https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-keeps-waging-his-failing-war-against-sanctuary-cities/2017/11/21/00add736-ce2d-11e7-81bc-c55a220c8cbe_story.html
From today’s Washington Post editorials:
“IN ITS crusade against so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, the Trump administration is on an impressive judicial losing streak, having been slapped down in federal courts from San Francisco to Philadelphia. It remains undeterred, as the Justice Department girds for more battles whose stakes — a few million dollars in federal funds withheld from offending cities — make a mockery of the dire rhetoric deployed by officials in Washington.
The administration is wrong on the law and the principle. It has no valid legal justification for its insistence that state and local law enforcement officers act as proxies for federal immigration agents and no basis for threatening to withhold funding if they refuse. By seeking to compel such conduct, the administration ignores police and prosecutors who warn that driving a wedge between law enforcement and immigrant communities will erode public safety. On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco permanently blocked President Trump’s executive order seeking to deny funding to uncooperative localities, but the administration shows no sign of giving up the fight.
. . . .
Most jurisdictions seek to balance information-sharing and other forms of cooperation with federal authorities with their interest in forging ties to immigrant communities. The judge in Philadelphia, in ruling against the administration’s threat to withhold funding, found the city had done just that, creating no conflict.
As it happens, the grants the feds wanted to withhold in that case would have covered, among other items, drugs used by first responders to save the lives of opioid overdose victims. How would that have been in the public interest?“
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Read the complete editorial at the link.
Gonzo’s extreme White Nationalist, xenophobic agenda drives him to waste the courts’ time and the public’s resources on wasteful and counterproductive publicity stunts while our country’s real law enforcement problems (like, for example, combatting foreign interference in our electoral process, combatting racial profiling in policing, protecting the rights of the LGBTQ community, fixing the due process crisis in our Immigration Courts, or addressing the causes of opioid addiction and gang violence in communities) go largely unaddressed.
PWS
11-22-17