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Republicans love “states’ rights,” until they don’t. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, America’s most racist Keebler, is expected to use his speech to the California Peace Officers Association today to formally announce the Trump administration’s pending lawsuit against the state of California and several state leaders over a series of pro-immigrant bills designed to limit cooperation with Donald Trump’s racist, mass deportation force:
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday evening in the U.S. Eastern District of California, marks a turning point in the ongoing battle between the Trump administration and state and local jurisdictions over how far cities and states can go to block their officers from enforcing federal immigration law.
The suit targets three California laws – Senate Bill 54, Assembly bill 450 and Assembly bill 103 – that the federal government say violate the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution and interfere with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
It names both California Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Xavier Becerra personally as defendants.
Of course, nothing prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from going into a state to conduct their operations. What so-called “sanctuary city” policies simply say is that localities won’t use their resources to act as federal immigration agents, oftentimes in unconstitutional ways. Police departments know that when immigrant residents trust them enough to report crime without fear of being turned over to ICE, communities become safer for all.
But the administration’s lawsuit isn’t about “law and order”—“If Mr. Sessions is worried about crime,” State Senator Kevin de León told journalist Pilar Marrero, “he should take a look at his own state of Alabama [because] FBI statistics show that violent crime and property crime is much higher there than in California”—it’s about Sessions’s decades-long war on immigrants, and now he’s weaponizing the Department of Justice to stick it to California for trying to protect their residents.
The lawsuit will come just days after Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned residents about an imminent raid, likely preventing scores of Oakland immigrants without criminal records from being caught up in ICE’s net. Her actions pissed off Thomas Homan, the agency’s acting director, who had promised to increase raids in the state because of the pro-immigrant legislation. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, roughly half of the immigrants who were ultimately arrested had no criminal record at all.
de León, author of S.B. 54, the so-called “sanctuary state” bill, isn’t backing down to Sessions’s political stunt of a lawsuit. “There was a reason why from the beginning of President Trump’s election that I hired the former U.S. Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, and that was to receive expert counsel on federal issues. If it galls the (current) U.S. attorney general and the president that we won’t help enforce their racist, xenophobic immigration policies, then I say tough”:
Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a former leader of the California Senate, echoed that defiance from Washington, D.C. where he had traveled for a business advocacy trip. “Their legal strategy around these issues has not been impressive, so whatever,” Steinberg said.
“If he wants to come to … further try to intimidate the city, the state, but more importantly the Dreamers and the hard-working families, he might as well cancel his flight, because we’re going to react in the same way we have reacted consistently," Steinberg said. "We are a proud safe haven, a proud sanctuary city, a proud sanctuary state and we stand with our neighbors.”
This has never been about California’s public safety, it’s been about attacking California for resisting his racist agenda. Not to mention a losing agenda: Republican attacks on so-called “sanctuary cities” backfired in Virginia and New Jersey elections last year. “No matter what happens in Washington,” tweeted Becerra, “California will stay the course and enforce all our laws and protect all our people. That’s how we keep our communities safe. Like all the men and women who wear the badge in California, I took an oath to uphold the law. That means all of the laws.” Brown, named in the lawsuit, also had a response: