Pro

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), in a Jan. 2016 report, "The Role of State & Local Law Enforcement in Immigration Matters and Reasons to Resist Sanctuary Policies," available at fairus.org, stated:

“Why should state and local governments cooperate with federal immigration officials?

Cooperation with federal immigration officials promotes public safety. State and local law enforcement are often on the front lines in dealing with crime involving transnational gang activity, human trafficking, smuggling, drug related offenses, and other serious crimes often tied to illegal immigration. When state and local law enforcement fail to contact federal immigration officials, criminal aliens are able to reenter communities and engage in further criminal activity at the expense and safety of citizens and lawful aliens…

ICE has roughly 20,000 officials and only 6,000 of these officials are active in enforcing immigration law in the interior of the country. That means, given current estimates, illegal aliens outnumber ICE agents by 2,000 to 1. Thus, the cooperation and assistance of over 900,000 state and local law enforcement agents currently working in our country allows immigration enforcement to operate much more efficiently and as intended by Congress. Without such cooperation, ICE officials alone can only hope to make small dents in the country’s vast illegal alien population.”

Jan. 2016