The Attorney General has been cracking down on sanctuary cities and making his case to the public forcefully on that score, pretty much since he took office. But rather than being content to explain his policies from the comfort of his office or the Sunday morning show circuit, Jeff Sessions has taken his act on the road. After an August visit to Miami where he eviscerated Chicago’s failed policies, he went right to the heart of one of the worst offenders, traveling to Portland, Oregon to discuss the negative impact the municipal government is having on the safety of its citizens.

In remarks delivered at the local office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the AG pulled no punches, reminding residents that the lax policies demanded by Portland had already resulted in one woman being raped by a repeat offending, criminal illegal alien who had previously been detained. (NBC News)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday visited Portland — a sanctuary city — to rail against what he calls the evils of such jurisdictions, bringing up an alleged undocumented immigrant rapist in their midst to make his case.

Sanctuary policies “endanger us all,” said Sessions, who cited a recent grisly crime in Portland in urging the city and the state of Oregon, a sanctuary state, to “reconsider” their stances.

“To win this multi-front war against rising crime, we need to use every lawful tool we have. And we need to eliminate all bad policies,” Sessions said at the Portland field office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Some smaller sanctuary municipalities have the luxury of dealing with this situation as a hypothetical, hearing about problems that only happen in other places. Portland can’t make the same claim. Sessions was referring to Sergio Martinez, an illegal alien who was no stranger to Portland’s jails, and had most recently been arrested in July. Before that he had been deported a dozen times. (Literally… twelve deportations.) He also had a rap sheet as long as your arm. And ICE had sent a detainer asking to be notified before he was set loose yet again so he could be put on a bus to Mexico. Since this is Portland we’re talking about, you can imagine how that played out.

On July 24, seven days after his last release, Martinez, 31, crawled through a window in a 65-year-old woman’s Northeast Portland apartment, tied her up with scarves and socks and sexually assaulted her, police said.

That night, he grabbed a 37-year-old woman at knifepoint as she walked to her car. He forced her into her car, but she escaped and he followed, tackled her and repeatedly bashed her head into the concrete until others arrived and he ran off, police said.

By this point, while each individual is responsible and accountable for their own actions, Portland is almost as much to blame for what happened to those women as Martinez is. There were ICE agents ready and waiting to pick him up and ship him out of the country. (Though under new federal laws it seems as if he could have done a stretch in the pen on federal charges first.) But Portland didn’t want their jail giving out information to ICE and Martinez hit the bricks. The rest, tragically, is history.

How long will the infamously “weird” residents of Portland continue to tolerate this? In the name of political correctness their own city officials are leaving them exposed to the whims of criminals, all in the name of protecting some other people who are also breaking the law. Portland should obviously receive zero JAG money from the Justice Department, but even beyond that there seems little point in expending much concern for their welfare. They keep electing people who are responsible for the condition they are in.