Just three days after a crushing health care defeat, AG Sessions echoed President Trump’s nationalist campaign rhetoric by threatening to cut off sanctuary cities from access to federal funds if they refuse to comply with information sharing with immigration officials.
“I urge the nation’s states and cities to carefully consider the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce our immigration laws,” Sessions said. Sessions also noted he was clarifying a similar Obama-era policy that had been adopted last year.
Throughout the campaign trail, Trump continuously threatened to “defund” sanctuary cities by taking their federal funding; as President, Trump signed an executive order to investigate jurisdictions seen as non-compliant with efforts to find and deport undocumented immigrants. Sessions’ statement follows the administration’s release of a report on local jails in which 200 cases of immigrants were released from custody before federal agents could intervene.
“President Trump’s latest threat changes nothing,” said New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio. “We will remain a city welcoming of immigrants. Any attempt to cut NYPD funding for the nation’s top terror target will be aggressively fought in court. We won’t back down from protecting New Yorkers from terror — or from an overzealous administration fixated on xenophobia and needless division.”
Mayors from across the country have followed suit, releasing their own statements in defense of their immigrant communities. Condemning AG Sessions’ statement as a ‘blind allegiance to ideology,’ the Mayors taking a stand against this anti-immigrant rhetoric vow to become one of the administration’s worst nightmares.
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