Donald Trump tried to punish sanctuary cities. Its backfiring.
Alice Miranda Ollstein
Politics Reporter @ThinkProgress.
5 hrs ago
Donald Trump tried to punish ‘sanctuary cities.’ It’s backfiring.
More cities have joined the movement since his executive order.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “end” so-called sanctuary cities—jurisdictions that refuse to make their local police enforce immigration law.
“This has to end,” he told a crowd in Houston in September, after talking about San Francisco’s refusal to share information with federal immigration agents. “It will end if I become president, I promise you it will end.”
On his fifth day in office, he signed an executive order to strip such cities and counties of their federal funding.
The threats appear to be backfiring. Since Trump’s election in November, nearly a dozen cities and counties — from progressive California to deep-red Alabama — have voted to adopt sanctuary city policies. Several more cities and an entire state are considering the move. Some cities that have long held sanctuary status are taking Trump to court, while others are creating legal defense funds and taking other measures to protect undocumented residents.
“When we saw that visitors to our community and our nation were under attack by this unjust position and order that the president has made, we wanted people to know that he does not speak for us,” said Jonathan Austin, the president of the Birmingham City Council, which voted unanimously this week to become a sanctuary city. “We need to be a city that’s welcoming and a sanctuary to everyone, regardless of who they are.”
Speaking from the other side of the country, City Council member Sal Tinajero in Santa Ana, California told ThinkProgress his city voted to declare itself a sanctuary as a direct response to Trump’s election.
“The impact it was having on our families, on the psyche of our kids going to school, they were afraid of what was going to happen,” he said. “We knew we had to take action before the president took his oath of office.”
So far, only one sanctuary jurisdiction out of the nation’s 400 or so, Miami-Dade County, has caved to Trump’s defunding threat. Residents took to the streets to protest the decision, and they plan to pressure the county commission to restore sanctuary status in the weeks ahead.
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https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trump-tried-to-punish-sanctuary-cities-it-s-backfiring-fdb2b8be26fc#.qayrwo2nc
= new reply since forum marked as read
A spot at the dinner table for anyone who needs a meal!
(I've got about a dozen deer taking me up on this in the backyard right now...I feed them corn 
)
Oh, and I live in one of Trump's naughty sanctuary cities!
First, being in the U.S. as an undocumented person is currently a Federal issue, not a necessarily a state or local issue.
Local police don't have the time, manpower, resources, or budget to do the Feds work. They can pick up undocumented people if those people break the law, and put them in jail if they commit a criminal act, but they can't go out hunting undocumented people, nor can they handle holding them simply because they are undocumented if the infraction isn't serious enough to warrant holding or incarceration.
Simple fact.
Putting on a program analyst hat - if the Feds are serious about criminalizing people who do not carry legal citizenship papers or Visas, and they want local police to be a component of ICE or Border Patrol, then the Feds should to pay big time to add local police liaisons at local stations for each shift, and hire more police, lawyers/prosecutors, investigators, holding cells, and basic services - all under a Federal policing agency (because, again - Jurisdiction) to hold undocumented that might be ticketed or arrested by the actual local police and to be able to process those people without over-burdening the local courts system.
That means there's probably close to another couple - ten, maybe fifty Billion that will need to be added to the Federal budget a year. A responsible government will raise taxes to cover such a program, or severely penalize all employers of undocumented workers - from large corporations who use "agents" to hire cheap crews under the table, to any private citizen who hire someone off a hand-scrawled bulletin board post-it note or outside hardware box stores. Of course, with Tax Cuts being the mantra of the current Congress and Administration and a hands-off attitude to business practices, we'll just get more deficit spending to hire more brownshirts to take care of anyone who doesn't look like an "Amurikkan".
The "Fiscally Responsible" GOP - looking out for future generations saddled with debt.
Haele
