Judge stays attempt to block funding
SAN FRANCISCO: The Trump Administration has suffered its third major setback on immigration policy after a federal judge blocked any attempt to withhold funding from ‘‘sanctuary cities’’ that do not cooperate with US immigration officials.
US District Judge William Orrick says the president has no authority to attach new conditions to federal spending.
Orrick issued the preliminary injunction in two lawsuits — one brought by the city of San Francisco, the other by Santa Clara County — against an executive order targeting communities that protect immigrants from deportation.
The injunction will stay in place while the lawsuits work their way through court.
The judge rejected the Administration’s argument the executive order applied only to a relatively small pot of money and said President Donald Trump could not set new conditions on spending approved by Congress.
Even if he could, those conditions would have to be clearly related to the funds at issue and not coercive, as the executive order appeared to be, Orrick said.
‘‘Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement cannot be threatened merely because a jurisdiction chooses an immigration enforcement strategy of which the president disapproves,’’ the judge said.
The Justice Department had no immediate comment.
San Francisco City lawyer Dennis Herrera said the President was ‘‘forced to back down’’.
‘‘This is why we have courts — to halt the overreach of a president and an attorneygeneral who either don’t understand the Constitution or choose to ignore it,’’ Herrera said.
The threat of a US Government shutdown this weekend appeared to recede yesterday after Trump backed away from a demand that Congress include funding for his planned border wall with Mexico in a spending Bill.
Even if the fight over wall funding is over, Republicans and Democrats still have difficult issues to resolve as they face a Friday night deadline when existing money expires for many federal agencies.
There was growing sentiment among lawmakers they would need to pass a shortterm extension of current spending, possibly of one week, to finish negotiating longerterm legislation for funding the Government through the end of September. But yesterday some leading Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate expressed optimism Congress could pass the longerterm Bill and avoid having to rely on another temporary extension of last year’s funding levels.
Trump removed a crucial sticking point when he said on Monday he might wait until Republicans began drafting the budget blueprint for the fiscal year that starts on October 1 to seek wall funding.
Trump’s former national security adviser may have broken the law by failing to disclose he had accepted tens of thousands of dollars from Russian organisations in 2015, leaders of a House oversight committee said.
The two leaders of the oversight committee, Republican Jason Chaffetz and Democrat Elijah Cummings, say they have seen no evidence that Michael Flynn, a retired army lieutenant general, properly disclosed foreign payments.
Among the payments in question was more than $US33,000 Flynn received in 2015 from the Russia Today television network, described by US intelli gence officials as a propaganda front for Russia’s government. ‘‘That money needs to be recovered,’’ said Chaffetz, chairman of the House committee on oversight and government reform.
Chaffetz also raised questions about fees Flynn received as part of $US530,000 in consulting work his company performed for a businessman tied to Turkey’s government.
Cummings said Flynn’s failure to formally report the Russian payments on his security clearance paperwork amounted to concealment of the money, which could be prosecuted as a felony.