Two more states have decided to sue the Trump administration for pressuring sanctuary cities into following The President’s immigration agenda. The city of San Francisco filed its lawsuit over the weekend challenging the additional conditions the Department of Justice recently put on key law enforcement grants to pressure sanctuary cities, and The state of California announced it would be filing its own suit on Monday.
In the filing, San Francisco calls the added conditions, which require cities to comply in certain ways with federal immigration enforcement, “the latest attempt by the Trump administration to coerce state and local jurisdictions into carrying out the federal government’s immigration enforcement priorities.”
On the other hand, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Monday that California would be the first state to challenge the grant conditions.
“This action jeopardizes critical crime-fighting resources and threatens the safety of California residents,” Becerra said. “More than $28 million in federal funds that California uses for programs supporting law enforcement, recidivism prevention, crime victims and witnesses, and at-risk youth are at issue.”
The lawsuits are the result of conditions placed on the grants, which was announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in July. The AG announced that cities will be required to certify that they will cooperate with federal immigration enforcement more extensively than in the past, including by letting federal authorities access detainees in jails to inquire about immigration status and by giving the federal government 48 hours’ notice before any inmate they’re interested in is released.
Those two conditions expanded the requirements for the grants, beyond compliance with a law mandating communication of immigration status to the federal government. That condition was put in place by the Obama administration last year, and virtually every city says it is in compliance with that law.
The additional requests — access to jails and 48 hours’ notice — are not required by any current law. But the Trump administration has made sanctuary cities a central focus of its immigration agenda.
The term sanctuary city loosely refers to jurisdictions that in some way do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. San Francisco has already won one court challenge over the Trump administration’s sanctuary city policies.
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