White House: Sanctuary city ruling ‘a gift’ to criminals
San Francisco judge’s order blocking Trump’s defunding of certain cities puts the Bay Area in the national spotlight
President Donald Trump on Wednesday blasted a San Francisco judge’s ”ridiculous” ruling that put the brakes on his plan to punish so-called “sanctuary cities” for not cooperating with federal authorities in enforcing immigration laws.
The president suggested his administration would appeal the decision by District Judge William Orrick, and also told the Washington Examiner that he has considered proposals to break up the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal, which has a reputation for liberal-leaning decisions.
In a rapid-fire burst of early morning tweets, Trump took aim at Orrick’s ruling saying: “First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities-both
ridiculous rulings. See you in the Supreme Court!”
However, the president mistakenly referred to Orrick as a member of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals; Orrick is a district judge and does not sit on that panel. And Congress, not the president, has the power to reorganize the appeals court.
Nonetheless, Trump’s disdain for the San Francisco-based appellate court was clear as he also tweeted “Out of our very big country, with many choices, does everyone notice that both the ‘ban’ case and now the ‘sanctuary’ case is brought in ... the Ninth Circuit, which has a terrible record of being overturned (close to 80%). They used to call this ‘judge shopping!’ Messy system.”
Trump’s declaration that “close to 80%” of the Circuit’s rulings are eventually overturned by the Supreme Court are both accurate and contextually misleading. The fact-checking site Politi Fact found the Supreme Court reversed about 79 percent of the cases it took from the Ninth Circuit between 2010 and 2015. Yet while that rate may be higher than the average, it’s not the absolute highest among the circuit courts, a distinction that goes to the Sixth Circuit, based in Ohio, with an 87 percent average in those same years.
UC Hastings professor of law Rory Little pointed out that given the huge number of cases the Ninth Circuit hears each year, far more than any other region, Trump’s “80 percent” reference wrongly gives the impression that the Supreme Court overturns the Ninth’s cases more than other circuits.
“Eighty percent,” he said, “is about in the middle of the pack — there are some with nearly 100 percent. But the real point here is that the Ninth hears three times as many cases as the other circuits do.” And when you do the math, he says, the percentage of its rulings that are overturned, compared to other circuits, “is the lowest in the country and has been for decades.”
At issue in the case before Orrick is whether the federal government can punish sanctuary cities, like San Francisco and San Jose, by withholding federal funding for their refusal to help immigration officials deport undocumented immigrants who have run afoul of the law. Cities that have declared themselves “sanctuaries” typically refuse to cooperate with agencies like ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, when they try and go after law-breaking undocumented immigrants. When a number of cities around the country balked at playing ball with the feds, the Trump administration threatened to cut them off from receiving federal funding. After Santa Clara and San Francisco counties asked for a preliminary injunction to stop the government from carrying out its threat, Orrick ruled on Tuesday to put Trump’s plan on hold.
The order, which places Santa Clara County and San Francisco at the center of a national immigration showdown, marks the second time a judge has blocked one of Trump’s attempts to tighten the borders.
Critics of Trump’s immigration policies continued to react to Orrick’s ruling. William Freeman, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, said in a statement “we are gratified that the court recognized the profound danger to our democracy posed by the president’s attempt to exercise unconstitutional powers.”
Freeman said “under our system of government, the president cannot coerce cities, counties and states to become agents of federal immigration enforcement by threatening the loss of funds appropriated by Congress.”
Meanwhile, Orrick’s detractors cried foul, accusing the judge of once bundling donations for Barack Obama. The Washington Times reported that Orrick also raised campaign money for John Kerry during that Massachusetts senator’s 2004 try for the White House.
According to the Public Citizen, a nonprofit, consumer rights advocacy group, Orrick was a lawyer working for Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass when he raised at least $200,000 for Obama and donated $30,800 to committees supporting him.
In his ruling, Orrick said that Trump’s order violated the Constitution by attempting to punish local governments by seeking to “deprive local jurisdictions of congressional allocated funds without any notice or opportunity to be heard.”
But the White House tore into the ruling, saying the judge “unilaterally rewrote immigration policy for our Nation.”
In the statement, issued by the office of the press secretary, the White House said, “once again, a single district judge — this time in San Francisco — has ignored Federal immigration law to set a new immigration policy for the entire country. San Francisco, and cities like it, are putting the well-being of criminal aliens before the safety of our citizens, and those city officials who authored these policies have the blood of dead Americans on their hands.”
The White House vowed to “pursue all legal remedies” and called it a fight between “sovereignty and open borders.”
“We are confident we will ultimately prevail in the Supreme Court, just as we will prevail in our lawful efforts to impose immigration restrictions necessary to keep terrorists out of the United States.”