SPANK-TUARY
Judge KOs Trump’s bid to withhold funds Pro-immig cities win, Prez words backfire
A FEDERAL judge in San Francisco has blocked a Trump administration order to withhold funding from so-called sanctuary cities — the latest in a series of blows to the President’s hard-line immigration agenda.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick on Tuesday issued the preliminary injunction in two lawsuits against an executive order targeting communities that protect immigrants from deportation.
One suit was brought by the city of San Francisco, the other by Santa Clara County in California.
The decision comes less than a week after the Department of Justice threatened to cut off money from a grant program named for an NYPD officer slain while watching over an immigrant and knocked New York City as “soft on crime.”
It also came hours after the White House bragged about Trump’s use of largely symbolic executive orders during his first 100 days in power.
Much like Trump’s order barring immigration from a number of Muslim-majority countries — which was blocked by federal courts twice — the President’s own rhetoric helped sink his sanctuary city edict.
“If there was doubt about the scope of the order, the President and attorney general have erased it with their public comments,” Orrick, an Obama appointee, wrote. “The President has called it ‘a weapon’ to use against jurisdictions that disagree with his preferred policies of immigration enforcement.”
Last month, a federal judge in Hawaii similarly cited Trump’s own statements to block his immigration ban.
“Once again a federal court has told the Trump administration: ‘No you can’t,’ ” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement on Tuesday. “The President is going beyond his authority when he tries to cut vital funding to cities that don’t share his illogical and unconstitutional desire to scapegoat immigrants.”
Last Friday, the Trump administration sent letters to officials in California and eight cities — including New York — demanding they provide documentation that they aren’t blocking local officials from sharing information about the immigration status of “any individual” they’ve come across with federal officials.
The letter sparked a heated war of words between the feds on one side and de Blasio and the NYPD on the other.
The Justice Department threatened to withhold money from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program. The grant is named after Byrne, an NYPD officer gunned down in 1988 while guarding the South Jamaica, Queens, home of an immigrant who had been targeted by gangs for reporting serious crimes in the neighborhood.
Orrick on Tuesday rejected the administration’s argument that the sanctuary city order applies only to a small pot of money and said only Congress has the power to set conditions on spending, not the President.
Even if he could, those conditions would have to be related to the funds at issue and not be coercive, Orrick wrote.
“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 wrote.
A Justice Department attorney, Chad Readler, had defended the President’s Jan. 25 executive order
as an attempt to use his “bully pulpit” to “encourage communities and states to comply with the law.”
But Orrick said the communities had a right to be afraid of losing funding.
“The result of this schizophrenic approach to the order is that the counties’ worst fears are not allayed and the counties reasonably fear enforcement under the order,” the judge wrote.
Trump can enforce existing laws that require cooperation in exchange for federal funds, according to Orrick.
A Justice Department spokesman said Tuesday that the administration “will follow the law with respect to regulation of sanctuary jurisdictions.”
The White House issued a lengthy statement condemning Orrick late Tuesday and vowing to appeal.
“Today, the rule of law suffered another blow, as an unelected judge unilaterally rewrote immigration policy for our nation,” the statement read.
“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.”New York officials and immigration advocates applauded Tuesday’s decision to block the order as the suits play out in the courts.
“Sanctuary policies like these aren’t just lawful; they can also be critical to protecting public safety, which depends on trust between law enforcement and those they bravely serve,” state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement.
Earlier Tuesday, mayors from several cities threatened with the loss of federal grants met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and said they remain confused about how to prove their police are in compliance with immigration policies.
The ruling is Trump’s latest defeat on the immigration front.
On top of his failure to limit immigration from Muslim-majority countries as he promised during his campaign, Trump’s efforts to build a wall along the Mexican border have gone nowhere.
Trump maintained on Tuesday that the wall will be built, even as he backed off on his insistence that $1 billion be set aside in a federal spending bill due Friday.