Mayor Touts Sanctuary Policy After Illegal Alien Murders Teen

The mayor of Texas’ largest city blames a “failed federal immigration policy” for the recent murder of a teenager yet has the audacity to publicly defend her municipality’s longtime sanctuary measures protecting illegal aliens.

Earlier this week a previously deported illegal immigrant with a lengthy criminal record gunned down a 14-year-old girl in Houston as she walked home from a party. The girl, Shatavia Anderson, was shot in the back after a confrontation near her home. The 22-year-old triggerman (Melvin Alvarado) is a Honduran national who has twice been convicted of drunken driving and has served time in Harris County Jail. Federal officials deported him on two occasions—in 2008 and 2009—but he still managed to return to his adopted hometown of Houston.

That’s probably because the city of about 2.4 million residents has long offered illegal immigrants sanctuary and even forbids its police department from asking suspects’ about their legal status. In an effort to change that policy, Judicial Watch sued the Houston Police Department last year on behalf of a sergeant whose husband, also a Houston Police officer, was killed in the line of duty by a previously deported illegal alien with a criminal history.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker, who favors U.S. citizenship for illegal immigrants, is in denial about the role sanctuary measures play in crimes like the recent Anderson shooting or the Houston police officer’s murder a few years ago. Ardently defending Houston’s sanctuary policies, she claims that “the problem is not illegal immigration” but rather the federal government’s inability to keep foreigners out when they break criminal laws.

The mayor assures illegal aliens that if they live in her city “peacefully” and “don’t “break local laws” they can call the police for services, use public clinics and report crimes without being reported to federal immigration authorities. Hundreds of municipalities around the U.S offer illegal immigrants the same protection and, in most cases, their police departments have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to immigration.

In dozens of instances the measures have enabled violent illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. long enough to commit atrocious crimes against innocent Americans. In the last few years alone, several law enforcement officers, teenagers and an entire family were brutally murdered in different parts of the country by illegal aliens with criminal histories.