When Democrats unveiled their 2018 campaign slogan, “For the People,” they weren’t referring to the American citizen. They want a government of, by, and for illegal aliens.

The job of a government is to provide a sanctuary for its citizens so that their life, liberty, and property can be protected from internal and external threats. On the state level, the main focus is internal threats, and on the federal level, the main focus is external threats. That is government in a nutshell. Nothing more, nothing less. Yet that is the one job liberals refuse to prioritize amid their empowerment of government to rule over every aspect of our lives. Now, places like San Francisco and Boston are offering sanctuary to violent foreign criminals and even allowing them to vote in elections, while offering nothing but peril and disenfranchisement to Americans.

Here is just a smattering of avoidable crimes that never would have happened if the feds kept our external border secure and if localities communicated with ICE to protect their internal affairs. While government can’t prevent every atrocity, clearly every crime committed by known criminal aliens is, by definition, an avoidable crime, because they can and should be immediately deported without the increasingly arduous task of landing a criminal conviction – and there should be no magnet to bring them back.

In San Francisco, Orlando Lazo was arrested for raping four women in his car over time as an employee of Lyft. The “rideshare rapist,” who is an illegal alien from Peru, was arrested after police obtained DNA evidence connecting him to sexual assaults in 2013 and several others earlier this year. ICE noted, “The San Francisco County Jail does not honor ICE detainers nor notify ICE about the impending release of aliens in its custody. In doing so, the jail not only provides a refuge for illegal aliens, but it also shields criminal aliens who prey on people in the community.” The bottom line is that he was only able to operate so brazenly and publicly as a rideshare driver because of the guaranteed sanctuary. It’s a shame these women didn’t have the guarantee of sanctuary.

Also last week, Selvin Chocooj, a 32-year-old illegal alien from Guatemala living in sanctuary Prince George’s County, Maryland, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexually assaulting a women in his ridesharing car on the way to Capitol Hill.

Last week, Alejandro Alvarez Villegas was arrested in Los Angeles County for attacking his wife with a chain saw in front of their three kids. According to ICE, he was deported 11 times since 2005! According to the LA Times, he was arrested for numerous counts of possession of drugs and DUI. He should immediately have been turned over but was not; sanctuary policies demand that people not be detained or deported for so-called “lower”-level offenses.

Last week, Border Patrol agents arrested two MS-13 members in El Paso, another sanctuary city. According to federal officials, 25-year-old William Amaya-Ortiz had an extensive criminal record in sanctuaries like Denver, yet was still in the country. He had multiple convictions, including assault and … you guessed it … DUI. All avoidable and preventable dangers to the public.

Ernesto Esquivel Garcia, an illegal from Mexico, faces charges of murdering his co-worker and then burning his body. Once again, he was arrested twice for DUI and traffic violations, but was never actually deported because he posted bond with an immigration judge for a voluntary departure order in May instead of a deportation. This is a growing problem in which ICE officially “supervises” 2.3 million illegal aliens, 1 million of which have final deportation orders and hundreds of thousands of others with orders of slightly less severity. Most of them are never monitored, and hundreds of thousands of them have criminal records.

In Mascotte, Florida, a woman was attacked in her own home by an illegal and was almost killed. Her husband woke up and chased the man away. Samuel Hernandez is an illegal alien from Guatemala who recently crossed over the border and claims he was told by the smugglers to break into the home in order to obtain money and pay off his debt. This is what the media refuses to expose about the border surge. Everyone coming over must pay some of the most evil cartels in the world, and even the “better elements” are forced into desperation in which they need to attack Americans in order to pay back the smugglers.

This week, ICE arrested 37 criminal aliens in Middlesex County, New Jersey, a jurisdiction that aspires to be a sanctuary. In an all-too-familiar pattern, 16 of them had been released multiple times by local law enforcement after being apprehended for sexual assaults, burglaries, and drunk driving. Imagine how many of these crimes would be avoided in the first place if all levels of law enforcement apprehended and deported criminal aliens at the first opportunity.

The cases of needless crime and violence by people who should never be here are endless. Just in FY 2017 alone, ICE arrested criminal aliens responsible for more than 80,000 DUI offenses, more than 76,000 dangerous drug offenses, more than 48,000 assault offenses, more than 12,800 burglaries, more than 11,000 weapons offenses, more than 5,600 sexual offenses, more than 2,000 kidnapping offenses, and more than 1,800 homicide offenses.

Now, these same sanctuary jurisdictions full of illegal alien crime are registering non-citizens to vote. San Francisco is allowing illegal aliens to vote in upcoming school board elections. Boston is considering allowing non-citizens to vote in all local elections. Thus, they attract these people through magnets that violate federal law and then want to use them for voting. So said the Lord, “Have you murdered and also inherited?” ~I Kings 21:19

While there is nothing stopping local governments from extending the vote to non-citizens for local elections, federal law requires that they be “conducted independently of voting for a candidate for such Federal offices” so as to deny non-citizens “an opportunity to vote for a candidate for any one or more of such Federal offices (18 U.S.C. §611(a)(3)). Even without officially allowing non-citizens to vote, we have non-citizens voting in our federal elections. Given that so many non-citizens are already registered to vote in federal elections because of motor voter laws and weak verification checks, there is no way localities will actively register non-citizens for local voting but somehow institute robust firewalls against voting in federal elections. Talk about foreign influence of our elections. Who needs the Russians?

Is it any wonder that, according to Gallup, immigration has surged to the top issue of concern to voters?

Rather than promoting things like the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act, Congress should be almost singularly focused on ending the bogus asylum invasion, mandating expedited deportations, punishing sanctuary cities, cutting off all welfare and magnets, and protecting our franchise. The nonbinding resolution supporting ICE yesterday is meritorious, so long as Congress follows it up with binding action and places it in the budget bill.

Sadly, the American people are caught between one party that is “For the [Illegal] People” and another party whose slogan should be “Nonbinding.” (For more from the author of “Sanctuary Cities Reward Crime Wave With Voting Rights for Illegals” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.