The Trump administration
is continuing its tough talk against “sanctuary cities,” which shelter people living in the country illegally by refusing to help the federal government enforce immigration laws.
WASHINGTON — The idea of Attorney General Jeff Sessions going to the White House to announce continuation of an Obama administration policy related to immigration would have been unthinkable months ago. But that’s what happened Monday.
Sessions, decrying the safety risk posed when cities don’t cooperate with federal immigration authorities, repeated previous statements that the Trump administration would seek to deny so-called sanctuary cities some federal grant funds. He offered no new policies, simply reiterating an Obama administration directive from the previous summer. But he did so with stark rhetoric intended to resonate with fellow advocates of aggressive moves to target illegal immigration.
“Countless Americans would be alive today and countless loved ones would not be grieving today if these policies of sanctuary cities were ended,” Sessions claimed.
His statement was the most visible sign of how the White House hopes to regain its footing after the collapse of its health care bill — returning to the types of largely symbolic gestures on campaign promises that were a staple of its early weeks.
In his first full week in office, Trump used executive authority to target a slew of Obama priorities, seeking to restart construction of oil pipelines, review new overtime pay rules and formally break from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership. Many of those orders did not actually change policies, but did highlight issues Trump’s voters care about.
On Monday, Trump was back at it — rescinding Obama-era regulations through a 1996 law that sought to give Congress an effective veto of executive directives.
The Congressional Review Act had been used just once before Trump took office; he signed four at once, addressing regulations on government contracting, development on public lands and education that the White House said hurt the economy and further centralized power in Washington.
“This was a lot of work for a lot of people to get this done, but it’s going to lead to a lot of good jobs and a lot less regulation,” Trump said at a signing ceremony attended by Republican lawmakers.
Only days earlier, a more somber president admitted that enacting more farreaching legislation was a much heavier lift. A threeweek sprint to pass the first major plank of his legislative agenda ended with GOP leaders calling off a vote on the American Health Care Act, the longpromised mechanism for repealing and replacing the health care law known as Obamacare.
The White House on Monday still had little appetite for dwelling on that setback, setting it aside as it recalibrates strategy on an equally daunting task: a rewrite of the federal tax code.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer only tentatively stood by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s previously stated August target date for legislation.
But the highest-profile symbolic move came from Sessions.
He noted that any jurisdiction applying for grants from his department would have to certify that it was in compliance with federal immigration law. He didn’t mention that the Justice Department has been requiring that at least since July, so police and sheriff ’s departments that have Justice Department grants already have been asserting that they meet the requirements of federal law.
Although many cities have policies that they, or critics, characterize as “sanctuary,” those policies do not necessarily mean they are violating the law.
Sessions did say that the Justice Department could impose additional requirements later, but announced none.