Sanctuary cities and Trump’s immigration policy

Dozens of migrants to the US, most of them traveling from Venezuela, were transported via private jet from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who vowed on Friday to send even more people from states like Florida and Texas to sanctuary cities and states.

Fifty people arrived via two chartered planes in Martha’s Vineyard, a wealthy coastal enclave, on Wednesday after many reported being lured into the trip with promises of jobs and assistance with rent. The migrants were led to believe that they were headed to Boston; instead, they arrived at the end of the tourist season in a community, which often hosts the vacationing rich and powerful — including politicians and presidents.

Jeff Sessions has resigned as President Trump’s Attorney General, after months of harassment. But his legacy is going to get the last laugh. If President Trump and all his appointees left office tomorrow, instead of Sessions, the mark Sessions has left on policy would be the most enduring.

While other Cabinet officials have gotten sucked into White House drama or caught in their own venal scandals, Sessions has generally kept his attention on doing his job — even at the cost of his relationship with the president. He’s pulled every available lever to redirect the considerable resources of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to fight the crimes he considers most serious: violent crimes, drug crime, and, most notably, violations of immigration law.

On Thursday, as Congress started voting on an omnibus spending bill to keep the government open through the end of September, White House officials assured the press that President Donald Trump would sign it. On Friday, Trump tweeted that he had other ideas.

Trump’s rage isn’t unjustified, considering that the omnibus bill gives the president very little of what he asked for on immigration enforcement — arguably his top domestic policy priority. Not only does it not give him the billions of dollars the White House wants for a “big, beautiful wall,” or contain restrictions on funding for “sanctuary cities,” but Congress is actually making an effort to rein in the Trump administration’s overspending on immigration detention instead of expanding it.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is suing the state of California on behalf of the Trump administration over the state’s “sanctuary” laws.

The Justice Department’s basic claim is that three California laws, passed in 2017, limit the ability of state officials and employees to assist the federal government in enforcing immigration policy. Tensions between states like California and Arizona and the federal government over immigration enforcement have spiked in recent years, including under the Obama administration. The latest move by Sessions is a significant escalation in that broader fight.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Wednesday that his Department of Justice was suing the state of California over three laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration agents, he made it seem simple: “We are not asking California, Oakland, or anyone else to enforce immigration laws. [...] We are simply asking California and other sanctuary jurisdictions to stop actively obstructing federal law enforcement.”

That idea — that places run by Democratic governments, including cities around the country and some blue states like California, are “actively obstructing” the federal government to protect “illegal immigrants” — is at the heart of the debate over “sanctuary” jurisdictions. (Usually, people refer to “sanctuary cities,” but in this case the Trump administration has picked a fight with a “sanctuary state.”)

On Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is visiting California to sue it.

The Department of Justice has just filed a lawsuit against the state over three laws it passed in 2017 that limit government officials’ and employers’ ability to help federal immigration agents, and that give California the power to review conditions in facilities where immigrants are being detained by the feds. Sessions, in a Wednesday speech to the California Peace Officers’ Association, a law enforcement union, is giving the message in person.

It’s time for a new emphasis on localism in American politics.

Across the political spectrum, Americans are realizing that they have less and less in common with their geographically distant countrymen, and this is playing out in political disputes: Supporters of the Trump administration want to crack down on “sanctuary cities,” while residents of those cities view it as imperative to resist aggressive anti-illegal-immigration policies they voted against. Democrats in Washington view Medicaid expansion as a crucial initiative, while some red-state politicians want no part of it.

The law-and-order president is angering a lot of the country’s top law enforcement officers right now. The Justice Department has threatened to cut off federal grant funding to police departments that won’t work more closely with immigration officers, and said it would bar some departments from participating in federal training programs.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has blamed these so-called sanctuary jurisdictions for letting foreign criminals roam free and prey upon innocent Americans.

President Donald Trump has often invoked sympathy with the people of San Bernardino after the terrorist attack that happened there in 2015. Indeed, his original proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States was issued in the wake of the 2015 attack — and his former press secretary Sean Spicer used San Bernardino to justify the executive order President Trump signed in January that sought to ban people from several majority-Muslim countries.

Now, San Bernardino is asking the federal government for help: It wants to join a new federal crime-reduction program called the Public Safety Partnership, which promises cities extra training and consulting to help them reduce violent crime.

It’s official: After months of empty threats, the Trump administration is moving to lay siege to progressive cities, with federal grants as its weapon, in the name of immigration enforcement.

On Tuesday night, the Department of Justice announced its first real attempt to prohibit “sanctuary cities” — cities that, in the federal government’s view, don’t do enough to help federal agents enforce immigration law — from getting federal funds.

Before President Trump arrived in office, he promised to strip all federal funding from “sanctuary cities” — cities that didn’t do enough, in his estimation, to help the federal government enforce immigration law — in his first 100 days in office.

The Trump administration is on the cusp of blowing that deadline. And now a federal court ruling threatens to thwart it from carrying out that defunding threat at all.

We hear a lot about the policy debate over so-called “sanctuary cities,” and that information gets filtered through our political preferences. Our perception is that the leaders who run these municipalities are either flagrantly flouting federal law or offering much-needed refuge for one of the nation’s most marginalized groups.

But one thing that doesn’t come up all that much in these debates is an explanation of what exactly these sanctuary cities do. That’s what you’ll find in the video above. Although there’s no strict legal definition for what makes a place a sanctuary city or county, many of them have something in common: a desire to balance financial security with public safety.

On Friday, the Department of Justice sent letters to a handful of jurisdictions that currently receive federal funding for law enforcement, with what seems like an innocuous request: they have 2 months to “provide documentation” proving that they’re in full compliance with a federal law about information-sharing, in order to continue qualifying for federal grants in the coming fiscal year.

But that uncontroversial request — asking cities to prove they obey a law that pretty much all of them say they already obey — is the Trump administration’s attempt to turn up the heat on so-called “sanctuary cities.” And it could lend fuel to a political fight that’s much broader than the jurisdictions who got the letters, or the text of the federal law they’re being asked to obey.

In June, a woman named Kathryn Steinle was murdered in San Francisco — and the man charged in her death, Francisco Sanchez, was an unauthorized immigrant and five-time deportee. For conservative immigration hawks, the Steinle murder fulfilled a prediction they’d been making for years: that the “sanctuary city” policies San Francisco and other cities use to limit cooperation with federal immigration agents were a menace to public safety.

Fast-forward to today, and the House has already passed an anti-sanctuary city law. The Senate, for its part, is considering a bill called “Kate’s Law,” as well as other proposals.

Last week, 32-year-old Kathryn Steinle was murdered in San Francisco. The man who’s accused of murdering her (who was arrested the day after the murder) is called Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate by federal officials. But when he was released from a local jail in March, he went by Francisco Sanchez.

The murder is getting national attention because Sanchez is an unauthorized immigrant — and because he was released from jail in March despite a request from the federal government to hold him until federal immigration agents could pick him up. So the case has become a referendum on what opponents call San Francisco’s “sanctuary city” policy.