WE’LL TAKE THEM
TRUMP: I’LL SEND MIGRANTS TO SANCTUARY CITIES
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free ...
President Trump said he’s ready to give “an unlimited supply” of immigrants held at the southern border to mostly Democratic sanctuary cities in an effort to make liberals who don’t like his policies “so happy.”
The comments, unleashed across Twitter and during a brief media appearance at the White House Friday, completely contradicted statements from his own administration, which a day earlier denied that Trump was considering the plan as a way to punish his perceived political enemies.
“We are looking at the possibility, strongly looking at it, to be honest with you,” Trump told reporters in a head-spinning change of position.
“We’ll bring them to sanctuary city areas and let that particular area take care of it,” he said. “We can give them a lot. We can give them an unlimited supply.”
Democrats don’t agree with his immigration policies, Trump added, so he’d do things their way.
“They say, ‘We have open arms.’ They’re always saying they have open arms. Let’s see if they have open arms,” he said.
His remarks came after a flurry of tweets in which he said Democrats were unwilling to change “our very dangerous immigration laws” and that this was his way to stick it to them.
“The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy,” he wrote.
The Washington Post first reported late Thursday that the administration was mulling the plan, but the White House and the Department of Homeland Security pushed back, claiming the policy was no longer under consideration.
“This was just a suggestion that was floated and rejected, which ended any further discussion,” the White House said in a statement.
But by Friday — after Trump’s complete 180 — a White House spokesman said Democrats need to accept migrants into their districts and work with the administration to make it happen.
Unless they can be quickly deported, immigrants detained for being in the U.S. illegally have to by law be released, except in cases where violent crimes are involved.
Generally, detainees are able to settle wherever they
want while awaiting deportations or court decisions.
But Trump’s plan would mandate they can only move to “sanctuary” jurisdictions — states and cities like New York, where politicians have pledged to not cooperate with federal authorities trying to deport undocumented immigrants without criminal records.
Mayor de Blasio on Friday said he was unmoved by Trump’s efforts at retaliation.
“Trump has yet again proven that the only constant in his immigration policy is cruelty,” the mayor said. “He uses people like pawns. New York City will always be the ultimate city of immigrants — the president’s empty threats won’t change that.”
But many advocates were aghast at Trump’s position that sending immigrants to a region would be a threat or a punishment.
“It’s a bizarre, outlandish notion and one that really doesn’t make any sense except that it’s consistent with this administration’s unserious approach to these very important questions of how you deal with people who come here,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrants’ rights project. “It’s impulsive, irrational and dehumanizing.”
The confusing rollout of Trump’s controversial policy coincides with his growing frustration at not being able to keep many of his most controversial campaign promises, including building a massive wall on the Mexican border and ending the policy he refers to as a “catch and release.”
Over the past week, the president pushed out his Homeland Security Department Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, then yanked his nominee to head the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and ousted the head of the U.S. Secret Service with a promise to move in a “tougher” direction.
A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Daily News that the abrupt shakeup has left the various agencies operating under the DHS umbrella “confused” and “broken in half.”
Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported this week that more than 53,000 migrant families were apprehended at the southern border in March, the highest number recorded in a single month since the agency began tracking that figure in 2012. A majority of the migrants are fleeing violence and poverty in Central America in hopes of finding better lives in the U.S.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — whose Democratic district in San Francisco is among the sanctuary jurisdictions that would be targeted by Trump’s plan — ripped the proposal as another sign of the president’s failure to meet the “challenges that we face” as a nation of immigrants.
Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, drew a line between Trump’s retaliatory sanctuary proposal and the Homeland Security staff shakeup, saying they show the administration’s “reckless” agenda isn’t about “keeping the country safe, but about partisan politics.”
“If your immigration policies are not fixing the problem but only cause chaos and focus on keeping people out, they will always fail,” Thompson said in a statement.