It’s no secret that progressive politicians in hundreds of cities and counties are opposing the Trump administration initiatives to end so-called “sanctuary” policies. What those politicians never talk about is the fact that those policies continue to allow tens of thousands of criminal aliens to go free instead of facing deportation proceedings as prescribed by federal law.

According to a summary report on sanctuary policies from Federation for American Immigration Reform and numerous media reports, it’s not just San Francisco, New York and Chicago that are obstructing federal deportation of violent criminals. About 300 local city and county jurisdictions have adopted official policies to refuse cooperation with immigration enforcement in open violation of federal law. And California is not the only place with a statewide sanctuary policy. For a map of principal sanctuary jurisdictions, go here.

You might think that Texas is a state with uniform cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, but you would be wrong. The capital city of Austin recently announced it will defy President Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and the Governor of Texas by continuing its sanctuary policies.

Yes, there’s a new sheriff in town, and citizens will soon have new protections if the new federal policies are followed. President Trump’s January 25 executive order is only the beginning of the fight, and we can expect the ACLU and other open borders advocates will challenge new enforcement policies in federal courts.

Here is the political reality. Sanctuary policies across the country are an important pillar of the “Obama Legacy,” so progressives and the leaders of the Democratic Party are not going to abandon that legacy. This commitment by progressives makes immigration enforcement and the end of local sanctuary policies far more of a political issue than in the past.

Until Obama’s election in 2008, there were only a handful of sanctuary cities across the nation, but the number skyrocketed after 2008 and now numbers over 300 according to a recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies. A 2016 report by the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Justice found 155 jurisdictions that limit or restrict cooperation with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

But as we said, there is a new sheriff in town — and his deputies have been busy.

Trump’s January 25 Executive Order was followed on February 20 by a Department of Homeland Security Memorandum titled, “Enforcement of the Immigration Laws to Serve the National Interest.” It is well worth reading in full.

This directive has many features that have already been welcomed as a breath of fresh air in the ranks of the officers of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One section of the DHS Memorandum that has been largely overlooked by the media could well serve as a giant spotlight on the devastation in local communities caused by sanctuary policies.

• Section “H” of the February 20 DHS Enforcement Memorandum, “Collecting and Reporting Data on Alien Apprehension and Release,” directs the agency to collect and publish on a weekly basis data from “all state and local jurisdictions” on criminal alien arrests, convictions, releases, as well as rejections of ICE detainer requests by local authorities.
• Once public, this data will alert citizens in every city and county in America as to exactly how many criminal aliens are being released back into the community instead of being deported or taken into federal custody.
• The taxpayer cost alone of incarceration of criminal aliens in state and local jails is $7 BILLION annually, as explained in one of my earlier Breitbart News columns.

A 2011 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed that the typical criminal alien inmate in federal prisons had been arrested 12 times for various offenses. On page 17 that GAO report is a summary of the arrest data for the criminal aliens in state and federal jails:

They were arrested for a total of about 2.9 million offenses, averaging about 12[each]… slightly lower than the 13 offenses per criminal alien we reported in 2005.

The Texas DPS report cited above said criminal aliens arrested over that five-year period had been arrested for an average of 2.5 crimes. Taking the average number of crimes committed by ARRESTED criminal aliens as five, and extrapolating from the data on the total number of criminal alien inmates in state and local jails in 2016, the approximately 300,000 criminal aliens in state and local jails are responsible for over 1,500,00 crimes.

In Colorado, the 2,039 criminal aliens in the state prison system in 2016 were 14.7 percent of a prison population of 13,873. The 2016 annual report on the criminal aliens in the Colorado state prison system is here. The 14.7 percent can be easily calculated from the 2,039 inmates in a total prison population of 13,873 found in this document.

This 14.7 percent is over four times the illegal alien population share of total state population, estimated at 200,000 in 2013 by the Pew Hispanic Center.

It is true that even under Obama’s lax policies on enforcement and deportations, local ICE offices routinely intercepted criminal alien felons being released from state prisons and deported the most violent among them. But it was a far different story for the thousands of criminals released from LOCAL jails in dozens of sanctuary jurisdictions, where federal ICE detainers were not being honored and violent criminals were routinely released to commit other crimes.

Even the pro-sanctuary Denver Post could not ignore two recent cases where an ICE detainer request was ignored and illegal aliens were released by the Denver jail and then arrested for homicide only weeks later. One case was a hit-and-run accident that left a young woman dead, and the second was a brutal murder at a light rail stop.

Unfortunately, our nation’s intrepid journalists are not routinely reporting on the thousands of crimes committed by criminal aliens who have been in police custody but then released because of sanctuary policies. It is conceivable that at least a half million serious crimes annually could be prevented if all illegal aliens convicted of felonies were deported — and then prevented from returning by effective border controls.