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Good news from Arizona today, where Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon has announced his city will move to repeal its open-borders sanctuary policy:

Amid growing controversy over Phoenix’s handling of immigration issues, Mayor Phil Gordon announced Monday that he would seek to end a controversial immigration enforcement policy.

The policy, Operations Order 1.4, prevents city police in most cases from asking about a person’s immigration status.

Gordon said Monday that he could no longer support the policy.

“When it was written, it was right for local law enforcement and our community,” Gordon told reporters. “But it was written in another time — and it was based on the premise that the federal government would fulfill all its responsibilities regarding immigration enforcement. Obviously, that has changed.”

The changed policy would allow police to notify Immigration and Customs Enforcement when any law has been violated by a person police suspect to be an illegal immigrant, a significant change that drew intense criticism from immigration advocates.

Oh, and the next time you hear open-borders radicals tell you that police officers support sanctuary, note this:

The policy’s opponents, including the president of Phoenix’s police union, want officers to have more discretion to contact immigration officials if they encounter undocumented immigrants.

Judicial Watch, a Washington-based conservative think tank, is weighing a lawsuit against Phoenix for the operations order.

Gordon and other city officials have said the order frees officers to concentrate on serious crimes and encourages undocumented immigrants to cooperate with the police. But it became a lightning rod for criticism this year, particularly after the shooting death of a Phoenix police officer by an illegal immigrant. Critics have cited the policy in branding Phoenix a “sanctuary city” for undocumented immigrants.

Still have a long way to go, but every step counts…