Trump threatens to pull ICE officers out of California

President Donald Trump on Thursday said that he has become so frustrated with California’s “lousy management job” in cracking down on illegal immigration that he’s thinking about removing federal immigration officials from the state.

“If we ever pulled our ICE out, if we ever said, ‘Hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves,’ in two months they’d be begging for us to come back,” Trump said during a roundtable discussion about school shootings on Thursday with state and local officials. “They would be begging. And you know what, I’m thinking about doing it.”

In December, California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed legislation into law that made the entire state a sanctuary for some undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation, limiting state and local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Trump has pledged to rid the country of such sanctuaries, pointing to scattered examples of undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes, and the Department of Justice has threatened to cut off millions of dollars in federal public safety grants to cities and jurisdictions that harbor undocumented immigrants.

“If I wanted to pull our people from California, you would have a crime mess like you’ve never seen in California,” Trump said. “All I’d have to do is to say, ‘ICE and Border Patrol, let California alone.’ You’d be inundated. You would see crime like no one’s ever seen crime in this country. And yet we get no help from the state of California. They’re doing a lousy management job, they have the highest taxes in the nation and they don’t know what’s happening out there.”