#Sanctuary Cities

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rachel Leingang at The Guardian:

To hear Donald Trump tell it, America’s cities are in dire shape and in need of a federal intervention. “We’re going to rebuild our cities into beacons of hope, safety and beauty – better than they have ever been before,” he said during a recent speech to the National Rifle Association in what has become a common refrain on the campaign trail. “We will take over the horribly run capital of our nation, Washington DC.” Trump has for years railed against cities, particularly those run by Democratic officials, as hotbeds for crime and moral decay. He called Atlanta a “record setting Murder and Violent Crime War Zone” last year, a similar claim he makes frequently about various cities.

His allies have an idea of how to capitalize on that agenda and make cities in Trump’s image, detailed in the conservative Project 2025: unleash new police forces on cities like Washington DC, withhold federal disaster and emergency grants unless they follow immigration policies like detaining undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes.

Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, an extensive document breaking down each part of the federal government and recommending changes to be made to advance rightwing policy, was created by the Heritage Foundation, with dozens of conservative organizations and prominent names contributing chapters based on their backgrounds. This part of the project is another Republican attempt at a crackdown on so-called “sanctuary” cities, places around the country that don’t cooperate with the federal government on enforcing harsh immigration policies.

[...]

The threat of withholding federal funds

Republicans, cheered on by Trump, have worked to make immigration a key issue in cities across the country by busing migrants from the US-Mexico border inland, to places run by Democrats like New York, DC and Chicago, overwhelming the social safety net in these cities. The idea of using federal funds granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to force immigration changes are included in a chapter about the Department of Homeland Security, written by Ken Cuccinelli, Trump’s former deputy secretary of homeland security.

The chapter’s initial recommendation is to dismantle DHS entirely, create a border-focused agency comprised of other immigration-related organizations and farm out the rest of its components to existing agencies (or privatize them, in the case of the Transportation Security Administration). It’s not directly clear whether the aim is to use all Fema funds – including those that help cities and states in the immediate aftermath of an emergency like a tornado or flood – or large grant programs for things like emergency preparedness. One line in the chapter says “post-disaster or nonhumanitarian funding” could be exempt from the immigration policy requirements. The chapter also suggests that cities and states should take on more of the burden of financially responding to disasters.

[...]

One of the conditions Project 2025 suggests is requiring states or localities to share information with the federal government for law and immigration enforcement, and specifies that this would include both department of motor vehicle and voter registration databases. This is of particular interest in many cities because 19 states and Washington DC allow undocumented people to get drivers licenses, the Niskanen Center, a thinktank that delved into the project’s immigration aims, points out. These licenses help with public safety by decreasing the potential for hit-and-runs and increasing work hours, among other benefits, the center writes. If a city or state is forced to choose between issuing licenses and then sharing this information for use by immigration authorities, or accessing emergency funds for their whole population in a crisis, it’ll be tough for them to deny Fema money, said Cecilia Esterline, an immigration research analyst at the Niskanen Center.

Donald Trump’s war on urban cities is part of the wretched far-right Project 2025 plan, including crackdowns on sanctuary cities.

See Also:

The Guardian: What is Project 2025 and what does it have to do with a second Trump term?

[culturevulturette]

It's almost like they write and pass these grandiose "sanctuary city" laws with no intent to actually act on any of them. It's almost like it was only ever about virtue signalling.

[simply-ivanka]

Cities and Counties

California: Alameda, Berkeley, Fremont, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco (county and city), San Mateo County, Santa Ana, Santa Clara County, Watsonville.

Colorado: Boulder, Denver

Washington D.C.

Illinois: Chicago and Cook County.

Massachusetts: Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Concord, Lawrence, Newton, Northampton and Somerville.

Maryland: Howard County, Hyattsville, Prince George’s County, Rockville.

New Jersey: Newark

New York: Albany, New York City, Westchester County.

Pennsylvania: Lancaster, Lehigh County, Northampton County, Philadelphia.

Vermont: Burlington

Washington: King County, Seattle, Walla Walla County.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A Massachusetts district attorney said Friday that his office is investigating Florida's decision last year to send flights filled with migrants to Martha's Vineyard.

Cape & Islands District Attorney Robert Galibois also threw his support behind a group of public officials from California and Texas calling for a federal investigation into the flights.

"I am conscious of my obligation to investigate any potentially criminal activity that occurs within my jurisdiction," Galibois said in a statement. "[I] am aware that immigrants were tricked and fooled into boarding planes that ultimately landed in Martha's Vineyard, a part of my jurisdiction. I believe this falls within my purview as District Attorney to investigate. Given that much of the information that I seek to review as part of my investigation falls outside of my jurisdiction, I stand behind California and believe in order for a full and proper investigation to occur, the Department of Justice must be involved. I stand ready to cooperate with the Department of Justice."

Two planes filled with undocumented immigrants landed on Martha's Vineyard last September, leaving the island scrambling to prepare emergency shelters to help them.

The office of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said it was responsible for the flights, with a spokesperson saying that night they were "part of the state's relocation program to transport [undocumented immigrants] to sanctuary destinations."

DeSantis, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has touted the flights to Martha's Vineyard in his campaign speeches, falsely claiming island officials "deported them the next day." In reality, they were brought to an emergency shelter on Joint Base Cape Cod before alternative housing was arranged.

Galibois' announcement comes a day before DeSantis will be on Cape Cod for a fundraiser.

In a class action lawsuit, migrants said unidentified people working with DeSantis had been "trolling streets outside of a migrant shelter in Texas and other similar locales, pretending to be good Samaritans offering humanitarian assistance."

The migrants said those people made false promises that if they were willing to board airplanes to other states, they would receive employment, housing, educational opportunities and other assistance.

They also said they were told they would be flown to Boston or Washington, D.C., but were dropped off on Martha's Vineyard without food, water or shelter.

DeSantis' move was widely panned by Massachusetts lawmakers as a "cruel stunt."

"History does not look kindly on leaders who treat human beings like cargo, loading them up and sending them a thousand miles away without telling them their destination," Rep. Bill Keating, D-Massachusetts, said in a tweet.

Earlier this summer, Florida also sent flights filled with migrants to Sacramento. California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta both likened the action to kidnapping.

In a letter earlier this month, Newsom and Bonta joined Sheriff Javier Salazar of Bexar County, Texas, to call on the U.S. Department of Justice "to investigate potential violations of federal law by those involved in this scheme."

Salazar's office announced last month that it had recommended criminal charges, including misdemeanor and felony counts of unlawful restraint. No suspects were named. The Sheriff had previously opened an investigation into the flights after saying the migrants were "lured." Charlie Baker, Massachusetts' Governor at the time, said he was supporting that investigation.

[diablo1776]

Shots fired..

[gamer2002]

[swiftiesforharris]

Kamala Fact of the Day!

In 2006, as San Francisco's district attorney, Kamala Harris expressed support for the city's sanctuary city policy of not inquiring about immigration status in the process of a criminal investigation, saying it allowed people to come forward as witnesses to crimes when they might not have otherwise. She argued it is important that immigrants be able to talk with law enforcement without fear.

[mightyflamethrower]

[piniatafullofblood]

this might be one of the most important things I’ve posted on here. If you see any of my posts today, see this one.

this is a governmental outreach survey.

If you live in the us, take the survey. Tell them what you think. Show them that we do not stand by the choices our government is making, and that they are doing us a disservice. topics discussed in tags

[etakeh]

Good news, Star Trek fans! We're pretty much on schedule.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

by Samantha Kamman | After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and returned to states the right to make laws governing abortion, initiatives to secure sanctuary cities for the unborn are multiplying. On Tuesday, the city of Pueblo, Colorado, narrowly passed the first reading of a proposed ordinance that would ban abortions within city limits...

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Radley Balko at The Watch Substack:

Donald Trump wants to deport 15 million people. He has now made that promise on multiple occasions. He made similar promises during his first term, when he said he’d deport 8 million people. Back then, he was thwarted by institutional resistance, other priorities, incompetence, and his general tendency to get distracted. But this time there’s a plan. It is not a smart plan, nor is it an achievable one. But it is an unapologetically autocratic plan. “You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition told me. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”

The Atlantic, New York Times and Washington Post have all looked at what Trump and the MAGA coalition have planned for immigration policy should he be elected again. Those stories all got some attention at the time, but not nearly enough to reflect the insanity of what he’s proposing. Perhaps it’s the sort of bluster Trump often spurts out in the moment, but never bothers to implement. We ought to take it more seriously. Trump has made 15 million deportations a central part of his 2024 campaign. And he’s stepped up the dehumanizing of immigrants he’ll need to get a significant portion of the country on board.

Even if Trump gets distracted, it’s likely he’ll put Stephen Miller in charge of the plan. Miller is the only non-relative senior staffer who served the entirety of the first Trump term. And Miller won’t be distracted. Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life. Miller himself has long made clear that the distinction that matters most to him is not between “legal” and “illegal,” but between white and non-white immigrants. Both prior to and after joining the Trump campaign in 2016 and White House in 2017, Miller sent hundreds of emails to far-right outlets like Breitbart touting racist literature like Camp of the Saints, and links to unabashed white nationalist sites where writers argue that nonwhite immigrants are of lower intelligence, and are disease-ridden, parasitic, and predisposed to criminality.

(It shouldn’t need saying, but immigrants and their children contribute far more to the economy than they take from it, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, interracial IQ comparisons are based on a false premise and have few real-world implications, and provided there’s some basic screening at the border, there’s zero evidence that immigrants threaten public health.) In November, Miller offered the details of his plan in an interview with Charlie Kirk. Miller plans to bring in the National Guard, state and local police, other federal police agencies like the DEA and ATF, and if necessary, the military. Miller’s deportation force would then infiltrate cities and neighborhoods, going door to door and business to business in search of undocumented immigrants. He plans to house the millions of immigrants he wants to expel in tent camps along the border, then use military planes to transport them back to their countries of origin.

[...]

Miller also wants to end birthright citizenship (more on that in a moment), and during the first Trump administration pushed a “denaturalization” program to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship. Last year, a coalition of MAGA factions put together “Project 2025,” their blueprint for a second Trump term. It’s basically a roadmap to autocracy. And they make no secret of the fact that they want to do away with legal immigration — and nonwhite legal immigration in particular.

The Project 2025 plan would end the only legal way for seasonal and agricultural workers to come to the U.S. to work. It would also effectively end the H1-B visas that allow immigrants to work in fields like tech, engineering, and medicine — most of whom come from India or China. They want to end humanitarian programs that grant sanctuary for refugees fleeing war or natural disasters, and suspend all visas to any country that the administration deems uncooperative in accepting deportations. They want to screen visa applicants for ideology, barring entry and terminating the visas of people Miller considers politically impure. Miller told the New York Times that the administration would also invoke a 1798 law that allows federal officials to deport immigrants without due process during wartime, taking the broad view that drug cartels are waging a war against the United States.

The Project 2025 plan also calls for cutting all federal aid to colleges and universities that provide financial aid to undocumented students, including DACA recipients — the undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. It would cruelly tie all sorts of unrelated federal aid — including emergency aid after natural disasters — to state and municipal cooperation on immigration enforcement. The plan would require at least 70 percent of the staff of any federal contractor to be U.S. citizens — not legal residents, but U.S. citizens. As the Niskanen Center puts it, “the Mandate aims to demolish the American immigration system, coerce states and localities into cooperating with administrative schemes, and intimidate immigrants present in the United States.”

[...] Deporting even a fraction of 15 million people would also wreck the economy. Inflation would soar (especially when combined with Trump’s plan to slap a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on imports), and the U.S. would likely spiral into a recession, possibly a depression. Naturally, House Speaker Mike Johnson has expressed his enthusiastic support. Trump and Miller aren’t going to deport 15 million people in four years. It just isn’t possible. But the important thing — the thing that ought to be immediately disqualifying — is that they plan to try.

[...]

Trump’s plan would require deportation officials to go into cities, workplaces, colleges, and neighborhoods, find undocumented immigrants, and forcibly extract them. He did some of this during his first term, but it was sporadic and mostly for show. This would be on a much, much larger scale.

These will be people who for the most part are indistinguishable from legal residents and citizens, and whose only offense is to be in the country without documentation (which is a civil offense, not a criminal one). That means it’s a near certainty that a significant number of people who are here legally would be mistakenly detained. Some would be deported. And once they’re gone, they’d have to battle a backlogged and bureaucratic morass of an immigration system to get back in. Usually, refugee crises are brought on by large groups of people either voluntarily migrating from regions struck by war or natural disaster, or armies forcibly moving people en masse. Trump’s deportation plan would mean identifying the undocumented people in virtually every decent sized city, town, and county in the United States, detaining those people in some regional facility, transporting them to a bus station or airport, then flying, walking, or driving them across the border.

Imagine what it would take to evacuate the entirety of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. Imagine the number of buses and you’d need, the number of holding facilities, and everything you’d need to staff and equip those facilities. You’d need security. You’d need medical staff and food services. You’d need bathroom and shower facilities. You’d need janitorial staff, bus drivers, and pilots. Now imagine moving a population equal in size to the populations of those cities, but spread out all over the United States. In addition to Miller’s tent encampments along the border, you’d also need detainment facilities in every major city to hold immigrants as they await transport. Sanctuary cities would resist letting the administration use space in their jails. But even in cooperating jurisdictions, there wouldn’t be nearly enough available space. In his Atlantic piece, Brownstein consulted with experts who made the dystopian suggestion of housing immigrants in warehouses and abandoned shopping malls.

Currently, removals are handled by the Enforcement and Removals Operations (ERO) division of ICE. At the moment, that office has 7,600 employees. Last year, ERO removed about 142,000 people with a budget of $4.7 billion. If we apply these numbers to Trump’s 15 million plan, and spread it out over a 4-year term, Trump would need the ERO or an equivalent agency to increase its capacity by a factor of about 26. So the office would need to increase to more than 200,000 employees, and a budget of $122 billion. But that’s just the “muscle,” or the people who carry out the removals. ICE also has investigators, administrative staff, and attorneys who argue immigration cases in court. Overall, ICE has about 20,000 employees, with a budget of $8.5 billion. If we assume the current staffing and budget would need to expand at scale with the number of removals, Trump’s deportation plan would need 530,000 employees. That’s about 70,000 more staff than current active-duty troops in the U.S. Army.

The overall ICE budget would need to increase to $225 billion — 80 percent more than the current budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security, and 20 percent more than the Army’s 2025 budget. You’d also need to multiply the number of immigration courts and judges. Currently there are 69 immigration courts with 650 immigration judges. To keep the current ratio of courts and judges to deportations, you’d need more than 1,800 courts and over 17,000 judges. The current budget for these courts is $981 million. That would need to jump to $26 billion.

Radley Balko wrote an insightful column on the costs of Donald Trump’s fascistic mass deportation plan, as it would be very costly to the economy and would require tons and tons of people to carry out.

[culturevulturette]

It's true. Where this is happening, this is exactly what they voted for. It's what "sanctuary city/state" policies are all about.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill into law Wednesday to expand the state's ability to move migrants to Democratic-led states.

The signing comes following controversial actions last year when DeSantis authorized sending two planes filled with Venezuelan and Colombian migrants to Martha's Vineyard, the vacation island in Massachusetts, as part of a political stunt aimed at opposing President Joe Biden's border policy.

The move triggered several lawsuits questioning its legality, including from Florida Democratic state Sen. Jason Pizzo.

The initial transport bill, from 2022, specified that state funds must be used to transport migrants only out of Florida, yet the Governor orchestrated flights out of Texas. Under the expanded law, Florida could move migrants from any state and keep the details of the transportation companies secret.

DeSantis, who typically showcases his legislative achievements with public events that he streams on social media, didn't sign the bill into law before a crowd. Instead, he did so from his office in the Governor's mansion and then tweeted a photo.

Still, he did address the legislation publicly after fielding a question about it from a reporter in West Palm Beach, where he was unveiling a separate technology proposal. Asked to defend the immigration policy, DeSantis said Biden's border actions had necessitated that he act.

"What it's done is it's highlighted this issue in a way that would not have been highlighted any other way," he said, adding: "I would love to not have to deal with this at all. But you have a total disaster that's unfolded on that border for over two years."

DeSantis' Martha's Vineyard move was viewed by critics as a cruel stunt that misled vulnerable migrants.

In political circles, it also was seen as an attempt to gin up headlines ahead of a potential 2024 presidential run. Defenders of the transport programs have said that the considerable costs of supporting migrants with food, shelter, and medical care should be borne not just by states along the US-Mexico border.

On September 20, 2022, a Boston-based civil rights firm representing a group of migrants and an immigration nonprofit network sued DeSantis, alleging migrants were tricked into boarding the flights with false promises of jobs and other support.

Despite the legal and political backlash, DeSantis pressed ahead in expanding the program. He brought lawmakers to Tallahassee last week to fast-track the bill through both chambers. The Governor has a Republican supermajority in the legislature that has been deferential to his proposals.

"Florida is using all tools available to protect our citizens from Biden's open border policies," DeSantis tweeted Wednesday. "I am glad to have signed legislation to continue the program of transporting illegal aliens to sanctuary jurisdictions. I thank the legislature for maintaining this valuable tool."

The state still has millions set aside for transporting migrants, but DeSantis has asked lawmakers to allocate $12 million more through their separate, budget-making process when they meet for their regular session in March.

"Some of these folks going to these sanctuary jurisdictions are in much better circumstances than just being stranded somewhere with nowhere to go," DeSantis said Wednesday. "It's not about them, because these are sanctuary jurisdictions that beat their chest just a few years ago about how nobody was illegal."

So-called "sanctuary cities" limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities by refusing to report or hand over certain undocumented immigrants for deportation.

DeSantis has said he agreed with former President Donald Trump's border policies that required migrants to wait in Mexico for their immigration appointments in the US.

US Customs and Border Protection in Miami reported that the state has seen a 400% increase in migrants from Cuba and Haiti arriving by boat since October of last year, according to CBS News.

[gamer2002]

The official Democrats' policy is that cities can defy federal immigration laws with their sanctuaries, but states cannot fill the gaps in protecting the border from illegal immigration.