Great Lakes Wire

The crisis at the border has worsened more this year than any year before. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has used sanctuary cities, or places with laws that tend to protect immigrants from deportation or prosecution, despite federal immigration laws, to bring the border crisis to Democrat leaders' backyards. The state of Michigan currently has five cities that are considered "sanctuary" for people immigrating to the country illegally.

"The true culprits are in Washington, not Austin," Carine Hajjar wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion column. "Congress hasn’t enacted meaningful reform to accommodate more legal immigration or stabilize the border, and the federal executive branch has fallen down on the job of administering existing law at the border and elsewhere." 

The state of Michigan currently has five confirmed sanctuary cities and counties: Ingham County, Kalamazoo County, Kent County, Lansing and Wayne County, where Detroit is located. Each sanctuary city operates with its own paperwork and detainment requirements and policies, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.                   

Since early August, Abbott has sought to bring the border crisis to other parts of the U.S. by sending bus loads of asylum-seekers from the Texas border to sanctuary cities across the nation, as noted by Hajjar in the Wall Street Journal. Hajjar says Abbott began sending them to major cities such as "New York, Chicago, Washington and other places that have policies discouraging local law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities in enforcing immigration law."  

According to the Patriot Project, when Abbott launched his busing program in April, he said, “We are sending them to the United States Capitol, where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.”

Biden administration officials announced Sept. 19 that over the past 11 months, U.S. authorities have made more than two million immigration arrests along the southern border, The Washington Post reported. This marks the first time annual enforcement statistics have exceeded that threshold. In addition, the latest figures show U.S. Customs and Border Protection detained 203,598 migrants attempting to cross over from Mexico in August alone. This puts authorities on pace to reach more than 2.3 million arrests during the government’s 2022 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, according to the Washington Post.

According to apsanlaw.com, sanctuary cities in the U.S. follow certain police procedures that shelters people coming to the country illegally. The term "sanctuary city" is most commonly used for cities that do not permit municipal funds or resources to be applied in federal immigration law enforcement.