Trump, state GOP voices lambaste sanctuary laws
White House rallies officials from California on core issue
“There are lot of people in California who are sympathetic to the plight
of immigrants. But they don’t want to be a sanctuary state.”
Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore (Riverside County)
California’s sanctuary-state laws got a national airing Wednesday when local leaders met with President Trump at the White House to complain that limiting their cooperation with immigration officials is endangering public safety.
The meeting was long on outrage and assertions by more than a dozen mayors, county supervisors and district attorneys that undocumented immigrants are driving up crime in California, with Trump periodically taking swings at the state’s “deadly and unconstitutional” laws — and referring to some undocumented immigrants as “animals.”
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s presence was a reminder of the underlying political importance of the sanctuary issue to the White House — it could help determine whether McCarthy and his fellow Republicans will still be running the House next year.
For McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, and California Republicans, this was about rallying GOP voters back home. For Trump, this was a message to his supporters in the rest of the country that he won’t forget the core of his agenda, even if the venue is a state that he lost by nearly 2-to-1 to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Republicans hope the real impact of Trump going national with his fight against sanctuary laws will be excitement among their base voters — and not just in the courtroom, where the administration has sued to overturn the state’s restrictions against local authorities cooperating with fed-
eral agents enforcing immigration law.
The GOP desperately needs the injection of energy in California. Democrats have targeted several of the 14 congressional seats now held by Republicans as part of their effort to win back the House. The two main Republicans running for governor, Travis Allen and John Cox, have seized on the issue in hopes that at least one of them will survive the June 5 top-two primary. Failing to field a candidate in the November runoff could depress Republican turnout throughout the state.
Trump said opposition to the law in California “has sparked a rebellion.” Ten counties and three dozen cities have supported the administration’s anti-sanctuary stance, nearly all of them in conservative parts of Southern California and the Central Valley.
“There’s a lot of people who are really fed up with what’s going on. It’s not just Republicans,” Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez, R-Lake Elsinore (Riverside County), who sat next to Trump, said in an interview afterward. “I have a lot of Democrats who write to me and say, ‘What in the world are you doing (on sanctuary laws)?’ ”
Some GOP leaders hope a November ballot measure to reverse California’s 12-centper-gallon increase in the gas tax could bring out their voters. But Shawn Steel, an Orange County attorney who is a member of the Republican National Committee, said that while an anti-gas-tax campaign “is certainly a spark” to bring out GOP voters, “the prairie fire is sanctuary.”
Trump repeated his suggestion Wednesday that Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf be investigated by the Justice Department for alleged obstruction of justice for her warning statement ahead of a federal immigration sweep in Northern California. When Trump first raised the idea in April, a Schaaf spokesman responded that “sharing information about rights, responsibilities and resources is legal and appropriate.”
Wednesday’s meeting was full of praise for Trump — Lassen County District Attorney Stacey Montgomery told the president that he was “loved” in the Northern California county, which he carried in 2016 with 72 percent of the vote.
But Melendez said, “The value for the rest of the country who was watching, and the Californians back home, was they see that they were not alone.
“There are lot of people in California who are sympathetic to the plight of immigrants,” Melendez said. “But they don’t want to be a sanctuary state.”
Gov. Jerry Brown, whose name was frequently invoked during the White House meeting in less-than-friendly terms, said afterward that he was “not impressed.”
“Trump is lying on immigration, lying about crime and lying about the laws of California,” Brown said in a statement. “Flying in a dozen Republican politicians to flatter him and praise his reckless policies changes nothing. We, the citizens of the fifth-largest economy in the world, are not impressed.”
State Sen. Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, the author of the state’s main sanctuary law, said the politicians who attended the meeting “are turning their backs on California and the people they represent. They’ve become useful props to Trump and what he’s trying to do to divide us. This is purely a play for (Republicans) to get out their base.”
Several of those at the meeting cited anecdotes of undocumented immigrants committing crimes in their jurisdictions as evidence of the wrongheadedness of laws that make it harder to deport such immigrants.
“We’re taking people out of the country — you wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” Trump said. “These aren’t people. These are animals.”
For Republicans to convince swing voters on the sanctuary issue, linking it to the fear of crime will be key, said Matt Barreto, a professor of Chicano and Latino studies at UCLA and co-founder of the Latino Decisions polling firm. Advocates of sanctuary laws can point to findings such as one from the nonpartisan fact-checking site Politifact, which said, “Several studies have found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born individuals.”
Barreto said, “You have to convince people that they have a law-and-order problem — and right now you’re not seeing a lot of voters pulling out their hair about immigrants killing people. Right now, this looks like the typical Trump playbook: You call out these racial dog-whistle political issues to get out your base. But I don’t know if that’s going to be enough in California.”