President Donald Trump’s proposal to ship immigration detainees to so-called sanctuary cities –which are Democrat strongholds— is a political masterstroke, if the Left’s wounded animal-like howling is any indication.
With this politically brilliant tactic, the likes of which would never have come from a President Jeb Bush or a President Mitt Romney, Trump continues to demonstrate that he is one of the few Republican presidents in modern American history who actually knows how to fight the Left. He is giving leftists a well-deserved taste of their own medicine.
And what better place to send illegal aliens than to sanctuary jurisdictions? They claim to welcome illegals and provide services for them. Their sanctuary policies, by which they harbor and shield illegals from U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), are magnets for illegals, giving them incentives to sneak across the border or overstay visas.
The president’s plan only gives sanctuary cities more of what they claim to want.
“We’ll bring them to sanctuary city areas and let that particular area take care of it,” Trump said April 12 at the White House. “They say, ‘we have open arms,’ they’re always saying they have open arms, let’s see if they have open arms.”
The same day Trump tweeted: “Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only….”
“Sanctuary cities that release known criminal aliens put all Americans at risk,” Trump told the National Association of Attorneys General on March 4.
“In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of approximately 100,000 assaults — and these are new numbers, hard to believe — 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 murders.”
California leftists loudly rejected Trump’s plan, which is not all that surprising because the Golden State gave birth to the sanctuary movement. Los Angeles became the first U.S. sanctuary city in 1979 when its police department issued Special Order 40, a document that forbids police officers from inquiring about the immigration status of individuals not suspected of crimes.
California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom (D), a former mayor of San Francisco, has pledged to make his home state “a sanctuary to all who seek it” in defiance of President Trump’s drive to secure the nation’s border with Mexico and enforce U.S. immigration laws. The state already has unprecedented sanctuary laws on its books that shelter its 2.4 million illegal aliens from ICE. Those dubious statutes are under attack in a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration.
Newsom was one step away from the funny farm Friday as he experienced an adjective-rich mental breakdown while describing his opposition to the plan to CBS News.
Newsom said Trump’s proposal was “unserious,” “illegal,” “immoral,” “asinine,” “sophomoric,” “ludicrous,” “petulant,” “un-American,” and “rather pathetic.”
“To use immigrants as pawns — to put them in difficult and trying circumstances as political theater shows how low a human being can go. And this human being happens to be sadly and tragically the president of the United States,” Newsom added.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, another California Democrat whose home town of San Francisco is a sanctuary city, attacked the Trump administration for its “cynicism and cruelty” in “using human beings … as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants.”
San Francisco’s current mayor, London Breed, said the plan “is just another in a long line of scare tactics and half-baked ideas.”
Oakland, California Mayor Libby Schaaf, called the plan “an outrageous abuse of power — using human beings to settle political scores.”
Schaaf has tipped off illegal aliens about approaching ICE raids to applause from the mainstream media. Schaaf piously insists her actions have not endangered ICE officers. “How can it be dangerous and illegal simply to tell people what the law is, what their rights are, what their resources are?” she said disingenuously. “That’s all I did.”
Except that Newsom, Pelosi, Breed, Schaaf, and their fellow Democrats have been using immigrants, or more precisely, illegal aliens, as pawns for decades in an effort to import an electorate more to their liking in what stubbornly remains a more or less right-of-center country.
Former President Obama even went further, sending busloads of migrants to law-and-order conservative cities that did not want them, to punish those jurisdictions for not being sanctuary cities, as Monica Showalter notes at American Thinker.
President Trump has tried to crack down on sanctuary cities.
An Obama-appointed San Francisco judge, U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick III, issued a permanent nationwide injunction against President Trump’s Executive Order 13768, which would have withheld federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with ICE. That injunction remains in force.
Congressional Republicans have serially betrayed conservatives and handed Democrats victories over President Trump by refusing to cut off funding for sanctuary cities.
The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers call sanctuary jurisdictions “civil liberties safe zones” to blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S. Leftists also like to refer to all migrants, including illegal aliens, simply as “immigrants” in order to further muddy the waters. This helps the Left portray conservatives, who are generally not anti-immigrant –they’re anti-illegal immigration— as xenophobic bigots.
Sanctuary cities should be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States just as much as the Confederate Army was when it opened fire on Fort Sumter.
President Trump, unlike Democrats and many in his own party, understands how dangerous sanctuary policies are.
And the Left’s extended freak-out over Trump’s new proposal suggests the president is on to something. (FrontPageMag)
Matthew Vadum, formerly senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, “Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.”
