of America.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading. 

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