Sessions’ announcement:
Attorney general vows to do all he can to ensure federal immigration laws are enforced in California.
SACRAMENTO — Chastising California officials for “irrational, unfair and unconstitutional” policies that protect undocumented immigrants, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions promised Wednesday to do everything in his power to ensure federal immigration laws are enforced in the state.
Sessions came to the state capital to deliver his message one day after the U.S. Justice Department sued to overturn three recently enacted California laws restricting state and local agencies’ cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
Democratic state leaders were derisive in their dismissal of Sessions and his agency’s lawsuit, and even his audience Wednesday — a state association of law enforcement officers — gave him a lukewarm reception.
They listened without applauding when he offered up such conservative crowdpleasers as, “We are simply asking California and other sanctuary jurisdictions to stop actively obstructing federal law enforcement. Stop treating immigration agents differently from everybody else for the purpose of eviscerating border and immigration laws and advancing an open borders philosophy shared by only a few of the most radical extremists.”
Sessions’ assertion that California is putting the public and federal immigration agents at risk through sanctuary policies drew a rebuke from Gov. Jerry Brown, who called it “simply not true.”
“We know the Trump administration is full of liars,” the governor said at a news conference.
He said Sessions should apologize for bringing “the mendacity of Washington to California and trying to insert this kind of division and, I might add, dysfunctionality, in a state that is really working.”
Brown labeled the Justice Department’s lawsuit as “pure red meat for the (Republican) base” and a declaration of “war against the state of California.”
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Sacramento, seeks to overturn three state laws that the Justice Department says unconstitutionally obstruct the federal government from enforcing immigration laws.
The state laws, each passed during President Trump’s first year in office in 2017, “reflect a deliberate effort by California” to hinder law enforcement, the Justice Department said.
One of the laws, SB54 by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, prohibits local law enforcement from notifying federal agents that an undocumented immigrant is about to be released from custody unless that person was being held on serious criminal charges. The law prohibits jails from holding undocumented immigrants for federal agents, bars police from asking detainees about their immigration status and denies immigration officers access to jails.
When undocumented immigrants are released into the community, Sessions said, that means federal agents have to go looking for them.
“Think about it — the fate of an officer knocking on a door to execute a warrant,” Session said Wednesday. “They don’t know what’s on the other side of the door . ... I fundamentally reject, at my core, that we should further endanger the lives of those who risk everything for us just because some officials in California want to violate the law in promoting an agenda that the American people reject.”
The lawsuit also targets a law authored by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, that prohibits private employers, in most cases, from allowing workplace immigration raids unless federal agents have a judicial warrant. It also challenges a law by Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County), barring cities and counties from signing contracts with the federal government to house immigration detainees in local jails.
De León, Chiu and Lara held a news conference Wednesday to argue that their bills afford protections to immigrants in the U.S. without documentation.
“We are not interfering with immigration law,” de León said. “We aren’t getting in the way, but we aren’t helping facilitate tearing mothers from children and children from fathers.”
Sessions made his remarks at the annual meeting of the California Peace Officers Association, which represents thousands of law enforcement officers around the state. The group, and most police agencies in the state, remained neutral on the three laws being challenged in the federal lawsuit.
The crowd listened in silence to Sessions’ speech and gave him polite applause when he finished. A handful of those in attendance rose to clap.
Outside Sessions’ speech at a downtown hotel, a couple hundred protesters sympathetic to undocumented immigrants lined the streets in a peaceful march.
“Hatred is infecting everything,” said 18-year-old Dronme Davis of Sacramento, “and you’ve got to show up.”