Scandal-Plagued D.C. Mayor Gives Illegal Aliens Sanctuary

As the perfect complement to the Obama stealth amnesty plan that’s spared thousands from deportation, the nation’s capital has officially become a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

The District of Columbia’s scandal-plagued mayor, Vincent Gray, signed an executive order this week banning police and other city agencies from asking people about their immigration status. The order also guarantees that local law enforcement officials will not detain illegal aliens, report them to federal agencies or even make them available for federal immigration interviews without a court order.

Gray, a veteran D.C. councilman who has been embroiled in a series of corruption scandals throughout his political career, claims his new order actually ensures public safety by assuring that police resources are deployed wisely and that immigrant communities feel safe cooperating with cops.

“The District is home to thousands of immigrants,” Vincent said in a statement announcing the new sanctuary measure. “If they are afraid to cooperate with authorities on criminal investigations because they fear it might endanger their presence in the United States or the presence of a loved one, then it endangers their public safety and that of our entire city.”

Vincent, who once headed the District’s Department of Human Services, has been embroiled in a variety of controversies over the years. A few months ago he hired Bill Clinton’s sex-scandal lawyer to fend off accusations that he paid a mayoral candidate to stay in the race and trash then-Mayor Adrian Fenty, who he replaced this year.

Federal authorities began investigating Gray after a disgruntled staffer exposed a seedy cash-for-campaigning scheme, according to a local newspaper that cites attorneys and law enforcement sources associated with the case. The fired employee (Sulaimon Brown) says members of Gray’s mayoral campaign gave him envelopes stuffed with cash and money orders to stay in the race and maintain a verbal assault on Fenty.

Before that, when Vincent served as D.C. council chairman, he got busted using official stationery to solicit donations for the Democratic Party and for using a politically-connected contractor to renovate his house. Gray used official council stationary to solicit a $20,000 contribution from a cable company to help pay for Democratic Party activities, in violation of measures forbidding taxpayer resources from being used for political reasons or to raise cash for a particular party.

As council chair Gray also had a mega developer that does strictly large commercial projects renovate his house. The company has a $300 million real estate contract in an area that Gray represents and initially the then-councilman denied any work had been done on his 2,800-square-foot home. He only came clean after a reporter dug around and gathered evidence of the shady arrangement.

After becoming mayor in January Gray came under fire for hiring an army of senior staffers with lucrative salaries while the city suffers through a painful $400 million budget shortfall. Among Gray’s highly-paid employees are the son of his chief of staff and the daughter of a close adviser.