California has sued the Trump regime over Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s plan to starve the state of millions of dollars in federal funding over so-called “sanctuary city” policies, with the lawsuit arguing that the move from this supposed “law and order” administration in fact “undermines public safety and violates the Constitution”:
“It’s a low blow to our men and women who wear the badge for the federal government to threaten their crime-fighting resources in order to force them to do the work of the federal government,” [California Attorney General Xavier] Becerra said at a news conference. “We’re in the best position to determine how best to enforce the law and keep our people safe.”
Mr. Becerra’s suit is the latest in a barrage of legal challenges in California and elsewhere over President Trump’s efforts to compel cooperation from local governments on immigration policy. Chicago sued the Justice Department over the same federal grants last week, and San Francisco quietly filed a matching complaint on Friday.
"This is a back-door attempt to coerce states and local governments to carry out federal immigration enforcement," said San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera. "Our police and deputies are focused on fighting crime, not breaking up hardworking families."
The fact is that locally decided sanctuary city policies follow the law—that’s according to legal experts like the former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association—and make communities safer by building trust between local law enforcement and immigrant communities.
Already, numerous police chiefs around the country have said that reports of crime against Latino and immigrant communities are down because victims are afraid of being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with unshackled and unhinged federal immigration agents sweeping up undocumented moms and dads without criminal records and years in the United States. It’s not immigrants making communities less safe, it’s Trump and Sessions.
As Becerra and others who defend sanctuary city policies have said, no one’s stopping federal authorities from coming into a city to conduct their immigration enforcement, but pro-sanctuary localities also have the right to not have to use any of their own resources to assist in Trump’s immoral mass deportation force, and localities certainly won’t take any unconstitutional actions to do so. Sessions and others could watch and learn.