City leaders across the US are vowing to intensify their fight against US President Donald Trump’s promised crackdown on so-called “sanctuary cities.”
“We are going to become this administration’s worst nightmare,” New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said on Monday during a gathering of municipal officials from urban centers such as San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Chicago and Philadelphia.
As is the case in several sanctuary cities, they promised to continue blocking cooperation between city police departments and federal immigration authorities.
Photo: Bloomberg
They also vowed to prevent federal agents from accessing their schools and school records, and openly contemplated employing cities’ rarely used oversight and subpoena powers to investigate federal immigration practices.
The defiance that filled the New York City conference clashed with warnings from the White House’s West Wing, where US Attorney General Jeff Sessions told urban leaders who embrace policies that help protect illegal immigrants in the country from deportation.
Such policies, Sessions said, “endanger the lives of every American” and violate federal law.
He said the Trump White House could withhold or “claw back” funding from any city that “willfully violates” immigration law.
Sessions said the US Department of Justice would require cities seeking some of the US$4.1 billion available in grant money to verify that they are in compliance with a section of federal law that allows information sharing with immigration officials.
“I strongly urge our nation’s states and cities and counties to consider carefully the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce our immigration laws and to rethink these policies,” he said.
Trump won the presidency in a campaign that regularly highlighted violent crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally.
Sessions drew from the same playbook at the White House podium, citing two murders committed by immigrants released by local authorities even though they were wanted by federal agents.
City leaders said that such examples are the exception, not the rule.
Philadelphia City Council member Helen Gym said immigrants in the country illegally are part of the “fabric of America.”
“It’s not like immigrants are dangerous. They’re actually the ones in the most danger,” Gym said, citing labor and housing practices that she said discriminate against immigrants.
City officials shared stories of immigrants in their communities seized by federal immigration agents at their children’s schools and at courthouses as they appeared as victims of other crimes.
Gym said some landlords have used Trump’s rhetoric to expel immigrant tenants.
There are an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country illegally.
Trump in January issued an executive order that directs the US Secretary of Homeland Security to publish a weekly list of “criminal actions committed by aliens.”
The administration last week reported more than 200 cases of immigrants recently released from local jails before federal agents could intervene.
Lourdes Rosado, who leads the New York attorney general’s civil rights bureau, said that municipalities have legal standing to resist what she described as immigration overreach by the new White House.
“Sessions makes it sound as if we’re breaking the law, but the point is, it’s voluntary whether or not to cooperate,” Rosado said, acknowledging that states and cities might have to resolve the issue in court.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia