Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, America’s most racist Keebler elf, appeared to eat some humble pie yesterday after backing off the Department of Justice’s ongoing threats to strip money from sanctuary cities. The Huffington Post reported that the DOJ capitulation was “admitting what legal experts have said for months: In most cases, the department can’t do that.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a memo explaining how the department will carry out President Donald Trump’s executive order meant to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities,” defining them more narrowly than before.
“Sanctuary city” is a broad term, but is most often applied to jurisdictions that don’t comply with all of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “detainer” requests to hold individuals who would otherwise be released. Yet instead of going after any city or county that doesn’t comply with ICE’s requests, the executive order will target jurisdictions that specifically don’t comply with a law to share information with the federal government for immigration purposes.
It’s an important distinction ― nearly all jurisdictions, even those labeled sanctuary cities, say they do comply with the law to provide information. If that’s the case, Trump’s anti-sanctuary cities order is largely toothless.
For all of the president’s rhetoric, the Trump administration is now admitting it can only take away funding under narrow circumstances, and not just because jurisdictions are declining to do what ICE asks.
But, there’s some trickery here that Sessions and Trump are trying to slide past folks, hidden in the middle of the new 1,300-page budget proposal that is also allocating billions of dollars to ramp up a deportation force and to build portions of his stupid, racist wall at the expense of the poor, disabled, and sick.
Immigrant rights group America’s Voice explains:
Today, Phil Wolgin and other policy analysts at the Center for American Progress revealed that a sneakier plan is in place: Sessions and Trump want to use the federal budget to radically change an existing immigration statute in order to make much harsher demands on how cities and counties should deal with undocumented immigrants.
It all revolves around 8 U.S.C. 1373, which is very narrow in scope. Currently, the statute merely requires jurisdictions to not prohibit officials from communicating a person’s immigration status to federal enforcement authorities. It’s a provision that just about every city, county, and state is compliant with. Trump’s budget, however, wants to drastically — and sneakily — change section 1373 to force localities to harshly police immigrants within their jurisdiction.
If enacted and upheld, this would be a way for Trump and Sessions to bring about an anti-immigrant mass-deportation dystopia, where cities and counties across the country are forced to hold undocumented immigrants for ICE pickup and deportation, at the risk of losing federal funding.
The good news is that Sessions is unlikely to get his way with the budget for two reasons: 1) Republican lawmakers have already declared Trump’s budget “dead on arrival”, further noting that presidential budgets usually are, and 2) Sessions’ devious attempt to change the law has been exposed by CAP, which means that Sessions, for now, is like a man searching for his next foothold.
“Sessions’ sneaky move on the budget doesn’t change the fact that the administration has been slapped down by the courts after months of blustering against sanctuary cities,” notes America’s Voice, “or that Sessions has had to concede to the reality that current immigration law does not allow him to force localities into helping the feds mass-deport immigrants.” But this administration’s philosophy has always been to just change the rules when they can’t win, right? It’s an important lesson to stay vigilant—these guys will do and try anything to advance this agenda of hate—and Democrats in Congress will need to stand strong.