A U.S. District Judge’s Injunction to Withhold State and Local Enforcement from the Trump-Breaking Immigration Crackdown
“The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the Cities and Counties and the communities they serve,” Orrick wrote.
“Here we are again,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco, who found that the Trump administration’s actions were likely unconstitutional and granted a preliminary injunction.
The Trump administration has also tried to withhold funding from sanctuary cities and states. During President Trump’s first term, the Justice Department tried to withhold funding from several jurisdictions — but they fought back, and were often able to defeat those efforts in court.
“We stand together in solidarity with our immigrant families,” wrote Keith Wilson, the mayor of Portland, OR, in a letter to the city council earlier this year, promising the city would try to “keep undocumented families safe by slowing or stopping cooperation with overreaching federal immigration enforcement.”
The executive order will direct the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to identify jurisdictions where local enforcement has declined to cooperate with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“It’s easy,” said Leavitt during a press conference on Monday. “Obey the law, respect the law, and don’t obstruct federal immigration officials and law enforcement officials when they are simply trying to remove public safety threats from our nation’s communities.”
The order on policing demands that federal agencies to provide ” new best practices” to state and local police, improve police training and pay, and improve the tracking of crime statistics.
The order doesn’t specify how to achieve those goals, but Peter Moskos, a former police officer and now professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says on its face the first portion of the executive order is positive.
Moskos wrote Back From The Brink, an oral history of New York’s historic declinein crime in the 1990s.
He didn’t like other parts of the order. One section calls on the attorney general to pursue legal remedies against state and local officials for discrimination and civil-rights violations, as well as obstructing law enforcement officers, related to the DEI initiatives.
Tom Homan, the FBI Border Czar, and the White House’s Attorney General: a lawyer-friendly approach to ICE probes of police misconduct
The FBI arrested a judge in Wisconsin who was attempting to help a man avoid an ICE arrest in her courtroom.
Tom Homan, White House Border Czar, told the press that he would be prosecuted if he crossed that line to impede or hide an illegal alien. “Judge or not.”
The Sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts says that he has never suggested that anyone interfere with what the federal government does. State law doesn’t allow him to accommodate ICE requests to hold people in jail beyond their release dates and he does not think the White House executive orders change that.
The executive order promising the “unleashing” of police also promises legal help to individual officers who “unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions” taken on duty. The attorney general will create a system that includes “private-sector pro bono assistance,” according to the order.
The Obama-eraJustice Department used consent decree to impose reforms on troubled police departments but it was not as popular as it used to be and it was slow to come back under Biden.
In the second Trump administration, there has been a loss of lawyers from the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
Juan Cuba is the executive director of the group Sheriff Accountability Action. When you force sheriffs and local police to sign on to agreements with ICE, it’s just going to encourage more bad actors.