DOJ asks sanctuary cities to prove cooperation with immigration law

The big difference, of course, is that while Trump’s travel order took effect immediately, the sanctuary city order has yet to concretely impact cities like San Francisco and Richmond, except in budget planning. This good police commissioner is not soft on crime.

Albuquerque police, for example, won’t ask about immigration status during a routine stop, but the city provides desk space for a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer at its prison transport center, where ICE can review the immigration status of arrested individuals.

The NYPD relies on federal funding, and that could be at risk because of a separate issue. The city’s total budget is more than $80 billion. This is a city of 8.5 million people. In 1990 more than 2,300 people were murdered here. We host around 60 million visitors a year.

However, as the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein pointed out on Twitter using Federal Bureau of Investigation crime statistics from the past few years, NY is actually significantly safer than Session’s native Alabama. That’s a small fraction of its total budget. We’ve shown you month after month that crime has gone down. One common version of a sanctuary policy prohibits local police from alerting federal agents when an illegal immigrant is in custody, or when the illegal immigrant is going to be released.

The Justice Department claimed illegal immigration into the country has increased crime in these cities.

The office also receives funding for its DNA crime lab, the largest in North America. “We always do with a federal grant”.

California, for instance, received $30.5 million from the Byrne grant, Texas got $21.4 million. She declined to speculate as to why Philadelphia was among the cities singled out by the Justice Department.

On Friday, letters threatening to withhold federal grant money were sent from the Department of Justice to officials in communities across the United States.

Zach Butterworth, the director of federal relations for the city of New Orleans and executive counsel to the mayor, said that the city welcomed the letter and would respond next week telling Sessions they were fully complying with federal law. The money helps pay for an array of services – from securing the city’s port to sheltering its homeless.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday that “greater latitude to deny federal grants to sanctuary cities” was a priority for the administration in the budget bill, along with money for a border wall.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel says “neither the facts nor the law” are on the department’s side.

In a statement accompanying the letters, the Justice Department specifically called out what it called New York City’s “soft on crime” stance as causing an increase in murders. The policy was actually put in place by the Obama administration. Not until the funding cuts become so painful that ordinary voters rise up and assert their will on local government. That panel’s decision can then be appealed to an 11-judge en banc panel or to the U.S. Supreme Court. How far will the administration go, however, remains unclear.

“To say we’re soft on crime is absolutely ludicrous.”, O’Neill said incredulously.