Mayor Sharetta Smith
File photo | The Lima News
LIMA — Amid concerns over the increased number of migrants crossing the southern border, Lima has no plans to become a sanctuary city for any undocumented immigrant, according to Mayor Sharetta Smith.
A sanctuary city, by definition, is a community that agrees to protect the undocumented from prosecution at the federal level as well as from deportation, according to information published by the National Institutes of Health. This would mean that local law enforcement would be required to not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement when it comes to turning over undocumented immigrants for deportation.
Questions as to how local governments would respond to this issue have grown as migration has continued to increase along the nation’s southern border. According to information on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Department’s website, land border encounters by border patrol agents have risen from 450,088 in fiscal year 2020 to 1,734,686 in fiscal year 2021 to 2,378,944 in fiscal year 2022 to a fiscal year-to-date total of 1,223,067 so far in fiscal year 2023. That number represents encounters between October 2022 and March 2023.
Despite those rising numbers, Smith said the city remains committed to following federal immigration law.
“We’re not a sanctuary city,” she said. “We’re a welcoming city, but specifically that designation of a sanctuary city are for any city that has enacted any policies that go against cooperating with law enforcement or immigration in case someone was here illegally. So we don’t have any such policies. We follow all federal laws with respect to immigration, so if someone has to go through that process, we follow that.”
In 2017, Smith, then the chief of staff for former mayor David Berger, quelled any rumors of Lima becoming a sanctuary city in the wake of then-President Donald Trump issuing an executive order prohibiting federal funding for any city that took on that designation.
Reach Craig Kelly at 567-242-0391 or on Twitter @cmkelly419.
