There’s a saying among the faithful here in Utah, that we believe in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law – and we do! 

Well, sort of. 

In May, it was revealed that Utah had become an unofficial sanctuary state by the regional office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE, for anyone who’s been under a rock the last eight years – because “non-detention policies have compromised the Salt Lake City Field Office’s ability to support the U.S. Border Patrol and their efforts to stem the current border surge.” 

Usually, sanctuary status is announced proudly by liberal mayors before they go home to their gated communities. But this one slipped under the radar in Utah – known as so reliably conservative for so long that we’re the only state where Bill Clinton came in third. 

While the sanctuary status designation is news, our misguided leniency is itself not. 

Illegal immigrants have been able to get driver's licenses here since 2005. In 2011, the legislature amended state code to grant work permits to them, and this year the legislature made it easier for companies to hire them by increasing the legal threshold for E-Verify from 15 employees to 150. The children of illegal immigrants have had access to in-state tuition since 2002, and this year state Sen. Luz Escamilla made sure they could get free health care too. 

So we’ve been a sanctuary state since Democrats were the good ones on this issue, like when Chuck Schumer said, “Illegal immigration is wrong — plain and simple” and Bernie Sanders said open borders is a “Koch brothers proposal” for cheap labor. 

There is a fundamental psychological problem in play here. We Utahns desperately like being told we’re nice – even by people who hate us. The engineering of mass third-world migration by the World Economic Forum, United Nations, and others, however, is not a nice thing. When bad people publicly announce “This is our evil plan to destroy you,” you should maybe take that seriously. 

Mass migration is bad for the desperate people being used as human fodder. It is bad for legal immigrants who waited their turn. It is bad for those Americans who need public resources – like social services and our already overcrowded public schools. And it is ultimately bad for the rest of the world. 

Without mass migration to the US, radical Democrats like the ones currently in charge could never have been elected. After just two years of this, the Taliban controls Afghanistan, Russia is invading its neighbors, China is poised to conquer the world, and the conflict in Israel has become the scariest parts of the Bible.

If we look at the mass pro-Hamas demonstrations across the country, including the recent insurrection at the Capitol, we have to ask ourselves how many terrorists have crossed into the country illegally. We don’t know how many are here in Utah. The answer is not zero. 

So – no – it is not kind for Utahns to let our home become a sanctuary state. 

Now although the ICE memo was blasted to many state leaders, none of them responded until Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs brought the issue up earlier this month. Among the (many) problems on which Staggs has raised the alarm is that apparently one or two sexual assaults in Utah are committed every day by illegal immigrants. 

But the good news there for sex criminals is that the state lowered the maximum penalty for Class A misdemeanors in 2019, making it harder to deport people whose first encounter with the United States was to break our laws (rather than – again – obey, honor, and sustain them). 

Our embarrassingly liberal Gov. Spencer Cox has been quick to claim that “Utah has never been, and under my ‘leadership,’ will never become a sanctuary state for illegal immigration” (quotation marks added). But Cox has been very vocal about wanting to flood Utah with as many immigrants as possible regardless of the fact that under his “leadership,” Utah has become worst in the nation for housing affordability. 

And instead of helping, our state’s corrupt, real estate developer-led legislature benefits doubly from the surge in illegal immigrants, on the one hand employing them to cheaply build over-priced, high-density housing projects then again stuff them in as tenants. 

While most of Utah is still Utah, the Salt Lake Valley has become an unrecognizable mini-Los Angeles. 

Those of us who have been watching from the sidelines were grateful to see Staggs’s leadership on this issue – rather than continue to let bad people exploit our kind-heartedness. He is currently running for the US Senate seat vacated by Mitt Romney, but Utah’s least-favorite son is still doing his best to pollute our elections. If Staggs can win the prominence that comes with a victorious Senate election, he might be able to turn things around. 

It is not kind to let bad people use desperate people to destabilize our country. It’s well past time for our leaders to obey, honor, and sustain the law. 

Jared Whitley is a longtime DC and Utah politico, having worked in the US Senate, White House, and defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult Business School in Dubai. In 2018, he was named the best blogger in Utah by the state chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.