It is now indisputable that  President Trump’s use of the National Guard to reinforce local law enforcement and crime-ridden cities is successful and welcome when applied.

The rabidly partisan Democratic mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, had opposed the introduction of the National Guard but after the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department disclosed that violent crime had fallen by half during this period and even relatively minor offenses such as evasion fares on the subway system were practically eliminated.

The National Guard reinforcements were naturally not deployed in low crime areas like Georgetown, but in crime-ridden areas where over a thousand serious arrests were made and a large number of firearms seized and 50 homeless encampments were cleared.

Mayor Bowser commendably expressed her gratitude for the National Guard, whose arrival was greeted by the Senate Democrats’ principal hobnobber with criminals, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, with the customary incantation that Trump is a “dictator… pushing democracy to the brink,” (by drastically reducing crime).  As the Washington Examiner remarked, “There was a lot of more nonsense where that came from.”

The second focal point of this effort was Memphis, a Democratic-governed city in a strongly Republican state where the governor and the mayor both cooperated. More than 2,000 federal law enforcement officers and national guardsmen were deployed in the crime-ridden city. Over 2,000 persons have been arrested, and robberies and vehicle thefts have been reduced by 70 percent, serious assaults by 50 percent and murders by 43 percent.

These deployments are expensive, and what is really needed is increased funding for local police, as opposed to the supplementary pay to mobilize national guardsmen and their deployment around the country far from where they live. The next step, perhaps apart from a few more exemplary introductions of national guardsmen, is a federal program to subsidize efficient plans for increasing the number of police in crime-ridden areas and effectively replicating the extraordinary reduction in crime achieved by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and police Commissioner William Brattan in New York City in the 90’s.

The formula for this is well-known. The need is great and the political benefit accruing to all those at all levels of government in both parties participating in such a plan will reflect public gratitude. Businesses remain open longer, traffic in stores greatly increases, and civic morale skyrockets.                                                      

The most frequently mentioned candidate for another airlift of supplementary law enforcement is Chicago. One of the world’s greatest and most fabled cities, it has fallen on the evil days of the mayoralty of Brandon Johnson, who enjoys a single figure approval rating, (still too high), and the egregious governor J.B. Pritzker, who, voluminous though he is, purports to be “living rent-free in the mind of the president” with his bellicose phrases of personal resistance that are reminiscent of nothing so much as the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, standing in the schoolhouse door proclaiming “segregation forever.”

In the poorest areas of Chicago, the numbers of people killed and wounded by gunfire are shocking. Yet Messrs. Johnson and Pritzker claim the situation is improving and that an insertion of additional law enforcement would be ”an occupation” like Israel’s of Gaza, as if the third largest metropolitan area in the United States was not in the United States.

The companion steps to these for strengthening neighborhood civilization and respect for persons and property, are the intensification and streamlining of the removal of undesirable people who entered the country illegally. The so-called border czar, the estimable Tom Homan, claims that 74 percent of deportees have committed more serious crimes than entering the country illegally. 

If that is accurate, and it would need to be verified, it would mean that 26 percent have not and if, as is widely alleged and is not implausible, those 26 percent, hundreds of thousands of people now, had effectively settled in the country, were gainfully employed, and had lived responsibly. Such people should be fast-tracked to citizenship without being deported.

To those who wish the administration well, it is disconcerting to see this level of overkill in what was a desperately needed and has been a heroically implemented reversal of the prolonged and profoundly dishonest attempt of the Democrats with some Republican collusion to swamp the country with destitute foreigners who have no allegiance to the United States and no sense of taking a new nationality and among whom are many hundreds of thousands of dangerous and violent criminals.

This is such an outstanding and successful policy initiative by the Trump administration, that it has to be clarified to focus altogether on migrants undeserving of public sympathy. The administration deserves a huge boost in public approval for this program, not a moral question mark.

And with that should come the next escalation of the program which should be the prosecution and, if the courts so order, the removal from office of municipal officials who proclaim sanctuary cities in clear, deliberate, and systematic defiance of the laws governing immigration, residents, and citizenship of the United States.

The sanctuary cities are instruments of national disintegration and chiefly give sanctuary to undesirables. They are born of the shameful confluence of the desire of the Democrats to reduce America to a one-party state through the manipulation of illegal immigrants empowered to vote illegally, and greedy Republican employers exploiting the low wages of legally vulnerable workers. 

This is a horrible apparatus of crime, political corruption, and corporate avarice, and it must be crushed, in the courts of law and with due process. The overarching interest of the life and integrity and continuity of the civic values and constitutional democracy of the United States requires no less.