If cities want help fighting violent crime, they’ll need to crack down on illegal immigration, attorney general says

Ideology trumps crime-fighting at Sessions’s Justice Department

IN GRAPPLING with its worst epidemic of homicides in years, Chicago faces no more critical task than repairing frayed relations between its beleaguered police force and the communities it serves. Now the Trump administration, more eager to advance its anti-illegal- immigration agenda than to combat violent crime, is throwing up obstacles that will make it more difficult for Chicago and other localities to get a grip on the problems they confront. After a federal court blocked the administration’s crusade to punish so-called sanctuary cities such as Chicago by withholding an array of federal funds, the Justice Department has renewed the effort in a more targeted way, declaring that localities that refuse to cooperate with deportation agents are ineligible for a specific grant program for police departments. If that sounds illogical, it’s because it is. Despite President Trump’s assertions to the contrary, there is no evidence that illegal immigration has contributed to Chicago’s murder spree. Eddie Johnson, the city’s police superintendent, said “the vast majority” of Chicago’s violent crime “is committed by homegrown people,” while illegal immigrants are a “nominal” factor. And while the city does prohibit cooperation with federal deportation agents in most instances, it makes exceptions for convicted and charged felons, as well as suspected gang members. Nonetheless, Attorney General Jeff Sessions justifies barring the federal grants to Chicago — thereby impeding its ability to buy crime-fighting gear such as police cars, SWAT equipment and radios — by falsely linking the Windy City’s homicide rate with its sanctuary policies. “The city’s leaders cannot follow some laws and ignore others and reasonably expect this horrific situation to improve,” he said. Irked at Chicago’s defiance, and that of other cities and counties, Mr. Sessions demands, as a condition for the law enforcement grants, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents be granted unfettered access to city jails and police stations to interview suspected illegal immigrants in custody; 48 hours’ notice of an inmate’s release if ICE agents want to detain him or her; and that local police share detainees’ immigration status with ICE. The trouble with Mr. Sessions’s demands is that they would undermine local law enforcement by driving a wedge between police and immigrant communities. As many police chiefs have pointed out, witnesses, victims and others in such neighborhoods are less likely to report crimes and cooperate with police if they think officers are working hand-in-glove with federal deportation agents. Chicago responded to the administration’s funding conditions this week by suing Mr. Sessions. The dollars at stake for Chicago — $3.2 million this year in federal Byrne grants — are minuscule measured against the city’s $9.8 billion annual budget. Nonetheless, Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) justifiably fears that acquiescence sets a bad precedent by allowing the executive branch to impose funding conditions unilaterally, without authorization by Congress, which enacted the grant program in the first place. Sanctuary policies are grounded in legitimate concern that working with deportation agents subverts local law enforcement. As long as localities use common sense — cooperating with federal agencies on dangerous criminals who should be deported — they should not be hounded by Washington. **Read more on this topic:** Erwin Chemerinsky, Annie Lai and Seth Davis: Trump can’t force ‘sanctuary cities’ to enforce his deportation plans Radley Balko: Jeff Sessions supports states’ rights. Except when he doesn’t. The Post’s View: Mr. Trump is picking a fight with urban America over sanctuary cities David Cole: The states’ rights that Trump doesn’t like

Denver fights back against Trump’s deportation crackdown with surprisingly simple change in law

As the Trump administration’s war on “sanctuary cities” heats up, cities have come up with increasingly creative ways to fight back. The latest example comes from Denver, which just passed a law aimed at protecting legal immigrants from being deported for committing relatively petty crimes, those carrying maximum sentences of 365 days — the federal government’s tripwire for kicking people out. The city’s solution? Simply take a bunch of those relatively petty offenses and reduce the maximum penalty to less than 365 days. Just like that, the move takes the crimes (and their perpetrators) off the radar of immigration authorities. It’s not a novel approach to protecting immigrants, but coming as a direct response to President Trump’s crackdown, it’s particularly timely. The action does not affect more serious crimes and does not protect undocumented immigrants. Under federal law, an immigrant living in the United States legally can be deported for committing a low-level crime, like shoplifting or trespassing, as long as that offense carries a potential sentence of one year. This means that even someone living in the country with a green card or student visa can be flagged to immigration officials — and deported — for such misdemeanors. Tens of thousands of legal residents have been deported for relatively minor offenses in recent decades. But under previous administrations, immigration authorities have often let low-level offenders off the hook. Now, under Trump, immigrants feel the threat of deportation more than ever, advocates say, whether they are residing here legally or not. The proposal passed Denver’s city council Monday night. In making the change, Denver is sending a clear message to the federal government that it will not “bend to a broken immigration system,” said the city’s mayor, Michael Hancock, who proposed the sentencing revisions. They will help “keep families together by ensuring low level offenses, like park curfew, are not a deportation tool,” he said. Previously, nearly all municipal crimes in Denver carried a maximum sentence of 365 days. But under the new approach, that maximum year-long sentence is only reserved for seven of the most serious offenses, including violent assaults and repeated domestic violence. Crimes including shoplifting, trespassing, the first or second instance of domestic violence, and simple assault will now be eligible for a maximum 300 days in jail. Even pettier offenses, such as public urination, and curfew violations would merit up to 60 days. “Over the past four months, the White House has issued a series of executive orders that have exacerbated our broken immigration system and have had a real impact on our community,” Hancock said in a statement. “I have heard from many who are rightfully concerned. Denver is committed to taking actions that will protect our people’s rights and keep our city safe, welcoming and open.” Denver is just one of dozens of cities and states across the country doing battle with Trump administration executive orders aimed at cracking down on immigration and travel. Suits brought by cities and states against the orders have tied them up in courts for the time being. In response to a court order blocking the administration’s attempt to strip funding from “sanctuary cities,” a memo released by Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday offered the government’s first official definition: Sessions said sanctuary cities are those that violate a federal law requiring local and state governments to share information with federal officials about immigrants’ citizenship or legal status.   Although Denver notifies Immigration and Customs Enforcement of impending releases of immigrants from jail upon request, it is one of many cities across the country that has declined to hold inmates for ICE if they otherwise are eligible for release. Yet despite Hancock’s efforts to push policies that protect immigrants, the mayor has refrained from calling Denver a “sanctuary city.” “The mayor has literally said you can call us whatever you want,” Amber Miller, communications director for the mayor’s office, told The Post. The term has “no legal meaning,” she said. “We are operating in a very vague environment right now,” Miller said. The mayor is “focusing on taking real actions that will actually impact people’s safety,” she said. “Labels don’t get you that.” The mayor acknowledged that many will hear about the changes and feel that he is advocating for illegal behavior. But he said, “it is the right and the duty of any individual in this city to report crime without fear of being punished. We want and need Denver residents to trust local law enforcement.” “This is not about shielding violent people,” Hancock said. “I will not play political games with the safety of our community.”  This would remove Denver from the “business of immigration enforcement,” Julie Gonzales, the policy director for the Meyer Law Office, a Denver firm that specializes in immigration cases, told the newspaper. The sentencing revisions, the mayor said, go “hand in hand” with a new system established in recent weeks allowing people to resolve traffic tickets by mail. Undocumented immigrants, particularly in recent months, have grown hesitant about interacting with public safety officials and going into courthouses. Their fears are justified, Miller said. “We are seeing ICE at our courts more and more looking to pick up undocumented immigrants,” he said. As a result, many people aren’t taking care of their traffic infractions, which only get worse over time. “We know many hard-working immigrants are afraid to come to the courthouse right now,” Hancock said. “But avoiding court dates or failing to resolve tickets is not the answer.” This is not the first time local officials and immigration advocates nationwide have pushed for such sentencing changes.   “Since then, we have experienced a deportation frenzy,” Kanstroom wrote. In addition to millions of undocumented deportees, tens of thousands of legal residents have been deported as “aggravated felons” for state misdemeanors like shoplifting or for minor drug offenses, he added. So for many advocates, Kyle Huelsman, the policy manager for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, Denver has taken a positive step, he told the Denver Post. “Creating automatic deportation as punishment is not a punishment we want to endorse,” he said.

Trump pledged to ‘end’ sanctuary cities. Common sense, not threats, should guide him.

PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump’s threat to deport 2 million to 3 million illegal immigrants with criminal records — a flimsy number that crumbles upon scrutiny — has caused tremors in some of the nation’s biggest metropolitan areas, especially those considered “sanctuary cities.” In fact, while some localities impose limits on working with federal immigration authorities, a large majority — including most regarded as sanctuary cities — do cooperate when it comes to helping to transfer and deport dangerous and violent felons scheduled to be released from jail or prison. The question is, what happens if Mr. Trump wants to go further by enlisting local law enforcement agencies to hand over or help sweep up undocumented immigrants convicted for small-time shoplifting, driving without a license and other minor offenses? The issue — part of a “negotiation,” in the words of Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump’s pick for White House chief of staff — is which crimes are sufficiently serious that they should trigger deportation, and reasonably require cooperation in that regard from local officials. A common-sense test should apply to federal policies and local ones. A fair-minded federal standard would not require local law enforcement agencies to be pressed into service as deportation agencies chasing or handing over undocumented immigrants who have committed minor offenses. To do so would subvert relations between law enforcement and local immigrant communities, in which trust and cooperation are critical. A fair-minded local standard would ensure that police, sheriffs and corrections officials see to it that dangerous criminals — violent felons and those convicted of multiple serious offenses, drunk drivers, sex abusers, drug dealers — do not slip through the cracks. That has happened in some isolated instances, which provided Mr. Trump with fodder for his campaign pledge to “end” sanctuary cities. The most notorious case involved San Francisco, where the sheriff’s office last year ignored a detainer — an official request from federal immigration officials seeking custody of an undocumented immigrant with a long record of drug offenses. Rather than being transferred to the feds, the man was released; soon after, he killed a tourist who was strolling on the city’s waterfront. San Francisco’s policy is irresponsible. The city has gone out of its way to defy federal officials, as have some other localities in California, which outstrips other states in thumbing its nose at federal detainers. But those jurisdictions are outliers. The tricky part is that there is no single accepted definition of a sanctuary city. Some, including New York, cooperate in handing over some felons, but not others, to federal authorities at their release date, depending on the severity of the crime. Others, such as Cook County in Illinois, which includes Chicago, refuse to turn over undocumented immigrants unless federal agents obtain a court warrant. It’s possible that New York considers too few crimes as sufficently serious to warrant transfer for deportation. Perhaps Cook County should honor detainers without insisting on a warrant. The Trump administration is entitled to seek fair and consistent standards that protect communities from dangerous criminals without poisoning relations between local law enforcement and immigrant communities. Better to negotiate terms than punish millions of Americans by suspending billions in federal funding to localities. **Read more on this topic:** Zachary Price: Could the Trump administration entrap Dreamers? Charles Lane: The risks of sanctuary cities Fatma Marouf, Michael Kagan and Rebecca Gill: A stay on deportations Charles Krauthammer: The only immigration solution The Post’s View: America the punitive?

Trump’s immigration order will increase crime

In the general-election campaign, President Trump assured Americans that in enforcing immigration laws, what he really wanted to do was to focus on dangerous criminals. Of course, the Obama administration already had done just that, prioritizing deportation of violent criminals. Nevertheless, it has long been the view of now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and the bevy of anti-immigrant groups that deportation should be expanded to include a whole range of people.  But this is hardly about prioritizing violent criminals. To the contrary, people never convicted of anything are targeted:  Logically, if you are prioritizing that long list of categories of people, you are not prioritizing any one category, especially violent criminals. When the next felony committed by an undocumented immigrant occurs, the Trump administration will have to explain why it was spending time and resources deporting noncriminals. When the crime rate goes up in cities, and mayors explain that not only have the feds neglected to focus on violent criminals in the undocumented-immigrant population but they’ve also deterred ordinary citizens from cooperating with law enforcement, Trump should be held accountable for the “carnage.” This is not about crime, or even illegal immigration. This is about the White House ideologues keeping a pledge to anxious white voters who’ve been told by Fox Non-News and Trump that immigrants are responsible for their economic plight and are largely violent criminals. The exaggerated, inaccurate view of the immigrant community has had its effect. The expanded deportation directive is the natural result of Trump’s — and too much of the right’s — demonization of nonwhites. And the new order in fact will sweep in a great many people who are not criminals or undocumented immigrants, or immigrants at all. A Hispanic-looking person without “papers” will now need to worry about being swept up in an immigration raid. Welcome to Trump’s America, where relations between the police and Hispanic and other minority communities are about to get really, really tense.

Sessions tells prosecutors to bring more cases against those entering U.S. illegally

Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed federal prosecutors across the country Tuesday to make immigration cases a higher priority and look for opportunities to bring serious felony charges against those who cross the border illegally — the latest in a string of controversial maneuvers to crack down on illegal entry into the United States and expand the Justice Department’s role in immigration enforcement. In a three-page memo, Sessions directed each U.S. attorney to appoint a border security coordinator to oversee immigration prosecutions and to make immigration offenses — such as crossing the border illegally or harboring those who do — “higher priorities.” He told prosecutors to consider whether they could bring felony charges against those who had entered the United States illegally multiple times and to evaluate whether they could charge illegal immigrants with aggravated identity theft, which carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence. He said law enforcement would no longer catch and release undocumented immigrants taken into custody at the border. The directive signals a more aggressive posture on immigration issues than the Obama administration had taken. Advocates and legal analysts said it raises troubling questions about the Justice Department’s intentions and its use of resources. “Which prosecutors and agents does he want to divert from the growing threats like terrorism, cybercrime, the opioid and heroin trade, organized crime and cartel activity?” asked Jenny Durkan, who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington from 2009 to 2014. “The ‘surge’ philosophy always requires taking agents, money and prosecutors from other priorities. In fact, the cost of satisfying Washington will reduce the ability of every U.S. attorney to address the greatest threats in their communities.” Sessions touted the changes in Nogales, Ariz., on Tuesday as he toured the U.S.-Mexico border crossing there, about 70 miles south of Tucson. In a speech, he derided violent cartel and gang members and those smuggling people across the border, and he promised to take a stand against them. He said illegal border crossings have declined significantly since President Trump took office — dropping 40 percent from January to February and 72 percent from December to March. Such crossings, though, also have decreased in recent years, and some researchers say demographic and economic factors have more influence than border security on the volume. “As you know too well, this is a booming business. No more,” Sessions said. “We are going to shut down and jail those who have been profiting off this lawlessness — smuggling gang members across the border, helping convicted criminals re-enter the country, and preying on those who don’t know how dangerous and costly this journey can be.” The Trump administration — and Sessions in particular — has taken a hard-line stance on immigration, alarming activists who say U.S. officials are testing legal boundaries and implementing policies contrary to American values. Sessions last month threatened to strip federal funding from cities that did not communicate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he signed a letter with Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly backing the practice of arresting undocumented immigrants at courthouses. He also announced that he would expand a program to deport undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes after they serve their prison sentences, and he said Tuesday that he would increase the number of immigration judges to speed the removal of others. Already, Sessions said, the Justice Department has posted 25 immigration judges in detention centers along the border, and he plans to add 125 more over the next two years. Those judges, though, handle deportation proceedings — not criminal cases. “This is a new era,” Sessions said. “This is the Trump era.” Paul K. Charlton, the U.S. attorney for Arizona from 2001 to 2007, said Sessions’s new directive would simply overburden the U.S. district court system, which is already struggling to handle the volume of immigration cases. He said that when he was U.S. attorney, his office had the highest number of prosecutions in the country, “yet the number of people entering illegally did not dramatically decrease.” “No one understands better than I do that prosecutions have a deterrent effect, but it’s not a solution. Prosecution and incarceration do not adequately address the real need, which is a reform of the immigration laws,” Charlton said. As a senator, Sessions vigorously opposed immigration law reform. Sessions’s memo offers blanket guidance to beef up enforcement, though it is somewhat short on specifics — omitting, for example, how to handle those coming to the United States with their children or those fleeing persecution, said Leon Fresco, who worked in the office of immigration litigation in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department. The Justice Department, Fresco said, could slap asylum seekers with identity theft charges merely for using fake passports to get out of a country that otherwise would not have let them leave, or could jail parents who cross the border with their kids — breaking up the family. That would run counter to the assertion by the homeland security secretary that officials will not separate children from their parents. “There’s nothing in the memo that talks about the need to be careful about that,” Fresco said. Justice Department lawyers already spend a significant amount of time prosecuting immigration offenses. In fiscal year 2015, for example, such cases accounted for 29.3 percent of the entire federal caseload — behind only drug prosecutions, which accounted for 31.8 percent, according to data from United States Sentencing Commission. But the prosecutions had steadily declined in recent years and had fallen by 30.1 percent since 2011. Gregory Z. Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the new Sessions memo seems to be an attempt at “scaring the public by linking immigrants to criminals despite studies showing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native born.” “Sessions’s massive, wasteful effort to prosecute illegal border crossers will hurt families in America,” Chen said.

Why Donald Trump may not be able to close sanctuary cities with the wave of a pen

President Trump is gearing up to tackle one of his marquee campaign promises: His pledge to target so-called sanctuary cities.  Sanctuary cities are one of the most high-profile acts of defiance for a Trump presidency, and he has indicated he has a zero-tolerance policy for these cities and every intention of ending their deportation protections. Except, that might be easier said than done. Immigration experts say Trump could run up against constitutional, geographic and even legal challenges in trying to force these cities to stop openly flouting him.   But apart from North Carolina and Texas, immigration experts have a hard time seeing where else a ban might gain momentum. Most cities that let local law enforcement decide whether to hand immigrants to hand over to federal authorities for deportation  are in Democratic-controlled states. "A lot of the other Republican states don't have large cities or large number of immigrants, so it's just not an issue in a lot of these GOP-controlled states," said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. (A bill in Texas failed in the past few years in part because there were no sanctuary cities to ban.)  Plus, Senate Democrats successfully blocked two sanctuary city bills in Congress in the past two years (including one immediately after 32-year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant deported five times prior). At the time, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) derided a sanctuary city ban as "dog-whistle politics," pointing out crimes committed by illegal immigrants aren't any higher than crimes committed by any one else living in America. Senate Democrats gained two seats in November's election, so they should have the numbers to block a ban bill again. If legislation isn't an option for Trump, some experts think taking the cities to court might be. Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, says the Trump administration could ask a federal judge for an injunction demanding these sanctuary cities hand over any immigrants the federal government wants to deport. They could argue it's technically against the law to shield immigrants from deportation. But this, too, comes with risk. Challenging the legality of sanctuary cities has never been tried before, so it's a 50/50 shot on how the courts would read the intersecting and sometimes contradictory laws about state rights and immigration.      Finally, all these options share something that's anathema to conservatives: They're big-government solutions. Getting rid of sanctuary cities requires a state, or Congress, or even the president to take a top-down approach and dictate municipal laws. And that can be an awkward thing for Republicans to gun for. "The spectacle of the federal government trying to deport large numbers of people in the face of local resistance is unlikely to make good PR for the Trump administration," wrote Somin in The Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog. Trump has options to try to tamp down on sanctuary cities, but all of them -- legislation, the courts, financial pressure -- are not guaranteed to work. That means some of our biggest cities could openly flout one of Trump's most high-profile campaign promises, and there's not a lot he may be able to do about it.

Could kids fleeing Central America be sent back to face more gang violence?

Violence, poverty, unemployment and President Obama’s immigration policy have all been blamed for the massive arrival of unaccompanied children from Central America at the U.S. southern border. Some immigration experts and advocates suggest another factor: U.S. policies of the 1990s and 2000s that deported thousands of gang members back to Central America. At the time, authorities were attempting to root out Latino gang violence in American cities. But instead of dispersing, the gangs took new root in Central America, abetted by the push of drug-trafficking routes into Central America from Mexico. The gangs grew more ruthless and expanded into international drug trade and other crimes, leading to escalating violence in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Critics of proposals to deport the new crop of youths warn that the United States risks making the same mistake twice, accelerating violence over the border by condemning those fleeing the gang explosion to become either gang members or victims. “Those who are returned now will face much worse conditions than those who were sent back in the 1990s. There is more violence, more poverty and less opportunity,” José Guadalupe Ruelas, director of the Casa Alianza youth rehabilitation program in Honduras, said on a recent visit to Washington. “In the past, when we asked deported children what their motive was for fleeing, they would say being poor or wanting to be with their families. Now the great majority say it is because of violence.” Not everyone agrees that the earlier deportations are a root of the crisis. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said that while deporting gang members from the United States may have contributed to the growth of gangs in Central America, the real problem was the U.S. government’s earlier failure to enforce the law against illegal immigrants, especially criminals, in the first place. “Our immigration policies were enforced belatedly, after we allowed these communities of illegal immigrants to grow and cause problems,” Krikorian said this week. “The deportations probably did play a role, but if the gangs had found it useful to branch out through Central America, they would have done it anyway.” After the mass deportations of gang members, which started in the mid-1990s, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador received tens of thousands of jobless, alienated young men who brought new sophistication and brutality to local gangs. From then on, the spread of gang power was abetted by several factors, experts say. One was the push of drug-trafficking routes into Central America, which brought more money and weapons to the region and spurred a rise in official corruption. “Our deportations at the time did not cause the gang problem, but they acted as a catalyst,” said Alfonso Valdez, a gang expert at the University of California at Irvine and a former government anti-gang agent. “People were poor, and the social conditions were ripe. It was like putting a virus in a culture dish.” In the 2000s, other factors strengthened the hold of gangs. Government instability, especially the 2009 coup in Honduras, gave them more operating room. Overcrowded prisons, especially in El Salvador, became gang command posts. Homicide rates soared, and victims became younger. According to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, the homicide rate doubled in Honduras from 2006 to 2011. In the first half of this year, more than 500 Hondurans younger than 18 died in gang violence. Central American officials, seeking to combat the wave of terror, tried a variety of methods that sometimes made things worse. In the early 2000s, Honduras militarized its national law enforcement system in a controversial _mano dura_ , or get-tough, policy. Police and army raids threw thousands of young men into prisons for years with few legal rights. The tactic boomeranged, terrifying communities and opening the way for police corruption and abuse. Lately, a new effort at peace talks with imprisoned gang leaders is being attempted. “These laws had the opposite effect of what was intended,” said Adriana Beltran, who studies gang issues at the nonprofit Washington Office on Latin America. “People were swept into prisons, which became universities of crime and extortion.” In El Salvador, an early get-tough effort also failed, so in 2012 a new government replaced it with an effort to facilitate gang truces and create “peace zones,” where gang members could receive job training and benefits if they renounced crime. This strategy dramatically reduced the homicide rate but did not make a significant dent in other gang activity. Now, Salvadoran officials are focusing on smaller communities in which gangs intimidate and extort even the poorest people — from bus drivers to shop owners — for protection payments. “For 10 years we tried the _mano dura_ approach, and it was a disaster,” said Rubén Zamora, the outgoing Salvadoran ambassador to Washington. “With 20,000 police and 60,000 mareros, how could we compete?” He said the new policies are more modest but have shown more promise, because they are working closely with communities. “The gang problem is local, so we’re going after it locally. It’s starting to work,” he said. The United States, although sometimes criticized for washing its hands of Central America in recent years, has supported a number of anti-gang initiatives there in the past decade, largely in connection with efforts to combat drug trafficking. It has also continued to deport thousands of “criminal aliens” or illegal immigrants who have committed crimes inside the United States to Central America and Mexico each year. But the pernicious sway of major gangs such as MS-13 and 18th Street has continued to reach into the United States. In 2012, the government declared MS-13 to be a “transnational criminal organization” whose activities “directly threaten” U.S. citizens and whose assets can be seized by the government. In their home countries, where lawlessness and violence are legacies of civil conflict, those two gangs alone have up to 85,000 members. “Millions and millions of dollars have been put into security issues in the Golden Triangle, and we still have a region that is one of the most violent in the world,” said José Miguel Cruz, a political scientist from El Salvador at Florida International University. “Something has gone very wrong.” The main reason for the continued attraction of gang life, experts say, is the lack of legitimate avenues to success for poor young men. Nearly one-third of the people of Honduras are between 15 and 24 years old; many do not attend school, have no job skills and come from scattered or dysfunctional families, thus providing what the Congressional Research Service report called a “ready pool of gang recruits.” Those who try to leave gangs face death threats from their leaders and rejection from society. At Casa Alianza, which helps young addicts, street children, deportees and former gang members, Ruelas said many boys are recruited by gangs thinking mistakenly that they will offer a form of protection. “First they act as lookouts, then they are assigned small crimes, and then they are forced to extort victims or be killed,” he said. “They are very vulnerable, and they can’t get out.” While Central American governments are giving more formal attention to gang-prevention and intervention strategies, the CRS report said most such efforts have been “small-scale, ad hoc and underfunded.” Smaller scale projects run by churches and local communities have had more success, it said. In recent weeks, the crush of Central American children on the Mexico-Texas border has triggered angry calls in Congress and in some affected communities for more and faster deportations. Critics fear the United States will be overwhelmed by a new tide of young illegal immigrants who burden schools and services, and some have called for a repeal of the 2008 law that granted temporary shelter to children from any country except Canada and Mexico who reach U.S. shores illegally. Other Americans have expressed concern for the fate of these children if they are deported to dangerous conditions, especially without a chance to get legal help as they face their hearings. Heidi Altman, legal director at the nonprofit Capital Area Immigrant Rights Coalition in Washington, said that she and her colleagues have represented many Central American children who arrived from border detention since 2012 and that often they had suffered unimaginable violence at home or during their journeys to the United States. “Many of them are fleeing several levels of violence, but they are too traumatized to talk about it at first,” Altman said. If they are forced to appear in immigration court too soon and cannot fully explain what they have been through, she added, “they may end up being sent back to face “abuse, rape and horrible persecution from gangs.” Experts such as Valdez and Ruelas said such dire assessments may not be far-fetched. Valdez noted that the largest number of unaccompanied minors reaching the U.S. border come from the area of San Pedro Sula, a city on the northern coast of Honduras that is one of the most gang-infested cities in the Americas. “It makes no sense for us to send back kids to the most violent city in the hemisphere,” Valdez said.

It’s okay that Congress won’t act on immigration. States can do a lot on their own.

It’s official: Congress won’t take up immigration reform this year. Today, President Barack Obama said he’ll use executive actions to change policies unilaterally.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday It’s a disappointing, if unsurprising, outcome. But advocates for reform have reason to hope. States and cities long have shaped the country’s immigration policy, and can continue to do so. Take New York. Just last week, the New York City Council made a splash in the immigration world by allocating $4.9 million to free legal assistance for non-citizens in deportation proceedings. It also created a municipal identification card available to everyone, regardless of immigration status. In Albany, advocates introduced a bill that goes further, granting unauthorized immigrants the right to vote and sit on juries. Although that measure is probably aspiration more than reality, it provides a counterpoint to the Arizona-style enforcement crackdowns. Such immigration federalism necessarily will entail ideological battle, between pro-enforcement and pro-integration strategies. But partisans on both sides should be willing to let states and localities take immigration policy in different directions. State and local authority in this domain is limited, but it exists. When it comes to enforcement, state and local police historically have played a role alongside the federal government. In 2012, the Supreme Court  trimmed this role by striking down most of Arizona’s notorious Senate Bill 1070. But the court also left space open for local immigration policing. As the administration emphasized throughout the litigation, the federal government depends on cooperation from state and local police. Nothing in the court’s decision precludes Congress from authorizing greater state and local involvement. And, the court recognized police authority to inquire into immigration status, subject to civil rights constraints. States also have considerable authority to define the parameters of their own political communities, as well as significant freedom to use their resources to benefit immigrants, regardless of status. Given these parameters, what should immigration federalism look like today? On the enforcement end, where enthusiasm for enforcement remains, states should focus on combating racial profiling and curbing distrust of police in immigrant communities. This should be complemented by training for police in the details of immigration law and in how to interact with immigrant communities. At the same time, some jurisdictions have rejected enforcement cooperation altogether. States such as California and Connecticut, and cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., actively resist federal requests for assistance. State and local ordinances constraining police cooperation continue to proliferate, especially as controversy over _federal_ enforcement builds. Enforcement enthusiast should acknowledge these moves as legitimate, too.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Critics might worry that this localized activity is creating an incoherent patchwork; no doubt the federal government prefers not to be challenged from both directions. But in reality, these mixed agendas offer examples of how state and local action can contribute to the national debate over immigration enforcement by highlighting what is at stake in concrete terms. Like Arizona’s law, the anti-enforcement measures reflect a rejection of current federal policy and may well force the federal government to rethink its enforcement strategies. There is no “final” answer to the enforcement question — only an ongoing debate. Today, numerous states and localities practice an affirmative integrative federalism. Republican and Democratic states alike make available in-state tuition to unauthorized college students. Municipal identification cards such as the one recently adopted in New York enable even unauthorized immigrants to open bank accounts, sign leases, get library cards and access other services. State and local bureaucracies are also interested in and capable of implementing the immigration laws, and they could be enlisted productively not just in enforcement, but also in future legalization and integration programs, and even in the process of selecting and admitting immigrants. For example, the Republican governor of Michigan and Utah’s state legislature have floated the idea of recruiting immigrants to help revitalize local communities. Though this idea would require federal authorization and may prove to be misguided, it reflects the possibilities for reform that open up when we recognize states and localities as legitimate players, rather than label them as out of their league. Immigration federalism will ultimately be a limited tool and cannot substitute for a federal policy. Only Congress (not the states, or even the president) can provide today’s unauthorized population with the ultimate security of legal status (or adopt direct means of restricting immigration). And in some cases a uniform immigration policy will be necessary. But because the United States consists of overlapping political communities with varied views on immigration, federalism offers a framework for productive debate, as well as a set of institutional mechanisms for working toward compromise. When imagining a better system, we should take advantage of these alternative forms of lawmaking to channel the complexity of the immigration question, even if it means embracing contradictions. _This essay is adapted from “Law and Borders,” published in the summer 2014 issue ofDemocracy: A Journal of Ideas._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

In nod to conservative base, Gillespie urges ‘eradicating’ gangs and sanctuary cities

Virginia GOP gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie on Thursday called for aggressive action against gangs and a ban on sanctuary cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities, part of a policy rollout that appears designed to fire up his conservative base. By highlighting gangs and crimes committed by immigrants living in Virginia illegally, Gillespie embraced an issue championed by Corey Stewart, who nearly beat him for the GOP nomination last month with a Trump-like agenda that took a hard line on immigration. Gillespie’s rollout coincided with a Trump administration push this week to call attention to MS-13, a violent street gang that originated in Los Angeles and has taken root in some immigrant communities in the United States. Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to El Salvador on Thursday as part of a mission to strengthen international cooperation in the fight against the gang. President Trump plans to visit Long Island in New York on Friday after the arrests of 15 gang members to discuss ways to eliminate MS-13. After Gillespie’s razor-thin victory in the GOP primary, Republicans at the state and national levels have been urging him to listen to Trump strategists. A spokesman for the Gillespie campaign would not say whether it had coordinated Thursday’s policy rollout with the White House. While Stewart used inflammatory rhetoric when discussing illegal immigrants, Gillespie spoke in technocratic language about seeking federal funding, establishing prevention programs and revising the state’s criminal code to increase prosecutions. He announced his anti-gang policies in front of the Loudoun County courthouse, a site he chose in part because of MS-13 activity in the area. “Job number one is eradicating gangs and rewarding those who keep up safer,” said Gillespie, who will face Democratic Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam in November. “If someone is here illegally and they commit a crime, they will be deported.” Gillespie said MS-13’s rise accentuates the need for local cooperation with federal immigration officials. The Justice Department this week said it will no longer award grant money to cities that don’t provide access to jails or notify when prisoners in the country illegally are about to be released, escalating the Trump administration’s crackdown on sanctuary cities. “A lot of those involved in [MS-13] are here illegally,” Gillespie said. “We cannot allow for the establishment of sanctuary cities.” The commonwealth does not have sanctuary cities, and Gillespie and Northam have agreed on that point. But there’s no clear-cut definition of what constitutes a sanctuary jurisdiction, and different sheriffs vary when it comes to cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Northam cast a tiebreaking vote in the state Senate to reject a bill banning sanctuary cities in Virginia, which he dismissed as a political scheme by Republicans. The measure later passed and was vetoed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who is barred from seeking consecutive terms under the state Constitution. Northam has advocated for compassion for immigrants living in Virginia illegally and says they should be able to receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities as well as driver’s licenses. Northam agrees with several of Gillespie’s proposal regarding law enforcement, including higher wages for state police (a pay raise was in this year’s budget) and a return of Project Exile, a program that originated in Richmond in 1997 and shifted the prosecution of illegal gun possession from the state to federal court, which had a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison. Although it was initially credited with reducing gun-related crimes in Richmond, the program was criticized as having a disproportionate effect on African Americans. A spokeswoman for Northam said that must be considered. “Dr. Northam is open to all ideas to help reduce crime, but they must be implemented in a way that does not exacerbate the racial disparities in our criminal justice system,” Ofirah Yheskel said. “Virginia also can foster positive relationships between law enforcement and the communities they represent, which will lead to increased rates of solving crimes.” Gillespie echoed similar sentiments. “I talked about disparities in arrests and convictions, and it’s something I’m very aware of and cautious of,” he said Thursday. He was joined by GOP attorney general nominee John Adams, whom Gillespie said he would name as his anti-gang chief. “This is a level of criminal activity that impacts the most vulnerable among us, including immigrant communities,” said Adams, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor. Some Democrats said Gillespie’s message to bolster law enforcement is undercut by his call for an across-the-board income tax cut, which Republican lawmakers have said would be funded by diverting future revenue. “Rather than talking about tax cuts for people who probably don’t need it, we need to be talking about how we are going to address some of these crisis situations we are dealing with,” said Newport News Sheriff Gabe Morgan. Although he spoke of tougher sanctions for gun crimes, Gillespie has hinted about relaxing penalties for other crimes. During the primary campaign, he called for fewer prison sentences and more redemption. About a dozen protesters organized by the Democratic Party of Virginia crashed Gillespie’s event Thursday, heckling him to condemn Trump and the GOP push for a health-care overhaul. Gillespie later posted a photo that said his news conference was meant to promote policies “to fairly compensate law enforcement, combat gangs and keep Virginians safe. Apparently these are things the Ralph Northam resistance hate.” _An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the MS-13 gang originated in El Salvador. The gang originated in Los Angeles._

Donald Trump’s unsupported claim that crime is ‘through the roof’ because of illegal immigration

Clearly, stories like this exist. But Trump uses anecdotes as evidence to connect illegal immigration and violent crimes, and to propose deporting the approximately 11 million undocumented believed to be living in the United States. Just how likely are Americans to die from homicide by undocumented immigrants? Trump cited homicide, rape and aggravated assault figures from the Los Angeles Police Department to say that crime in California is “going through the roof.” Violent crimes — including homicides, rapes and aggravated assault — were up across the board by the end of 2015, compared with 2014. L.A.’s numbers mirror the trend in other major cities that saw an uptick in violent crimes in 2015 compared with the previous years.       The number of homicide convictions (208) affiliated with criminal aliens released into non-custodial settings in fiscal 2015 is fewer than the number of people in the United States who died in calendar year 2014 from:     Trump’s wild rhetoric over deporting all unauthorized immigrants for bringing crimes like murder into the U.S. underscores a common public misperception that violent crime is correlated with immigration, especially illegal immigration. He continues to assert that crime is spiking because of illegal immigration, this time in California, but this claim remains unsupported. Clearly, there are plenty of isolated incidents where an innocent American was killed by a known criminal who was in the country illegally. But let’s put this problem into perspective. In 2014, Americans were 159 times more likely to die from falling, 15 times more likely to die from auto accidents involving distracted drivers and four times more likely to die from injuries from a construction job than an undocumented immigrant was to be convicted of homicide, then released. Trump’s claim highlights the problem with using anecdotes as evidence to guide policymaking. He can point to victims’ families all he wants, and their stories are compelling. But the underlying data suggest that other causes of death, like car crashes, are far more dangerous to everyday Americans’ lives than criminal noncitizens. Those are the facts, whether he cares to consider them or not.

Immigration enforcement and the Constitution

In his Oct 29 op-ed column, “A border-state challenge,” Charles Lane usefully questioned whether California laws that prevent cooperation with federal immigration law enforcement can be constitutional if Arizona laws that require such cooperation are not. However, Mr. Lane erred in asserting that, “the Supreme Court struck down most of Arizona’s immigration legislation.” The legislation in question, SB 1070, had more than 20 substantive provisions directed against illegal immigration. The U.S. government challenged only four of those provisions, of which only three were struck down by the court. “Most of Arizona’s immigration legislation” has not even been challenged, let alone “struck down.” ****William W. Chip,** Washington** The writer is on the board of directors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and of the Center for Immigration Studies. ● In “A border-state challenge,” Charles Lane asked whether a bill I authored to protect California’s undocumented immigrants can be legal. The answer, simply, is yes. The Trust Act is a state law that does nothing to undermine federal law. Immigration agents can still do their jobs, though I don’t like how they’ve been tearing apart families and California communities while doing them. The Trust Act merely says California is not going to use scarce state and local resources to hold residents who are not dangerous, who haven’t been tried, in our overcrowded jails. The law says we need our communities to feel secure going to local police, instead of leaving rape, domestic violence and gang activity unreported for fear of deportation. ****Tom Ammiano,** Sacramento** The writer is a Democrat representing San Francisco in the California Assembly.

Despite Trump’s threat to cut federal funding, mayors pledge to protect undocumented immigrants

“To all those who are, after Tuesday’s election, very nervous and filled with anxiety as we’ve spoken to, you are safe in Chicago, you are secure in Chicago, and you are supported in Chicago,” Emanuel said. “Chicago will always be a sanctuary city.” Emanuel’s announcement follows a similar pledge Friday from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D). When asked what he would tell concerned Muslim residents, de Blasio said, “We have your back.”    Critics of sanctuary cities have drawn on incidents such as the death of Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman killed by Mexican immigrant Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez on a San Francisco pier in July 2015.    “If police officers were to do the work of ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] it would harm our ability to keep people safe and solve crimes,” Hodges’s statement said. “Witnesses and victims of crimes won’t come forward if they think our police officers will question or detain them about their immigration status.”    “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and we’ll see how it goes, and we’ll try to figure something out,” Kenney said.   “Many Americans, thousands of them, have been killed by illegal aliens,” Moran said.    Priebus, who has since been named Trump’s chief of staff, left the door open to further policy beyond deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Only until all of that is taken care of will we look at what we are going to do next,” he said.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions repeats Trump threat that ‘sanctuary cities’ could lose Justice Department grants

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday threatened to strip some “sanctuary cities” of coveted Justice Department grants for state and local law enforcement, saying those places that did not comply with a particular federal law on immigration would not be eligible for money. “I urge our nation’s states and cities to consider carefully the harm they are doing to their citizens by refusing to enforce our immigration laws, and to rethink these policies,” Sessions said from the White House. “Such policies make their cities and states less safe, and put them at risk of losing valuable federal dollars.” Sessions’s announcement follows President Trump’s executive order in January that gave the attorney general the authority to sanction any city that doesn’t readily hand over undocumented immigrants for deportation. This effort to punish cities where local leaders refuse to hand over undocumented immigrants for deportation is the latest effort by the Trump administration to crack down on illegal immigration. Sessions said the Justice Department will take steps to “claw back any funds awarded to a jurisdiction” that violates federal law. The Justice Department will award more than $4.1 billion in grants to state and local jurisdictions this fiscal year. Sessions said jurisdictions would not be eligible for grant money if they could not certify compliance with a law against blocking the sharing of information about a person’s immigration status with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It is unclear to which jurisdictions that might apply. Some cities that prevent their employees from disclosing a person’s immigration information have exceptions for situations when it is required by law — although it is questionable as to whether those exceptions would satisfy Sessions. And merely refusing to honor a detainer request would not put a “sanctuary city” in violation of the law, as honoring such requests is not required under the statute cited by Sessions. The attorney general said the Department of Homeland Security recently issued a report showing that in one week, there were more than 200 instances of jurisdictions that did not honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests with respect to people charged or convicted of a serious crime. “The charges and convictions against these aliens include drug trafficking, hit and run, rape, sex offenses against a child and even murder,” Sessions said. “Such policies cannot continue. They make our nation less safe by putting dangerous criminals back on our streets.” Sessions noted that Maryland is considering a law that would make it a “sanctuary state,” but that the governor is opposed. “That would be such a mistake,” Sessions said. “I would plead with the state of Maryland. It is not good policy.” Across the country Monday, several critics of Trump’s sanctuary-city crackdown said they had no plans to reverse their policies and accused Trump of wrongly portraying undocumented immigrants as criminals when studies show their communities tend to be safer. California State Senate president pro tempore Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles), the sponsor of a bill that would make California a sanctuary state, called Sessions’s crackdown “nothing short of blackmail.” “Instead of making us safer, the Trump administration is spreading fear and promoting race-based scapegoating,” he said in the statement. “Their gun-to-the-head method to force resistant cities and counties to participate in Trump’s inhumane and counterproductive mass-deportation is unconstitutional and will fail.” The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the Trump administration’s attacks on sanctuary cities “promote unlawful profiling and xenophobia.” “Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeks to create a police state in which local and state law enforcement are acting at the behest of the federal government to round up immigrants in communities across the country,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the committee. The National Immigration Law Center noted the timing of Sessions’s announcement, soon after Trump’s defeat on health care. “In typical fashion, they are trying to manipulate the news cycle to distract and divert attention elsewhere,” Kamal Essaheb, director of policy and advocacy with the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement. Some city and county officials complained that the Trump administration is not carefully examining sanctuary policies, which vary. In Montgomery County, for instance, a spokesman said the county cooperates with federal immigration officials and protested when Homeland Security said they did not. “We feel that we’re in compliance with the laws that we need to be in compliance with,” said spokesman Patrick Lacefield. In Massachusetts, the mayor of Somerville, Joseph Curtatone, said his city turns over those with serious criminal records and people accused of dangerous crimes to immigration officials. Curtatone said Trump’s plans would endanger all residents by withholding public-safety money that in the past has funded programs such as self-defense classes to prevent rape. “We’re not harboring any criminals,” Curtatone said. “It’s dangerous when you have those in authority and power who are not fully informed with the facts making such statements.” Matt Zapotosky and John Wagner contributed to this report.

Chicago sues Justice Department over new police grant rules targeting sanctuary cities

Chicago officials on Monday filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Justice Department over a plan to withhold federal public safety grants to jurisdictions with so-called “sanctuary city” policies.  The challenge centers on new rules attached to the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, which provides money to local governments to buy police vehicles and other equipment. The new rules include a requirement that localities give federal immigration authorities open access to jails and notify them 48 hours in advance of plans to release an inmate wanted on an immigration detainer. Filed in Northern Illinois District Court, the lawsuit argues that the requirements “federalize” local jails and violate the constitutional rights of inmates. “Chicago will not be blackmailed into changing our values, and we are and will remain a welcoming City,” Emanuel said in a statement late Sunday. “The federal government should be working with cities to provide necessary resources to improve public safety, not concocting new schemes to reduce our crime fighting resources.” The Justice Department responded sharply Monday, accusing Chicago leaders of putting illegal immigrants above the safety of police and citizens. “In 2016, more Chicagoans were murdered than in New York City and Los Angeles combined,” Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley said in an email. “So it’s especially tragic that the mayor is less concerned with that staggering figure than he is spending time and taxpayer money protecting criminal aliens and putting Chicago’s law enforcement at greater risk.” The lawsuit comes as President Trump is trying to make good on his promise to crack down on unlawful immigration by building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and more aggressively enforcing federal immigration laws. Among his priorities on this front is cracking down on “sanctuary cities,” which in the administration’s view undermine efforts to root out and deport violent criminals who are in the country illegally. The cities, meanwhile, say they are not required to closely cooperate with federal immigration authorities and that doing so makes it more difficult to build trust in immigrant communities, where they want residents to feel comfortable offering tips and reporting crimes. They also argue that holding foreigners in jail at the request of immigration authorities could force them to keep inmates longer than is permitted under the Constitution. Earlier this year, a federal judge blocked an executive order aimed at withholding federal funds from sanctuary cities. With the new policy on the Byrne grants, the Justice Department has tried to take a more modest, and potentially more legally defensible, step toward penalizing such communities. If allowed to go into effect, the new policy would begin in September. The conflict puts Trump in something of a bind over conflicting priorities. While he has taken a hard-line stance against sanctuary cities, he also has tried to show that he is committed to fighting urban crime — a goal he has often emphasized by highlighting Chicago’s homicide rate, the highest in the nation at more than 400 killings so far this year. At one point, Trump proposed using federal resources to rein in the violence. Any attempt to withhold public safety funds from that city would seem to go against that parallel effort. Chicago received $2.3 million last year through the grant program, funds that in the past the city has used to purchase SWAT equipment, police vehicles, radios and stun guns. It’s a relatively small amount of money for one of the largest cities in the country, but Chicago officials said the fight centers on “standing up to this administration that’s trying to make us make this awful choice that we don’t think is lawful and constitutional, and also keep them from doing this to other grants,” said Shannon Breymaier, a spokeswoman for Emanuel. In the lawsuit, Chicago officials said the new conditions the Justice Department seeks to impose “would give federal officials the power to enter city facilities and interrogate arrestees at will and would force the City to detain individuals longer than justified by probable cause, solely to permit federal officials to investigate their immigration status.” That would conflict with Chicago’s “welcoming cities” ordinance, which prioritizes crime prevention and local law enforcement over federal immigration enforcement, and potentially would force them to violate the constitutional rights of foreigners held in city jails, the lawsuit says. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday that Chicago has a policy that obstructs the nation’s immigration system and has “demonstrated an open hostility to enforcing laws designed to protect law enforcement — Federal, state, and local — and reduce crime, and instead have adopted an official policy of protecting criminal aliens who prey on their own residents.” Sessions said in a statement that Chicago needs to recommit to the rule of law and to policies that roll back “the culture of lawlessness that has beset the city.” “This administration will not simply give away grant dollars to city governments that proudly violate the rule of law and protect criminal aliens at the expense of public safety,” Sessions said. “So it’s this simple: Comply with the law or forego taxpayer dollars.”

Sessions directs federal prosecutors to target the nation’s most violent offenders

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday directed federal prosecutors across the country to “use every tool we have” to investigate and prosecute violent offenders as part of his effort to crack down on recent increases in serious crime. In a memo to the Justice Department’s 94 U.S. attorney’s offices, Sessions told prosecutors to work closely with federal, state, local and tribal authorities to target the most violent offenders in each district. “Turning back our nation’s recent rise in violent crime is a top priority for the Department of Justice and it requires decisive action from our federal prosecutors,” Sessions said in a statement released late Wednesday. “I’m urging each of them to continue working closely with their counterparts at all levels, and to use every tool we have to put violent offenders behind bars and keep our citizens safe.” Sessions’s memo to his prosecutors follows a speech he gave last month to state attorneys general in which he said that historically low crime rates might be coming to an end and that recent crime increases could foreshadow a violent new period in the nation’s history. “Unfortunately, the most recent crime data available shows a 10.8 percent increase in the number of murders in this country, while federal prosecutions for violent crimes have been declining,” Sessions said in his memo to prosecutors. Sessions encouraged his prosecutors to use laws regarding firearms, robbery, carjacking and drug offenses as tools to bring investigations and prosecutions against suspected criminals. In his memo, Sessions said that prosecutions under the federal Controlled Substances Act “can drive violent crime down.” It is still unclear how the attorney general, who has long spoken out against marijuana, will enforce the federal laws against its use, which could undercut the growing number of states that have legalized the drug for recreational use. White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last month that he expects states to be subject to “greater enforcement” of federal marijuana laws. Sessions’s tough-on-crime approach is also a key issue for President Trump, who has already signed three executive orders directing the Justice Department to create a crime-reduction task force and take steps to target criminal gangs, reduce violent crime and curb attacks on police. Trump spoke of rising crime in his inaugural address and promised he would end “American carnage.” Overall crime is at a historical low in the United States. But serious crime, including homicides, has been rising in some major cities, such as Chicago. Sessions has been under fire for testifying to Congress during his confirmation hearings that he did not meet with any Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. He recused himself from any campaign-related investigations after The Washington Post reported that he had met with the Russian ambassador twice during the campaign. At a hearing Tuesday for deputy attorney general nominee Rod Rosenstein, who would oversee the Russia probe, several senators called on Sessions to return to the Senate Judiciary Committee and further explain his testimony. Justice officials say that with this memo, Sessions is trying to move forward with one of his top priorities, a crackdown on violent crime.

On Long Island, Trump highlights violence from MS-13 gang to push Congress on immigration

SELDEN, N.Y. — President Trump on Friday warned of an uptick in violence from the transnational gang MS-13 that he said exploited weak political leadership and immigration enforcement to terrorize communities as the White House launched a renewed push for Congress to beef up funding for border security measures.  In stark language, Trump said MS-13 members have stabbed, raped and murdered young people and “transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields.” He added: “They’re animals. We cannot tolerate as a society the spilling of innocent, young, wonderful, vibrant people.” Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to ramp up border security, has in recent months begun highlighting the threat from MS-13, whose formal name is La Mara Salvatrucha, a gang formed in Los Angeles decades ago with ties to El Salvador and Honduras. Speaking Friday before an audience of law enforcement officers at Suffolk County Community College, Trump blamed past administrations for failing to enforce immigration laws. “For many years, they exploited America’s weak borders and immigration enforcement,” Trump said of gangs such as MS-13. “They are there right now because of weak political leadership … and in many cases police who are not allowed to do their job because they have a pathetic mayor or a mayor who does not know what’s going on.” A day after suffering a major political defeat on his bid to overturn the Affordable Care Act, when the Senate voted down a repeal measure, the president seemed buoyed during his return to Long Island, where he spent part of his youth. Trump spoke on stage in front of dozens of uniformed officers and a banner that read, “Protecting American lives.” He received numerous ovations as he thanked law enforcement officers for their service and pledged to create policies to allow them to do their jobs better. The officers at one point chanted, “USA! USA!” Trump boasted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers are tougher than the criminal gangs, and at one point he encouraged police to be rougher with suspects who are apprehended, suggesting, for example, that they not protect suspects' heads while putting them into police cars. Addressing illegal immigrants, Trump said: “We will find you, we will arrest you, we will jail you and we will deport you.” Trump administration officials said they have begun implementing the president's directive to target MS-13 and other violent gangs and cartels. The Justice Department has requested funding for 300 additional federal prosecutors, said Rob Hur, the principal associate deputy attorney general, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled this week to El Salvador to meet with officials from the Northern Triangle, including Honduras and Guatemala, in an effort to coordinate enforcement efforts. Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE who traveled here with Trump aboard Air Force One, said his agency has arrested 3,311 gang members this year, including 100 in New York, a majority of whom were affiliated with MS-13. “Targeting, arresting and removing members of violent street gangs such as MS-13 sends a clear message to criminal enterprises around the world:  You are not welcome in the United States, and you'll find no harbor here,” Homan said. Trump used his remarks to push Congress to boost funding for the administration's immigration crackdown, including the start of construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, 10,000 new ICE agents and 5,000 new Customs and Border Patrol officers. He also urged passage of laws to increase penalties on immigrants who enter the United States illegally, speed up deportations and penalize “sanctuary cities” that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts. The House approved legislation late Thursday that would allocate $1.6 billion to the wall, and administration officials said they will make a major push for that funding in budget deliberations with Congress over the coming months. Yet immigrant rights advocates said the administration is inflating the dangers of illegal immigration to instill fear in the public as a way to build political support for its stricter policies.  Also, many members of MS-13 are U.S. citizens and are under 18 years old. Maria Teresa Kumar, chief executive of Voto Latino, said the comments from Trump and his aides are “simply an attempt to incite fear as a means to justify aggressive deportation efforts and costly border security policies. Their generalizations of our community are simply untrue. On the contrary, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born population, and that gap continues to widen each year.” Homan acknowledged that Trump had broadened the pool of undocumented immigrants considered a priority for removal, but he said the numbers are misleading because the Obama administration had sought to protect broad categories of immigrants from deportation. The numbers of non-criminals had fallen to such low levels, Homan said, that even a modest increase boosts the percentages. Over the first 100 days of the Trump administration, 30,473 criminals were arrested from Jan. 22 to April 29, an 18 percent increase from the same period in 2016, according to ICE. Arrests of immigrants with no criminal records reached nearly 11,000, an increase of about 150 percent. “If we send the message that if you get into the country, you get by the Border Patrol, and don't get arrested by local law enforcement for another crime, and no one is looking for you — that is a magnet; that is a pull factor,” Homan said. “We got to stop that messaging.  We got to tell people it's not okay to violate laws in this country.”

Local mayors: By Sessions’s definition, there might not actually be sanctuary cities

A group of mayors who met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions Tuesday said the threat to strip federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities” is unlikely to become reality since jurisdictions across the country appear to be following the law. The mayors said Sessions indicated at the meeting that he considered “sanctuary jurisdictions” only those in violation of a vague federal statute requiring places not to block communication with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They said their cities comply with the law, and they were unaware of any places that didn’t. “If that’s the definition of sanctuary city,” said Providence, R.I., Mayor Jorge Elorza, “then I don’t think there are any sanctuary cities in the United States of America.” The meeting comes just days after Sessions sent letters demanding that nine jurisdictions produce proof that they are communicating with federal authorities about undocumented immigrants or risk losing grant funding. The threat was greeted with outrage, particularly because the Justice Department accompanied it with a statement declaring many of the places were “crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime.” The department singled out New York City in particular as being “soft on crime.” Sessions said Friday one jurisdiction already had formally replied. The jurisdictions have said publicly they believe they are complying with federal law. And the local officials who met with Sessions Tuesday — including the mayor of New Orleans, whose city was among those asked to certify its compliance with federal law — said the attorney general’s comments offered some measure of reassurance. Sessions said in a statement that he was “pleased that the mayors who met with us today assured us they want to be in compliance with the law.” He said the “vast majority of state and local jurisdictions are in compliance and want to work with federal law enforcement to keep their communities safe,” though following the particular law on communication with Immigration and Customs Enforcement was “the minimum the American people should expect.” “We want all jurisdictions to enthusiastically support the laws of the United States that require the removal of criminal aliens, as many jurisdictions already do,” Sessions said. After the meeting, a federal judge in San Francisco blocked President Trump’s order threatening to take federal funds from sanctuary cities, though he said Sessions was within his right to enforce existing grant conditions — as his letters sought to do. But the judge restricted federal authorities from taking any steps beyond that — such as putting new conditions on money, or bullying locals into holding possible illegal immigrations for their federal counterparts — even though the Justice Department had argued it did not intend to. There is no singular definition of a “sanctuary jurisdiction,” and the judge noted even the president’s order on the topic was ambiguous. Cities with police departments that don’t ask people they encounter about immigration status, for example, could earn the label. So, too, could police departments that refuse to hold suspected illegal immigrants charged with other crimes when Immigration and Customs enforcement asks them to. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the group asked Sessions Tuesday: “Give us clarity about what you think a sanctuary city is, which we don’t have now.” He and others said that while the answer was still somewhat vague, Justice Department officials indicated it was only those cities that do not comply with a federal law that bars places from blocking information sharing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manger, president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said Justice Department officials said some practices that commonly earn cities the “sanctuary” label — such as telling police officers not to inquire about immigration status — would not violate the law and not jeopardize federal funding. He said Montgomery County does just that, and has found it an effective way to fight crime. Manger said Sessions seems to be improperly linking increases in homicides in some places to gang crime and immigration, when gangs are only responsible for a portion of the increase, and many are more are likely traceable to gangs whose members are U.S. citizens. “They’re not the driver in the increase in homicides around this country,” Manger said. “The driver is mental illness, it’s addiction, it’s domestic, it’s drug related.” A sticking point in the talks with U.S. officials, Manger said, was to what extent cities have to cooperate when it comes to holding suspected illegal immigrants based on a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As it stands now, all those arrested for local crimes have their fingerprints run through the FBI database. Whether the locals like it or not, the information is then sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who often ask for the people to be held. Not honoring a detainer request, the mayors said, would not seem to be a violation of federal law. And for local authorities, officials said, honoring them can present legal problems. “The question then gets to be constitutionally how long we can hold that individual without a warrant,” Landrieu said. The federal judge later said the president’s executive order could not force jurisdictions to hold suspected illegal immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Justice Department inspector general report during the Obama administration found some places with policies that it said might violate the law; the Justice Department has said that report helped it determine which cities to target to certify their compliance. Some, though, have actually modified their policies since the report, including New Orleans.

Mr. Trump is picking a fight with urban America over sanctuary cities

HAVING ORDERED that unspecified federal funding be halted on the basis of unspecified legal authority to unspecified sanctuary cities and counties, President Trump has triggered a showdown with large swaths of urban America, most of which voted heavily against him. Mayors in Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco and leaders of other localities vowed defiance, lending the dispute the air of a standoff between tough guys. His campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr. Trump is unwise to pick a divisive fight impelled by the fiction that the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants constitute a community of predatory and violent criminals. His inflated rhetoric on that point served to rile up his campaign events. As a tactic in governance, or to promote public safety, it is likely to be less effective. The president is also on shaky legal ground to demand that local authorities, including police and jail officials, enforce federal immigration law, just as he would by insisting they enforce the federal tax code, federal environmental regulations or federal food and drug rules. In 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia ruled that detention requests made by the federal government to localities — specifically, that they hold undocumented immigrants — are just that: requests, not commands. It remains unclear which federal funding Mr. Trump would or legally could try to suspend as a means of coercing jurisdictions to cooperate with federal officials, and whether such a threat would amount to much leverage. The Supreme Court has also ruled that there is no legal basis by which the president, or Congress, could withhold federal funding to localities that is unrelated to immigration — for instance, for housing or hospitals. Assuming that’s the case, then the president’s leverage with most localities would be limited. Nor is it clear which of the more than 300 cities and counties that withhold some form of cooperation from federal immigration officials would fall into Mr. Trump’s definition of a sanctuary jurisdiction. Some localities, notably San Francisco, refuse almost all forms of cooperation. Others ignore detention requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for undocumented immigrants convicted of minor crimes but not those found guilty of serious or violent crimes. Many others simply instruct their police not to ask detained suspects about their immigration status. No doubt, there are instances of localities having behaved with outrageous irresponsibility by refusing to turn over repeat offenders to ICE. That was the case, in 2015, when San Francisco refused to honor an ICE detainer for an undocumented immigrant with an extensive criminal record, who, shortly after he was released, shot and killed a young woman strolling on the waterfront. Still, Mr. Trump stands to gain very little by declaring what amounts to a culture war on huge swaths of urban America that, with good reason, would defy his attempts to deport millions of productive and largely law-abiding immigrants, many of whom have children and other relatives who are U.S. citizens. **Read more here:** Erwin Chemerinsky, Annie Lai and Seth Davis: Trump can’t force ‘sanctuary cities’ to enforce his deportation plans Kari Hong: Why Trump’s plan to deport criminal noncitizens won’t work Jennifer Rubin: Donald Trump’s ‘sanctuary city’ nonsense

Donald Trump wants local police to enforce immigration laws. Here’s why they don’t.

But Trump apparently hasn’t been paying attention to what local jurisdictions have been doing over the past 10 years. A great many law enforcement agencies — including those covering large immigrant populations — have sharply restricted their cooperation with federal enforcement, even for violators arrested for local crimes and in the face of a formal federal request. The reasons for this local stance reveal much about the counterproductive effects of “enforcement-first” policies. But they also indicate what must be done to achieve stable and sustainable immigration enforcement.    What would a broad legalization program mean for the future role of local law enforcement? Certainly not a return to the street sweeps that Trump envisions. They almost always ensnare both citizens and lawful immigrants. Experienced immigration officers, not local police, need to be the ones who both determine immigration status and apply consistent nationwide enforcement priorities.  Could this more focused connection to immigration enforcement still undercut community policing? That tension would still exist, but as many police executives recognize, it would be greatly reduced if Congress assured immigrants that the federal government will concentrate enforcement on recent violators.

Why Donald Trump may not be able to close sanctuary cities

One of the most high-profile acts of defiance to a Donald Trump presidency so far has come from mayors of liberal cities —Austin, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, basically all of California — who have promised to create or uphold sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants.   Trump has indicated he has a zero-tolerance policy for these cities, even threatening to cut off their federal funding unless they agree to obey all deportation requests. That might be easier said than done. Immigration experts say Trump could run up against constitutional, geographic and even legal challenges in trying to force these cities to stop openly flouting him.  But apart from North Carolina and Texas, immigration experts have a hard time seeing where else a ban might gain momentum. Most cities that let local law enforcement decide whether to hand immigrants to hand over to federal authorities for deportation  are in Democratic-controlled states. "A lot of the other Republican states don't have large cities or large number of immigrants, so it's just not an issue in a lot of these GOP-controlled states," said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute. (A bill in Texas failed in the past few years in part because there were no sanctuary cities to ban.) Trump could just ask Congress to pass a law cutting off funding for sanctuary cities. Except sanctuary cities have never really been a priority for Republican congressional leadership, which seems much more focused on repealing Obamacare and tax reform (and, when it comes to immigration, securing the border). Plus, Senate Democrats successfully blocked two sanctuary city bills in Congress in the past two years (including one immediately after 32-year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant deported five times prior). At the time, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) derided a sanctuary city ban as "dog-whistle politics," pointing out crimes committed by illegal immigrants aren't any higher than crimes committed by any one else living in America. Senate Democrats gained two seats in November's election, so they should have the numbers to block a ban bill again. If legislation isn't an option for Trump, some experts think taking the cities to court might be. Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, says the Trump administration could ask a federal judge for an injunction demanding these sanctuary cities hand over any immigrants the federal government wants to deport. They could argue it's technically against the law to shield immigrants from deportation.   Of course, sanctuary cities could just decide sticking it to Trump is worth the cost. (Many cities have announced their intention to be sanctuary cities after Trump's threat to cut off funding to them.)  Finally, all these options share something that's anathema to conservatives: They're big-government solutions. Getting rid of sanctuary cities requires a state, or Congress, or even the president to take a top-down approach and dictate municipal laws. And that can be an awkward thing for Republicans to gun for. "The spectacle of the federal government trying to deport large numbers of people in the face of local resistance is unlikely to make good PR for the Trump administration," wrote Somin in The Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog. Trump has options to try to tamp down on sanctuary cities, but all of them -- legislation, the courts, financial pressure -- are not guaranteed to work. And that means some of our biggest cities could openly flout one of Trump's most high-profile campaign promises, and there's not a lot he may be able to do about it.

California lawmakers are setting up a sanctuary state and daring Trump to stop them. Can he?

Flipping a giant middle finger to President Trump, California is on its way to becoming the first sanctuary state in the nation. Democratic lawmakers there are moving a bill that would prevent local and state law enforcement agencies from helping the federal government deport undocumented immigrants. (The state Senate passed it last week, and the state Assembly is expected to take it up soon, though Gov. Jerry Brown (D) hasn't said whether he'll sign it.) Sanctuary cities are one of the most high-profile acts of defiance to a Trump presidency, and the president has expressed a zero-tolerance policy toward them. In his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that sanctuaries are in violation of federal law and “have caused immeasurable harm to the American people.” Except it's not as simple as winning the presidency and then putting pen to paper to force California's hand. Trump will run into legal and political challenges if he wants to go to war with California over this issue. His powers in this area could even end up being decided at the U.S. Supreme Court. We talked to immigration experts on both sides of the issue to see how this potentially epic immigration showdown between California and Trump might unfold — and it could shape what happens in the hundreds of other liberal cities and counties attempting to defy Trump on this. Actually, this is already in the works. His executive order requires the federal government to make a list of immigrants these cities and states are protecting and whether any have been charged with crimes. It's an effort to put public pressure on these communities to hand over immigrants who are eligible for deportation. (Most, if not all, of sanctuary jurisdictions have said they will offer up immigrants convicted of violent crimes for deportation.)  Actually, this is already in the works, too. California is on track to lose law enforcement funding as well as federal funds for health care and nutrition for the poor because of a 2014 law that limited the state's cooperation in handing over fingerprints of undocumented immigrants. In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped onto press secretary Sean Spicer's podium, faced the cameras and warned cities, counties and California that the Justice Department would withhold billions of dollars if they don't hand over illegal immigrants when asked to do so.  But California has clearly calculated that pursuing its policy is more valuable than the money. Which brings us to ...  It would take an act of Congress to go back and insert a clause declaring these unrelated law enforcement, health-care and poverty grants deliverable only if jurisdictions hand over their illegal immigrants for deportation when the government asks for them.   The Department of Justice could sue California and try to block the implementation of this law. It's never been tried, and the Trump administration would likely have to sue in the same San Francisco-based federal court that unanimously blocked its first entry ban. But it may be the best chance the administration has, says Jessica Vaughan of the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies. Lower courts have split on whether it is legal for the federal government to require local law enforcement to hand over immigrants.  That's for the courts to decide. But this would be the first court challenge in which the administration would be giving a full-throated defense of its deportation requests in court. “It's a whole new ball game with a new administration that wants to go to the mat on this,” Vaughan said. Speaking of going to the mat ...  But here we get into a problem of resources for the Trump administration, Somin says: Trying to round up immigrants in one sanctuary jurisdiction is like playing whack-a-mole with the others; he'd be taking federal officials away from the dozens of counties that are openly defying the administration. Most of Trump's problems could be solved if Congress passed a law that made it okay for the government to cut off funding for sanctuary cities and states. Such a law passed the House of Representatives in 2015 and could probably pass the House again if it came up. But it would almost surely face a Democratic filibuster in the Senate — in fact, this kind of law has already been defeated by Senate Democrats. Even those laws could be subject to court cases challenging the federal government's authority over the states. Our experts could envision a world where all of this drags out for years and eventually ends up at the U.S. Supreme Court. There's too much at stake politically for both sides to give up easily — for Trump, one of his premiere campaign promises is on the line, and in sanctuary cities, Democrats have a chance to publicly defy Trump and win. “I don't see any side letting up because it's a political battle, not just a policy one,” Vaughan said. “It's too fundamental to the views of each side.”

Trump wants to reduce crime. But he doesn’t understand good police work.

Our criminal justice system works mostly at the local and state level, so the executive branch of the federal government is limited in its influence over local police. Crime reduction does not happen through fearmongering or federal fiat. And violence against police is illegal. But although the substance of these orders is near zero, their very existence reveals a shift in focus under the Trump administration. Reducing crime is a fabulous wish, and a federal focus on crime reduction was curiously absent in the previous administration. But Trump has little knowledge of the issues at hand. His rhetoric about the perils of cities — which relied on false statements about murder rates — illustrates that the devil, as always, is in the details.        That is not to say that protests and a focus on bad policing haven’t shed light on real problems. There is still no national database of police-involved shootings and use of force. And too many towns continue to see police enforcement and the court system primarily as a “revenue stream” to fund municipal government.  Any profession, law enforcement included, appreciates kind words from up top. But the White House has to be more than a pulpit for a bully. Ultimately Trump will be judged by deeds, not words. And the president’s actions are not promising. Border restrictions and immigrant raids do more harm than good, and neither does anything to reduce the “carnage” of urban violence over which Trump professes concern. Ramping up the war on drugs, with its multi-decade track record of futility, is certainly not the answer. Nor is increased incarceration, particularly when private prisons are involved. This is where the president’s power could do serious national harm. Crime reduction does not happen through “zero tolerance,” xenophobia, or any slogan that can fit on a bumper sticker. Crime, violent crime especially, is related to society’s problems: illegal guns, lack of mental-health care, segregation, unemployment, drug prohibition and a general erosion of family, social and civic structure. These all desperately need our attention. But if 25 years of crime reduction taught us anything, it’s that we don’t need to fix the world before police can help fix a city. Policing is not one-size-fits-all, but we have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t. Repeat violent offenders, particularly in cases involving illegal guns, need special attention and formal prosecution. When it comes to minor crimes and quality-of-life issues, though, residents must help identify problems and potential solutions. Police should help residents maintain order. Proactive policing, especially when it disproportionately affects minorities in high-crime areas, requires constant communication. A top-down approach of arrests and imprisonment does little but create justifiable resentment. A free, diverse and civic society depends on good policing. If law enforcement shifts its focus to “cracking down” on immigrants, Muslims or any other enemy Trump invents, we risk a descent into repression and crime.

Sessions takes step toward enforcing threat to strip funding from ‘sanctuary cities’

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday demanded that nine jurisdictions produce proof that they are communicating with federal authorities about undocumented immigrants or risk losing grant funding. Sessions sent letters to the nine jurisdictions, including Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, in the latest sign that the Trump administration intends to punish what are sometimes called sanctuary cities that do not cooperate in its promised crackdown on illegal immigration. President Trump signed an executive order in January declaring that sanctuary jurisdictions would not be eligible to receive federal grants, and Sessions vowed last month during a White House news conference to take Justice Department money from such places. How far Trump can go, though, and what jurisdictions can do to avoid his ire, remains unclear. In a news release, the Justice Department said that the places were identified in a Justice Department Inspector General’s Office report from May 2016 as potentially having policies that hindered communication with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The letters were addressed to officials in New Orleans; Philadelphia; Chicago; New York City; Clark County, Nev.; Miami-Dade County, Fla.; Milwaukee County, Wis.; Cook County, Ill.; and the state of California. “Additionally, many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime,” the Justice Department wrote in a news release, casting aspersions on New York, Chicago and the Bay Area in particular. The release said New York, for example, “continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s ‘soft on crime’ stance.” New York, in fact, has seen significant recent reductions in crime. The statement said crime in Chicago had “skyrocketed.” And it said that after a raid on MS-13 members in the Bay Area, “city officials seemed more concerned with reassuring illegal immigrants that the raid was unrelated to immigration than with warning other MS-13 members that they were next.” The grants at stake provide federal funding for a host of functions in the criminal-justice system — including policing, victim-and-witness initiatives, crime prevention, drug-treatment programs and technology improvements. Representatives of the jurisdictions said they believed that they already had been complying with federal law and disputed Sessions’s characterization of what was happening. 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. He said that sanctuary city was an ill-defined term and New Orleans did not accept the moniker. “There’s a lot of political talk, but there’s no legal analysis,” Butterworth said. “We say we’re not one because we follow federal law.” While the city tells its police officers not to ask people they encounter about their immigration status, it does not block them from talking to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Butterworth said. He said the city updated its policy to better reflect federal law last year. “If they need one more letter, we’re happy to send it, and we’ll get it turned around quickly,” Butterworth said. Michael Hernández, the communications director for Miami-Dade County, said Mayor Carlos A. Giménez (R) “strongly believes that we are in compliance” with the law, and noted that the county had begun earlier this year to honor all requests from ICE to detain potential undocumented immigrants taken into custody on local charges. That move prompted Trump to praise the county in January. “Right decision. Strong!” he wrote on Twitter. Sessions himself said in a recent Fox News appearance he was “pleased that Miami complied.” Hernández said the county had stopped honoring the requests in 2013 because the federal government was not providing reimbursement for the cost of detaining suspected undocumented immigrants, but, fearing the loss of federal funding, officials had decided to change course. “We never proclaimed to be a sanctuary community before then, and we haven’t since,” Hernández said. “We always have worked with federal authorities on all matters, including immigration.” Seth Stein, a spokesman for city hall in New York City, said the administration’s push was “nothing new” and the “grandstanding shows how out of touch the Trump administration is with reality.” “Contrary to their alternative facts, New York is the safest big city in the country, with crime at record lows in large part because we have policies in place to encourage cooperation between NYPD and immigrant communities,” he said. Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele said in a statement officials were “in compliance with the law and will share the required legal opinion by the date requested,” though the Justice Department’s comments about illegal immigration and violent crime were “neither accurate nor productive.” “Milwaukee County has its challenges, but they are not caused by illegal immigration,” Abele said. “My far greater concern is the proactive dissemination of misinformation, fear, and intolerance.” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said in a statement: “Neither the facts nor the law are on their side. Regardless, let me be clear: Chicago’s values and Chicago’s future are not for sale.” The law that Sessions wants enforced is very narrow, and it would not bar any of the policies that people generally associate with sanctuary jurisdictions. When someone is arrested on a local crime, their fingerprints are run through the FBI database, and — whether local authorities like it or not — ICE can tell if they are in the country illegally. It then often will send a request to local authorities to detain such people. Refusing to honor such a request would not necessarily violate federal law. But telling local police officers, for example, that they could not give information to their ICE counterparts might. The Obama administration also had considered compliance with the law a requirement for receiving Justice Department grants, and in response to the Inspector General’s Office report, even issued guidance on the subject. Cities, though, have said they are worried that Sessions’s threats are not mere talk. Seattle, San Francisco and Santa Clara County have sued over the matter, asking a federal judge to block Trump’s executive order and stop Sessions from making good on his threat. The Justice Department has fought the cases in court, and acting assistant attorney general Chad Readler argued at a recent hearing that it was premature for the judge to consider because the Justice Department had not yet taken any sort of “enforcement action.”

Sessions vows crackdown on violent crime in first major speech as attorney general

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in his first significant speech as the nation’s top law enforcement official, warned that recent increases in serious crime might portend a violent new period in the country’s history and vowed to work to stop it. Speaking to the National Association of Attorneys General on Tuesday, Sessions said that the country has seen warning signs, and that he fears that the era of historically low crime rates might be coming to an end. He said law enforcement can’t become “overconfident” because violence is near historic lows, and he cited rising crimes rates in the 1970s as an indicator of what might happen. “We’ve done a lot of good. We need to not give up on that progress,” Sessions said. “That is the thing that has concerned me the most.” Sessions, a Republican former senator from Alabama, has long spoken of reinvigorating the fight against violent crime, and his bleak view of the United States is in line with that of President Trump, who has cast his administration as one that values law and order. Sessions’s remarks confirm that he is likely to break with his predecessors in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, who worked to grant clemency to drug and other offenders they said were serving sentences far out of proportion with the crimes they committed. Sessions has deviated from past administrations in other areas. He said in a recent memo that the Justice Department will continue to use private prisons, contrary to a directive from Sally Yates when she was deputyattorney general. He similarly revoked guidance from the prior administration on students being allowed to use the bathrooms matching their gender identities. And on Monday, his Justice Department dropped its long-standing position that Texas intended to discriminate when it passed a strict voter-ID law. On crime and drugs, Sessions seems likely to take a harder stance than those of his predecessors. He spoke to reporters Monday and to the attorneys general Tuesday about how he does not think marijuana should be legalized, and he said that he will revisit guidance from former deputy attorney general James Cole on how federal authorities should act in states that have done so. Cole had written that in states with robust regulatory systems, federal officials should continue to leave the matter to local law enforcement. But states without such systems might face challenges from the federal government, Cole wrote. “States, you know, can pass whatever laws they choose, but I’m not sure we’re going to be a better, healthier nation if we have marijuana being sold at every corner grocery store,” Sessions said Tuesday. “We’ll have to work our way through that.” Sessions said that increases in crime tend to follow increases in drug use, and he worried about “the beginning of a trend.” Combating violent crime has been a signature issue for both him and Trump. Less than a month into office, Trump signed three executive actions directing the Justice Department to form a task force and take other steps to target criminal gangs, and reduce violent crime and attacks on police. In his speech, Sessions — unlike Trump — offered context for his warning about rising crime. He cited data showing that homicides had increased by nearly 11 percent from 2014, and said he did “not believe that this pop in crime, this increase in crime is necessarily an aberration, a one time blip.” But he also noted the homicide rate had been cut in half from what it once was. Sessions also seemed to foreshadow a Justice Department that is friendlier to police than it had been in the past, and perhaps less likely to prosecute officers when they are accused of wrongdoing. He said he had not decided how to proceed with a possible consent decree mandating reform at the Chicago Police Department — where a Justice Department investigation found officers routinely use excessive force — and even suggested that less heavy-handed policing may be to blame for that city’s increase in crime “One of the metrics that has been reported in Chicago shows a dramatic reduction in stops and arrests in Chicago by the police department,” he said. “That has got to be a factor in the increase in violence in the city.” Sessions said he had not read reports on the police departments in Chicago and Ferguson, Mo., where 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer, sparking riots, but he minimized the summaries he had reviewed. “Some of it was pretty anecdotal and not so scientifically based,” he said. In his speech, he also suggested that second-guessing of police is hindering the fight against crime. “Somehow, some way, we’ve undermined the respect for our police, and made, oftentimes, their job more difficult, and it’s not been well received by them, and we’re not seeing the kind of effective community-based, street-based policing that we found to be so effective in reducing crime,” he said. __

Justice Department asks in budget proposal that cities be forced to detain illegal immigrants

The Justice Department is pushing as a part of its budget proposal to change federal law so that local jurisdictions can be forced to detain suspected illegal immigrants upon request. The move would give the administration far more leeway to make good on its promise to crack down on “sanctuary cities” — although it would surely meet resistance from some local law enforcement agencies that do not want their officers used to enforce immigration law. “Having states and local jurisdictions enforce federal immigration law terrorizes immigrant communities and makes the whole community less, not more, safe, as police chiefs around the country recognize,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project. The measure — a small portion of the budget proposal and readily confirmed by Justice Department officials — is unlikely to become reality. The budget request still must be evaluated by Congress, and lawmakers are likely to change it substantially. But the request demonstrates the lengths to which the Justice Department is willing to go to beef up immigration enforcement. The Justice Department also asked for more authority to tie grant money to local jurisdictions’ cooperation with immigration enforcement. President Trump signed an executive order — which has since been blocked by a federal judge — threatening to cut the flow of federal funds to “sanctuary cities.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions later sent letters to nine jurisdictions asking them to produce proof that they are communicating with federal authorities about undocumented immigrants or risk losing money. But federal law limits the authority of the president and the attorney general to take real action. The law says only that cities must not restrict information sharing with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It does not mention instances in which the federal government learns that a person in local custody might be in the country illegally and asks a jurisdiction to detain that person. Some city officials are reluctant to honor such detainer requests because the federal government is not willing to reimburse them, and they worry about the legal implications of holding people on immigration offenses without criminal warrants. Local law enforcement officials also worry that if they are perceived as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), witnesses and others might be less willing to cooperate with them in other kinds of investigations for fear of being deported. Justice Department officials have said that under current law, holding illegal immigrants upon request is voluntary. And in a memo Tuesday, Sessions seemed to concede that his power in the matter was limited. He declared that sanctuary cities, even under Trump’s executive order, were only those places that violated the particular federal law that stops local officials from putting any restrictions on information sharing with ICE. Only such jurisdictions, he said, were at risk of losing federal funding. If the Justice Department’s proposal were to become law, though, all jurisdictions that do not honor detainer requests will be at risk. The law would block cities from enacting policies that stop compliance with legal Department of Homeland Security requests, including “any request to maintain custody of the alien for a period not to exceed 48 hours.” The state of Texas recently passed a bill that imposes fines and even jail time on local authorities who do not cooperate with ICE agents. Sari Horwitz, Kelsey Snell and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.

Don’t buy the hype: The U.S. is not experiencing a terrible new crime wave

_Mark Holden is general counsel and senior vice president at Koch Industries. Ronal Serpas is a former superintendent of the New Orleans and Nashville police departments and the chairman of Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration._ There has been a surge of assertions about rising crime recently. At the Republican convention in July, GOP nominee Donald Trump said, “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.” The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald  echoed these concerns, noting that homicides increased by nearly 17 percent in the 56 largest U.S. cities last year and citing sharp rises in Baltimore, Chicago and the District. In an op-ed in last Sunday’s Post, Sean Kennedy and Parker Abt made the same case. As two strong conservatives, let us set the record straight. These statements on rising murders are highly misleading. The truth is that Americans are still experiencing hard-won historic lows in crime. When examining statistics on crime, researchers evaluate several factors: overall crime, violent crime, homicide and property crime. By 2014, violent crime had fallen by half from its 1991 peak. Property crime was down 49 percent. Crime overall was 66 percent lower in major cities. No one disputes this decades-long trend. Moving on to 2015, crime data collected directly from police departments in the 30 largest cities show that crime overall was the about same as in 2014 (in fact, it was down 0.1 percent). Violent crime was up by 3 percent, and murder by 13 percent. This is reasonably consistent with the FBI’s June 2015 midyear report, which showed violence up 1.7 percent and murder up 6 percent nationally, and the oft-cited Justice Department study by criminologist Richard Rosenfeld that found murder to be up 17 percent in major cities in 2015. These numbers put the 2015 murder rate near 2012 levels — still very near to all-time lows. This rise in homicide is alarming on its face. But _half_ of 2015’s murder increase occurred in Baltimore, Chicago and the District — the very cities that those pushing the crime panic repeatedly use as examples. While we must work to address the issues driving this unacceptable localized violence, it is not the norm. These cities are outliers. As for violent crime overall, half of 2015’s increase came from a spike in aggravated assaults in Los Angeles. Turning to 2016, data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association show homicides rising 15 percent at midyear. But, again, Chicago caused nearly one-third of that increase. Additionally, the MCCA study relies on self-reporting and therefore does not include cities such as New York, where homicide decreased. And its focus on cities, where murder rates are usually higher, likewise must be taken into account. The report shows a partial slice of the picture, making it difficult to draw conclusions about 2016. Two more cautionary notes. First, some yearly variation is normal. For example, 2005, 2006 and 2012 all saw rises in violent crime. Each time, crime rates flattened or dropped soon thereafter, and the downward trend continued. The same may be happening now. In 2015, New York’s murder rate rose, but it decreased in 2016, reversing the 2015 increase. Even in Baltimore, where murders rose sharply last year, homicide has fallen by 9 percent this year. Second, with the murder rate at such historic lows, increases measured in percentages may be misleading. Context is important. Portland, Ore., for example, experienced a 19 percent increase in murders in 2015 as a result of just five additional killings. Politicized voices often omit these important caveats. The bottom line: Some cities are seeing a rise in homicides. But the country is not experiencing a national murder wave or a reversal in the long trend of decreasing crime. We all want our families, children and police to be safe. And we all want to live in safe neighborhoods. But stoking false fear about crime will not bring or preserve “law and order.” That’s why the nation’s most prominent police and prosecutor groups, representing 30,000 law enforcement officials, wrote to Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on the eve of the conventions to urge them to take a data-driven, modern approach to crime — one that targets violent crime while reducing the unnecessary incarceration of low-level offenders. States that have employed these practices have seen crime and incarceration fall together, which preserves resources for law enforcement. Law enforcement isn’t the only entity that’s changed its stance on crime policy after decades of seeing what has and hasn’t worked. Many conservative leaders, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) , New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) and Newt Gingrich, agree. The Republican Party platform has also adopted a similar approach. To be sure, as Kennedy and Abt note in their op-ed, Americans do _believe_ that crime is rising. An April 2016 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans worry “a great deal” about crime. It’s important that our country’s leaders keep the public’s concerns in mind. But stoking fear with twisted data and dangerous rhetoric doesn’t help, nor is it the best way to support our police. If we care about law and order and changing the dire conditions in cities where violent crime is a perpetuating cycle, we need to rely on facts, not fear. **Read more:** Sean Kennedy and Parker Abt: Trump is right about violent crime: It’s on the rise in major cities. Danielle Allen: How the war on drugs creates violence Marc Schindler and Mai Fernandez: Tackling crime by making communities healthier

Trump’s attack on sanctuary cities isn’t for their residents’ benefit

Cities are not and cannot be dragooned into conducting immigration enforcement on behalf of the feds, so the argument has often boiled down to the level of cooperation that cities afford to immigration officials when they are preparing to release someone in custody. Sessions now claims that all he is concerned with are “those in violation of a vague federal statute requiring places not to block communication with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” In a meeting with mayors last month, mayors told Sessions that none of them are blocking communication. This seems to be the proverbial solution in search of a problem. So why is Sessions hassling cities over something they don’t do, which in any event is unrelated to crime? One imagines that it is part of the administration’s effort to terrorize immigrants and to show Trump’s base (strongest in non-urban areas with fewer numbers of immigrants) how tough it is.

Trump’s intervention into policing, voting and immigration sets up showdown with America’s largest cities

In the past 24 hours, President Trump has signaled sweeping federal intervention in the way local and state officials carry out policing, treat immigrants and run elections, setting off a wave of defiance and apprehension from leaders of some of America’s largest cities. In an executive order signed Wednesday, Trump directed the Department of Homeland Security to find ways to defund cities and jurisdictions out of step with his immigration priorities. That action — which could cost sanctuary cities including Washington, New York and Los Angeles millions of dollars — is the latest in a series of moves where Trump has appeared willing to step on state-level or municipal prerogatives. In the scuffle, U.S. mayors have emerged as key players in the resistance to Trump’s agenda. “Cities know how important local control is, because we are in touch with the people we represent most closely. This is a president who’s been clear that he wants to centralize as much authority as he can in himself,” Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges said Wednesday. “That is dangerous for our democracy, I believe, and he is using the levers of our democracy to centralize his authority.” At the center of the sanctuary city debate is a disagreement over whether local police officers should be required to help immigration officials enforce federal immigration laws. Many liberal mayors, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and New York City’s Bill De Blasio, have argued that requiring local police departments to assist immigration agents with deportations could sow distrust among immigrant populations. It could also discourage undocumented victims or witnesses from coming forward to report crimes. “This is a federalism issue,” said Jorge Elorza (D), the mayor of Providence, R.I., who is the son of immigrants. “The idea of local control is deeply embedded in American history, and what we have now is a very aggressive attempt by the federal government to commandeer our local police departments to become immigration agents.” He vowed “massive and aggressive lawsuits,” a resistance echoed by several local leaders. Kevin de Leon, the Democratic president pro tempore of the California state Senate, said the state legislature is prepared to “explore all of our legal options” to fight the order. “Singling out states and cities with punitive threats and withholding federal resources as today’s order on sanctuary cities does is unconstitutional,” de Leon said. “It’s not the job of our local and county and state law enforcement to turn the cogs on President Trump’s deportation machine.” For states and mayors, the debate also comes down to dollars. Elorza, who has vowed to defy any federal order to change how his city handles undocumented immigrants, said that officials within his administration have watched anxiously as Trump and his surrogates have leveled threats and suggestions that federal funding for sanctuary cities could be at stake. He estimates that about 10 percent of the city’s $700 million budget consists of federal money. Garcetti criticized the order in a statement Wednesday and stressed his city’s crucial economic stature. “Splitting up families and cutting funding to any city — especially Los Angeles, where 40 percent of the nation’s goods enter the U.S. at our port, and more than 80 million passengers traveled through our airport last year — puts the personal safety and economic health of our entire nation at risk. It is not the way forward for the United States.” In Boston, Mayor Marty Walsh (D) said that he would open City Hall itself to immigrants if that’s what it takes to keep them safe. “You are safe in Boston. If necessary, we will use City Hall itself to protect anyone who is targeted unjustly,” Walsh said during a news conference Wednesday after Trump signed the order. Asked about what funding Boston might lose, Walsh said, “I guess we’ll find out.” Sanctuary city funding is just one of many ongoing concerns, though certainly the most tangible. Trump has also made other broad — if vague — statements in recent days that have caused outrage and alarm. He tweeted from his personal account Wednesday that he planned to ask for a “major investigation” into allegations of widespread voter fraud, as he reasserted a false claim that cheating caused him to lose the popular vote in November. States oversee elections and certify results, and some members of Trump’s own party have voiced opposition to some of his ideas. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, said during an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday that his state investigates voter fraud every two years and that it is “not widespread” or systemic. He said elections need to be kept in the states’ hands. “Every time the federal government touches something, with all due respect, it gets worse, not better. Our system of elections with federal involvement, it’s not going to improve it,” he said. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) on Wednesday called the president’s call for a probe “lunacy” after delivering remarks at a National Governors Association gathering in Washington. He also expressed concerns that such rhetoric or executive action could lead to actions restricting voting rights. “What I worry about is they use these types of comments and tactics to deny people’s access to the voting booths, make it harder for people to vote, to justify more stringent voter ID laws,” McAuliffe said. Another flash point came Tuesday night when Trump vowed in a Twitter message to “send in the feds” if leaders in Chicago are unable to end the ongoing spate of violence in the city. Many were left speculating whether Trump meant he would send National Guard troops or expand the number of FBI agents embedded in Chicago. At a briefing on Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer clarified that Trump’s tweets were a reference to providing more federal resources to Chicago via the U.S. attorney’s office as well as other federal agencies. Newark’s Democratic mayor, Ras Baraka, sounded a defiant note before the order had even been signed. “Newark will continue to protect undocumented immigrants despite whatever executive order is issued later today by President Trump,” Baraka said in a statement to the news media. “Newark has a policy of protecting undocumented immigrants from deportation by U.S. immigration authorities. We see no reason to change that policy.” Fenit Nirappil and David Weigel contributed to this report.

Immigration and crime

In recent weeks, there has been an upsurge in controversy over crime committed by immigrants, sparked by a recent murder in San Francisco, and by presidential candidate Donald Trump’s exploitation of the issue. But as conservative commentator Linda Chavez points out, immigrants – both legal and illegal – have far lower crime rates than native-born Americans do. Even if they did not, it does not follow that immigration restrictions and deportation are the right solution to the problem.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Numerous studies show that immigrants have lower crime rates than natives, a finding which holds true even if you focus solely on Mexican immigrants – the main objects of Trump’s ire. Indeed, Mexican-born immigrant males aged 18-39 who lack a high school diploma actually had a lower incarceration rate in 2010 (2.8%) than all native-born males of the same age group (3.3%), regardless of education level (the incarceration rate for native-born men without a high school diploma was 10.7% in the same year). Overall, immigrants are only about one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated for crimes, and the difference is mostly due to a lower propensity to commit crime in the immigrant population rather than to deportation or other law enforcement measures that differentially target immigrants.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico For these reasons, claims that we could lower violent crime rates by reducing immigration or deporting more illegals are fundamentally misplaced. Indeed, if reducing violent crime is really the goal, we could shift some of the vast resources currently devoted to keeping out and deporting peaceful migrants and reinvest them in combating violent crime and terrorism. But let’s assume that the data showed that immigrants have an unusually high crime after all. It still would not follow that increased immigration restrictions and deportation are the answer. Even if immigrants had a crime rate, say, twice as high, as those of natives, immigration restrictions and deportation efforts would still punish vastly more innocent, nonviolent people, than violent criminals. Within the native-born population, there are a number of demographic groups that have much higher than average crime rates. For example, a hugely disproportionate percentage of violent crimes are committed by young males, particularly homicides. Other things equal, increasing the proportion of young males in any population is likely to disproportionately increase the crime rate. Yet few would argue that this justifies restricting the movement of young males as a class, or otherwise imposing constraints on their liberty. Indeed, few Americans would support imposing a curfew that applied to young males alone, even if might reduce the crime rate. Similarly, few would support a differential drinking age for men, as opposed to women, even though inebriated men are far more likely to resort to violence than women are. We recognize that it is wrong to restrict the liberty of large classes of innocent people merely because they happen to belong to a demographic group with a relatively high crime rate. For their part, most conservative immigration restrictionists rightly recognize that it is wrong to deprive innocent gun-owners of their right to possess handguns merely because a small minority use them to commit crimes.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The same principle applies to immigrants as much as it does to young males and gun owners. Indeed, it does so with much greater force. Those who wish to crack down on immigrants generally in order to lower the crime rate advocate far more draconian measures than a differential curfew or drinking age. They favor imposing immigration restrictions and deportation rules that consign huge numbers of people (most of whom have not harmed anyone at all) to a lifetime of Third World poverty and oppression.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Given the enormity of the harms and restrictions on freedom involved, they can be justified – if at all – only if they are the only way to prevent a comparably grave evil. The burden of proof that such policies must meet is a lot higher than whatever might be sufficient to justify a differential curfew, confiscation of guns, or similar more moderate infringement on freedom. Yet it is fairly obvious that there are numerous more cost-effective ways to lower violent crime, including – as noted above – devoting to that purpose some of the resources currently allocated to keeping out and deporting peaceful migrants. For example, some of that money could be spent on increasing the number of police officers assigned to high-crime neighborhoods. Unlikely immigration restrictions, increasing police presence has a proven record of reducing crime rates.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Many immigration restrictionists nonetheless claim that immigrants – or at least illegal immigrants – are different from young males because their mere presence in the US violates the law, thus essentially making them criminals regardless of whether they have committed any other wrongs. Illegally crossing the border is in fact a minor misdemeanor under federal law. If you think that anyone who violates the law in any way is thereby a morally depraved person who must be punished, then you can consistently advocate immigration restriction and deportation as “solutions” to immigrant criminality.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But most Americans do not in fact seem to believe that all violations of law are morally wrong and deserve punishment. If you drove your car to work today, you probably exceeded the speed limit, which is also a violation of criminal law. Yet you probably don’t think you did anything wrong, much less deserve punishment. Almost every business violates at least a few of the manifold state and federal regulations that apply to them. Overall, the vast majority of American adults have violated state or federal criminal law at one point or another.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The point is not just that most Americans violate the law, but that we believe we are morally justified in doing so in many situations. And, in most such cases, our reasons are far less compelling than those of border-crossing illegal immigrants, whose only other option is to accept a lifetime of poverty and misery living under corrupt and often oppressive Third World governments. The average illegal immigrant is far less morally blameworthy than the average American who decides to drive a few miles above the speed limit in order to get to work faster, or to engage in underage drinking – both of which activities are more likely to endanger innocent third parties than merely crossing a border in search of freedom and opportunity.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The desire to prevent violent crime is laudable regardless of whether the perpetrators are immigrants or natives. But we should find ways to deter and punish the guilty without harming large numbers of innocent people in the process. UPDATE: Immigration policy expert Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute has a more detailed look at the data on immigration and crime. As he points out, studies using different methodologies have all generally reached the same conclusion: “that immigrants are less crime-prone than natives with some small potential exceptions.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

In executive actions, President Trump vows crackdown on violent crime. Is America as unsafe as he thinks?

President Trump signed three executive actions Thursday designed to crack down on violence in America, directing the Department of Justice to form a task force and take other steps to target criminal gangs and reduce violent crime and crime against police. Trump has long held a pessimistic view of how safe people are in the U.S., declaring in his inaugural address that the “American carnage” would stop with his presidency. As his new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was sworn in Thursday, Trump said he was signing the executive actions to “restore safety in America.” “First, I’m directing Department of Justice & Homeland Security to undertake all necessary and lawful action to break the back of the criminal cartels that have spread across our nation and are destroying the blood of our youth and other people, many other people,” Trump said. “Secondly, I’m directing Department of Justice to form a task force on reducing violent crime in America. And thirdly, I’m directing the Department of Justice to implement a plan to stop crime and crimes of violence against law enforcement officers.” But Trump has, in the past, misstated crime statistics or not presented them in the proper context, presenting a somewhat bleaker view than perhaps is warranted. He has accurately cited a statistic from the Brennan Center for Justice, which found that, in the largest 30 cities, homicides increased by 14 percent from 2015 to 2016. But in that data set, one outlier city — Chicago — was responsible for 43.7 percent of the total increase in homicide rates in 2016.  Civil liberties groups criticized the executive orders as responses to a non-existent problem. “President Trump intends to build task forces to investigate and stop national trends that don’t exist,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeffery Robinson. “We have seen historic lows in the country’s crime rate and a downward trend in killings against police officers since the 1980s. The president not only doesn’t acknowledge these facts about our nation’s safety, he persists in ignoring the all-too-real deaths of Black and brown people at the hands of law enforcement.” Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, Co-Director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. program, said, “The executive orders President Trump signed today on criminal justice are premised on a distortion of reality that will ultimately be counterproductive. Smart public safety policies should be based on the realities that communities, law enforcement, and victims face, so that resources are used wisely. Far from soaring, overall crime rates have decreased steadily in recent decades, though homicide rates in several major cities have increased and require thoughtful attention.” Sessions said in his own remarks that America had “a crime problem,” and it was no mere anomaly. “I wish the rise that we are seeing in crime in America today were some sort of aberration or a blip,” he said. “My best judgment, having been involved in criminal law enforcement for many years, is that this is a dangerous, permanent trend that places the health and safety of the American people at risk. We will deploy the talents and abilities of the Department of Justice in the most effective way possible to confront this rise in crime and to protect the people of our country.” Sessions mentioned violent crime in his remarks even before terrorism, indicating just how high a priority it might become in his Justice Department.    “It’s a shame what’s been happening to our great, truly great, law enforcement officers,” Trump said. “That’s going to stop, as of today.” Trump has cast himself as a pro-law enforcement candidate since the campaign trail. Some advocates worry that he is not adequately concerned, though, with police abuses and those killed by police. Some cities in recent years, including Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and Charlotte, have seen protests and violence erupt after incidents of black men being killed at the hands of law enforcement officers. The Justice Department under President Barack Obama sent mediators to those cities to try to keep the peace. The Obama administration also aggressively investigated the police with systemic reviews of entire departments to address the root cause of conflict between law enforcement and residents. Neither Trump nor his attorney general mentioned such investigations at the swearing-in ceremony. On the White House website, the Trump administration has hinted at a crackdown on protests. “Our job is not to make life more comfortable for the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter,” the site says. Sessions, though, did note another issue of importance to him: immigration. That is significant, as the Justice Department is in the midst of a heated court battle to defend Trump’s now-frozen executive order barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. “We need a lawful system of immigration — one that serves the interests of the people of the United States,” Sessions said. “That’s not wrong, that’s not immoral, that’s not indecent. We admit a million people a year plus, lawfully, and we need to end this lawlessness that threatens the public safety, pulls down wages of working Americans.”

Sessions: Focus on violent crime doesn’t mean lax enforcement for white-collar offenses

Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed Monday not to diminish the Justice Department’s focus on corporate fraud, asserting that a vigorous interest in violent crime would not diminish its long-standing mission to prosecute white-collar offenders. In a speech and question-and-answer session at the Ethics and Compliance Initiative’s annual conference, Sessions took aim at recent speculation that his Justice Department might be easier on white-collar crime, saying while there could be “some uncertainty” when administrations changed, he would “still enforce the laws that protect American consumers and ensure that honest businesses are not placed at a disadvantage to dishonest businesses.” He acknowledged that he had been focused in his first weeks on the job on violent crime and immigration but said that did not mean he would give other criminals a pass. “These are important priorities for our department,” Sessions said. “But focusing on these challenges does not mean we’re going to reduce our efforts in other areas.” Sessions has made extensive public comments on violent crime and immigration, and — even at a gathering of corporate and white-collar lawyers at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Washington — he did so again Monday. He spoke of his fear that crime, after years of declines, might now increase, and of his support of the “broken windows” philosophy of police, which has officers rigorously enforcing the laws on even minor violations in hopes of preventing more serious problems. He talked about restoring a “lawful system of immigration” and disrupting cartels and gangs. Even with those tangents, the speech marked the first time the attorney general has addressed the topic of corporate fraud, bribery and public corruption in a significant way. Sessions was appointed attorney general by a businessman whose family is still engaged in significant financial dealings around the world, and some feared that — coupled with Sessions’s own interest in other issues — might mean a reduced commitment to investigating and prosecuting financial wrongdoing. President Trump in 2012 said a particular law governing bribery in foreign countries, which Sessions said he will enforce, was “horrible” and “should be changed” as it put American companies at a disadvantage. He called the United States “absolutely crazy” for prosecuting people for such offenses. The Justice Department, though, in some ways is a more important player on white-collar crime than it is on violent offenses, which are typically handled at the local level. Sessions said enforcing laws governing financial and corporate dealings was important because the frauds are “paid for by innocent people,” and not doing so can hurt businesses that act honestly. “Companies that obey the law and do the right thing should not be at a disadvantage simply because their competitors choose to break the law,” Sessions said. He said, though, that the department would try to differentiate between an “honest mistake” and “willful misconduct.” Sessions said the department also would continue “to emphasize the importance” of holding individuals, rather than just companies, accountable for misconduct. But he also said doing so was “not always possible” and that lawyers would take into account companies’ cooperation and self-disclosure when making charging decisions. He said he also felt businesses should not be held responsible for isolated mistakes by employees. In the Obama administration, Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates had directed prosecutors to focus on individuals and not to agree to release such people from liability in a deal with the company “absent extraordinary circumstances or approved departmental policy.” The department under Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had faced significant criticism for prosecuting or reaching deals with big banks but not going after top executives. Sessions said the department would continue pursuing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases, which target companies that bribe foreign officials to gain a competitive advantage, though he noted curiously that “foreign competitors often aren’t bound by these laws.” That is technically true, but if the businesses trade securities in the United States, they can be prosecuted, and federal prosecutors have made major cases against foreign-based companies.

Police chiefs’ immigration task force outlines opposition to Trump policy

A group of 63 police chiefs and sheriffs from around the country, who formed a Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force in 2015, has issued a letter saying they do not want their officers acting as federal immigration officers and they do not want to lose federal funding if their cities and counties are defined as immigrant “sanctuaries.”  The letter, first reported by the Guardian, is not addressed to the president but rather to members of the Senate, and is signed by the chiefs of Orlando, Houston, Boston, Seattle, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles County as well as smaller jurisdictions such as Marshalltown, Iowa, and Garden City, Kan. “We believe,” the letter states, “that we can best serve our communities by leaving the enforcement of immigration laws to the federal government. Threatening the removal of valuable grant funding from jurisdictions that choose not to spend limited resources enforcing federal immigration law is extremely problematic. Removing these funds … would not fix any part of our broken immigration system.”   The letter also pointed out that “there is no set definition of what comprises a ‘sanctuary jurisdiction’ and the term is often defined much too broadly.” The letter emerged after members of the chiefs’ immigration task force met with members of Congress in early February, according to J. Thomas Manger, chief of the Montgomery County, Md., police and head of the Major Cities Chiefs. “We just wanted to make our position clear,” Manger said Wednesday. “We do believe we should be working with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and identifying folks in our community who are dangerous.” Law enforcement executives met with members of Congress, and Manger met with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). “I was encouraged by the conversation we had with him,” Manger said. “I think he’s fairly supportive of what we were talking about.” Chiefs and sheriffs with larger immigrant populations “have to be concerned about the fear and the panic in the immigrant community,” because of their unwillingness to cooperate with authorities, which in turn makes them more vulnerable as crime targets, Manger said. The letter says that compelling state and local law enforcement “to carry out new and sometimes problematic tasks undermines the delicate federal balance and will harm locally-based community-oriented policing.” Manger said, “I believe we can help influence this to go in a direction that’s better than the extremists who say, ‘Deport them all.’ ” Here is the letter from the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force:

New York officials blast Sessions for calling city ‘soft on crime’

New York’s mayor and police commissioner ripped Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday for a Justice Department statement declaring that their city was soft on crime and plagued by gang murders. The war of words arose from an ongoing dispute between the Trump administration and many large U.S. cities over immigration policy, but Friday’s fireworks were remarkable in that the leader of the largest police force in the country publicly denounced the attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement official. The Justice Department — in threatening to withhold millions of dollars in grant money from the New York Police Department if the city doesn’t change its policy and turn over suspected illegal immigrants in custody to immigration agents — said in a news release that New York “continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s ‘soft on crime’ stance.” “Many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime,” the news release said. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) called that statement “outrageous,” given the city’s record-low crime figures, which are part of a decades-long trend in falling crime that began in the early 1990s. “Attorney General Sessions is supposed to be the leading law enforcement official in America,” he said. “Why would he insult the men and women who do this work every day, put their lives on the line in order to achieve so much? I would say to President Trump, and to Attorney General Sessions, if you believe this statement is accurate, come here to New York City, look our police officers in the eye and tell them that you believe they are soft on crime. See how that feels. See what the people of New York City will say about that.” New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill called the Justice Department’s criticism “incredibly insulting” and said there are piles of data to prove that the city is anything but soft on crime. “When I read that statement by DOJ this afternoon, my blood began to boil,” O’Neill said. The Justice Department is threatening to withhold grant money from New York if it doesn’t change its policy toward illegal immigrants. The grants are called Byrne grants, named after an NYPD officer, Eddie Byrne, who was killed by drug dealers in 1988 as he guarded a witness’s house. The year of Byrne’s murder, there were nearly 2,000 homicides in New York. Last year, there were 335. At a news conference late in the day, Sessions deviated from prepared remarks to take another dig at the city. Originally slated to say, “California is no stranger to transnational gangs,” he added, “and neither is New York.” Later, though, he heaped praise on the city for policies that had reduced crime and said officials merely had to be careful in “altering those highly successful policies.” “I would say this about New York. New York has done some great things in criminal justice, they are following policies that have proven to reduce crime in America,” Sessions said. “We have a disagreement with the mayor over sanctuary city policies. I strongly disagree with his ideas on that.” Around the same time, the Justice Department issued a second statement saying it was making a distinction between New York City’s policies and the work of the NYPD. “Unfortunately, the Mayor’s policies are hamstringing the brave NYPD officers that protect the city, and only serve to endanger the lives of the hard working men and women of the NYPD who care more about keeping their city and country safe than they do about city hall politics,” the statement said. New York, of course, was not the only place to find itself at odds with Sessions.

Sessions says 42 percent of federal cases involve non-Americans, but half of arrests are immigration crimes

In a speech Friday morning at the federal courthouse in Central Islip, N.Y., Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the following comment: “The Bureau of Justice Statistics just released a report showing that 42 percent of defendants charged in U.S. district court were non-U.S. citizens.”  But the report Sessions referenced had another interesting statistic: Almost half of all arrests made by all federal agencies across the U.S. in 2014 were for immigration violations, largely along the border with Mexico. And of those who wound up charged in federal district court with criminal immigration violations, 92 percent were non-citizens, the Justice Department told us Monday. That will drive up the “non-citizen charges” number. Further, of the 42 percent of non-citizens charged in district court, 72 percent were charged with an immigration offense, 17 percent with a drug crime and six percent with a property crime. One percent of the non-citizens prosecuted in district court were charged with a violent crime, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Now, most violent crime is prosecuted by the states, not the feds, so it’s not surprising that violent crime arrests are low at the federal level. For all defendants, violent crime only accounts for two percent of federal arrests. [Sex offenses, counted separately, also make up only two percent of federal arrests.] But Sessions’s comments raised again the question about a link between immigration and crime. This is a subject criminologists have tackled with gusto recently. One new meta-study, by Charis E. Kubrin of the University of California at Irvine and Graham C. Ousey of the College of William & Mary, analyzed 51 studies done between 1994 and 2014 on the relationship between immigration and crime and found that, if anything, immigration reduces crime. “Where you have immigrants, you have less violent crime. Period,” Kubrin said Monday. The meta-study, to be published in the Annual Review of Criminology, even poses the question, “What role might immigration have played in America’s crime drop?” since crime levels have plummeted in the U.S. in the last two decades, and studies of that drop have focused mainly on policing, incarceration, guns and economics. “You would be hard-pressed,” Kubrin said, “to find a criminologist to tell you that immigration and crime are related.” In looking at studies of the issue, “in this one area, it’s unbelievable the consistency with which this occurs.” The review of 51 scientific studies found that in reports with statistically significant size estimates, “the majority of the statistically significant results are negative, suggesting that greater immigration is associated with lower crime rates. In fact, our review indicates that significant negative effects [i.e. crime decreasing] are 2.5 times as common as significant positive effects. Taken alone, these descriptive results suggest a conclusion that rings familiar to many scholars — that immigration has a null or negative effect on crime rates.” Kubrin was surprised to find that the Justice Department maintained statistics on race and country of national origin for federal defendants, which is typically not kept by local and state law enforcement agencies. The report cited by Sessions, “Federal Justice Statistics 2013-2014,” by Justice statistician Mark Motivans, shows that 58.7 percent of people charged in U.S. district court in 2014 were from the U.S., 31.5 percent were from Mexico, five percent from Central America, and 0.2 percent from Canada. The racial breakdown of defendants in 2014 was 22.1 percent white, 19.4 percent black and 54.6 percent Hispanic. Motivans said the information came from interviews done by federal pretrial service officers to help determine whether a defendant should be released before trial. Digging deeper, of the 165,295 arrests made by all federal agents in 2014, slightly more than 100,000 were made in the five federal districts along the U.S.-Mexico border, or about 61 percent. When the 81,881 immigration arrests in 2014 nationwide were analyzed, 93 percent were made in the same five border districts — southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, western Texas and southern Texas. The report notes that defendants with Mexican citizenship decreased from more than 25,000 in 2012 to about 20,000 in 2014, as did the number of defendants from Central America and South America. But most immigration cases don’t go to the federal district court—which are the courts Sessions was discussing. And the immigration cases that do make it to federal court don’t account for most of the district judges’ caseload. Only 30 percent of the more than 81,000 defendants arrested for immigration violations in 2014 were prosecuted in district courts.  The rest were handled as misdemeanors before federal magistrates, and mostly by magistrates concentrated in the five federal districts along the U.S-Mexico border. Magistrates at the southern border handled 65 percent of all immigration cases, with the other six percent fielded across the country. Federal district judges saw more drug cases –which were 28.6 percent of all district court cases- than immigration cases (27 percent).  Property crimes cases were at 13.9 percent in that time frame and weapons crimes were at 7.9 percent. Kubrin noted that discussing federal court numbers in trying to analyze violent crime, or associate it with a certain group, is fruitless. “It makes up such a small percentage of offending in the U.S.,” she said. “It’s studying where the action isn’t.” Here is the report Sessions cited:

Charles Lane: Can a permissive immigration law be legal if a punitive law wasn’t?

In 2010, Arizona cracked down on illegal immigrants. “We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act,” Gov. Jan Brewer (R) said. “But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created a dangerous and unacceptable situation.” Last year, the Supreme Court struck down most of Arizona’s immigration legislation, siding with the Obama administration and immigrant rights activists who argued that Arizona’s law intruded on the federal government’s well-established authority over immigration. “Arizona may have understandable frustrations with the problems caused by illegal immigration,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote, “but the State may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.” So what are we to make of the California laws, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Oct. 5, that seek to protect the state’s estimated 2.6 million undocumented residents? Brown sounds as frustrated with Congress as Brewer did: “While Washington waffles on immigration, California’s forging ahead,” he said this month. “I’m not waiting.” But if it’s unconstitutional for Arizona to enact its own restrictive policy, in tension with federal law, is it constitutional for California to let undocumented immigrants practice law in the state or to penalize employers that report — or “threaten” to report — undocumented employees in retaliation for asserting their rights? Note that federal law — though spottily enforced — imposes penalties on employers that knowingly hire undocumented workers. California’s new law limits cooperation with the federal Secure Communities program, under which the fingerprints of arrestees that local police routinely send to the FBI also get routed to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). When ICE registers a “hit” against its database, it tells the state or local jail to hold the individual for up to 48 hours so that federal officials can pursue deportation if appropriate. Between March 2008 and September 2011, Secure Communities led to more than 142,000 deportations. The Obama administration points to statistics showing that the majority of these were serious criminals or national security threats. But immigrant rights groups argue that the program also swept up many people guilty of only petty misdemeanors or immigration violations. California’s new law forbids police to detain anyone under Secure Communities unless the individual has been convicted of or formally charged with certain serious crimes such as murder or bribery — but not, say, misdemeanor drunk driving. It’s the mirror image of a provision of Arizona’s immigration law that essentially required Arizona police officers to check with ICE about everyone they arrested. The Obama administration opposed that as unwanted and unnecessary meddling in federal decision making — but it was the only aspect of Arizona’s crackdown that the Supreme Court upheld. So: If the Supreme Court says that one state (Arizona) may pester federal immigration authorities with more information about detainees than they asked for, can another state (California) deny the feds information they might seek? It probably makes little difference in practice. Washington doesn’t have to investigate or deport anyone, no matter how much Arizona insists; and, at Brown’s insistence, California’s law still allows police to detain the most violent and dangerous people at the top of ICE’s priority list. In that sense, California’s law may be more symbol than substance. Yet the issue it raises — the precise boundaries of federal and state discretion over the noncitizens in our midst — is not going away. In rebelling against Secure Communities, California’s ruling liberal Democrats have availed themselves of a states’ rights concept similar to the one invoked by sheriffs from rural Montana and Arizona who resisted federal gun control laws during the Clinton administration. In that case, _Printz v. U.S._ , the sheriffs balked at a federal law requiring them to help carry out background checks of gun purchasers. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court sided with the sheriffs, with Justice Antonin Scalia writing that Congress cannot “commandeer” state and local officials to carry out federal programs. In declaring ICE “holds” purely voluntary in California even before the new law passed, California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris invoked Scalia’s _Printz_ opinion as well as the tea party’s favorite constitutional amendment, the Tenth. States’ rights makes strange bedfellows, it would appear. We shall see if anyone challenges California’s new laws in federal court and what position the Obama administration takes — though, because they are permissive by nature, it’s not clear how the California laws could produce a victim with the requisite legal standing. Meanwhile, ponder Americans’ deep divisions over who can and cannot stay in this country and how far we are from the ideal articulated by Justice Kennedy. These decisions, he wrote, “must be made with one voice.” _Read more fromCharles Lane’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook._ **Read more about this issue:** Elizabeth Cohen: Should illegal immigrants should become citizens? Michael Gerson: The GOP divide on immigration Charles E. Schumer and Lindsey O. Graham: The right way to mend immigration The Post’s View: Immigration reform hits a GOP hurdle E.J. Dionne: Republicans need to choose sides on immigration

What exactly are ‘sanctuary cities’ in immigration policy?

There has been a lot of focus on “sanctuary cities” in the presidential campaign, especially in relation to illegal immigration and crime. Opponents of illegal immigration, including Donald Trump, have called for an end to sanctuary policies, arguing that they protect undocumented immigrants from criminal prosecution. When asked about sanctuary cities in a recent interview, Kaine answered that Trump is going after “phantom sanctuary cities” and that police chiefs are making decisions to make their communities safer. Host Chris Cuomo asked Kaine what he meant by “phantom,” and Kaine explained his experience as a mayor and governor in Virginia in deciding not to participate in a federal immigration enforcement program. A campaign spokeswoman clarified that the nominee was referring to the fact that local governments are implementing “overarching policies and practices that will make their communities safer” — rather than making policies to shield violent criminals, as opponents of such policies contend. So we decided to explore this issue further and clear up the facts about sanctuary cities. There’s no official definition of “sanctuary,” but it generally refers to rules restricting state and local governments from alerting federal authorities about people who may be in the country illegally.  Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility. State and local law enforcement officials can decide to what extent they want to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement.   ICE can issue an “immigration detainer,” a request to be notified when a “criminal alien” (a noncitizen convicted of a crime) is being released from a state or local law enforcement agency. This is so ICE can take custody of such people when they’re released and figure out whether they’re subject to deportation. But some local or state law enforcement agencies decide not to tell ICE when a “criminal alien” is released, for several reasons. Some agencies say it leads to mistrust between the community and law enforcement, because victims and potential witnesses might not come forward to report crimes if they are afraid of being reported to federal authorities for their immigration status.   Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, has criticized San Francisco for releasing the suspect in Steinle’s killing, but she supports sanctuary cities and thinks such policies can help further public safety.   Local and state governments can decide not to participate in federal immigration enforcement — which ultimately is a federal responsibility. Many local jurisdictions do cooperate, with the idea that they’re multiplying forces to find removable noncitizens. Kaine rebuts arguments by opponents of sanctuary cities, like Trump, as “phantom” claims that portray such policies as designed to protect undocumented immigrants who commit crimes. This claim by Kaine highlights the core difference in the views of those who support and oppose sanctuary policies. Kaine and Clinton believe that local law enforcement should continue to decide whether to cooperate with federal authorities on enforcing immigration, because they are doing what is best for their communities. Law enforcement agencies that support sanctuary policies say they ensure that victims and witnesses of crime feel safe enough to report the crime to police, without the fear of possible deportation. We will not rate this claim, as “phantom” is more based on Kaine’s opinion and therefore not fact-checkable.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s claim that ‘criminals take notice’ of cities with sanctuary policies

In a speech about “sanctuary cities,” Sessions cited research from University of California at Riverside that does not actually support his point. There is little research looking at the impact of sanctuary policies on crime. It’s a difficult correlation to study; many factors affect crime, and state and local law enforcement do not always track inmate citizenship status.  What is Sessions talking about?  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can issue an “immigration detainer,” or a request to be notified when a noncitizen convicted of a crime is being released at state or local levels. ICE can then take custody of the offenders and figure out if they should be deported. But some agencies decide not to alert ICE. Some fear that victims and potential witnesses may not come forward to report crimes if they are afraid of being reported to federal authorities for their immigration status. Others cite dwindling local and state law enforcement resources. There are somewhere between 165 and 608 local and state government with “sanctuary” policies. But the jurisdictions differ in their approach. Some don’t cooperate at all, while others only do so in civil investigations, for felony convictions or for offenders otherwise deemed to be a public safety threat.  According to the Justice Department, Sessions is citing this graphic in the study that shows that violent crime rates in cities with sanctuary policies are higher than violent crime rates in cities without sanctuary policies: Sessions is presenting the data accurately, and making a “different conclusion based on the data as well as his experience and discussions with law enforcement officials throughout the country,” according to Justice Department. But the researchers used this graphic to show that there is no correlation between violent crime and sanctuary policies. Here’s what they said in their research about this graphic: In October 2016, the authors summarized their research in Monkey Cage, a blog hosted by Washingtonpost.com. The authors acknowledged in that column that violent crime is slightly higher in sanctuary cities than non-sanctuary cities, but again, they warned about the statistic significance: “However, judging by the error bands — which capture the uncertainty underlying these estimates — the relationship is not statistically significant before or after a sanctuary policy is passed. We find similar results for property crime and rape.” They added: “That is, a sanctuary policy itself has no statistically meaningful effect on crime.” Researchers ran several other tests to find whether there was connection. One graph shows that there is no clear generalizable pattern about violent crime and whether the city has sanctuary policies or not.  But the Justice Department said the authors are arguing about the statistical significance of the data, but that Sessions is citing what the data show, not the statistical significance. “The Attorney General accurately cited data from a study that clearly showed that the violent crime rate was higher in sanctuary cities versus non-sanctuary cities. That is a fact and assertions to the contrary ignore that data,” said Ian Prior, Justice Department spokesman. Sessions is being rather misleading by citing data from a study that doesn’t support his point. Sessions says that “criminals take notice” when cities make it known that they have “sanctuary” policies that restrict local cooperation with federal authorities about people who may be in the country illegally. He cites data from a study by the University of California Riverside, to say that “cities with these policies have more violent crime on average than those that don’t.” But he omits the other side of the research, which is that this data point is not statistically significant. The study by the researchers did not find that sanctuary policies had any effect on crime — a point that they have emphasized in the past and which Sessions appears to have willfully ignored for political purposes. We award Sessions Three Pinocchios for twisting the data out of context to make the opposite point that the researchers made.        Share the Facts 2017-07-17 10:55:30 UTC

D.C. will go ‘beyond sanctuary,’ create legal defense fund for illegal immigrants

The nation’s capital is joining several other heavily Democratic cities in pledging to spend tax dollars to defend illegal immigrants against efforts by the incoming Trump administration to deport them. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Monday she plans to award grants to defense lawyers and nonprofit organizations to represent any of the District’s estimated 25,000 illegal immigrants who are faced with deportation. The $500,000 fund will also help illegal immigrants in the District apply for asylum and will provide representation for those residing in the city legally with green cards to obtain permanent U.S. citizenship. In a statement, Bowser said the District is “doubling down” on its status as a sanctuary city, where D.C. police have already been instructed to not cooperate with federal authorities working to deport residents. “We must ensure that all District residents can take advantage of their federal and constitutional rights,” Bowser said. “If immigration enforcement changes and problems arise, DC’s immigrant population will have our support and the support of DC’s legal community.” Bowser’s announcement puts the District alongside Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and the state of New York, where Democratic mayors, governors and legislatures have in recent weeks approved or pledged to create similar public-private defense funds for illegal immigrants. It also comes almost two months after Bowser was confronted in a library by angry demonstrators who said the mayor had not done enough to forcefully denounce President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Bowser was caught by surprise by the revolt, insisting that “your mayor has stood up . . . asserted firmly that we are a sanctuary city.” She left the scene with the crowd chanting “not enough.” Betsy Cavendish, the mayor’s general counsel, said it would take D.C. ‘beyond sanctuary’ city status, using taxpayer funds to actively oppose a crackdown on illegal immigrants. Bowser will launch the initiative by shifting funds from the Office on Latino Affairs to a new Immigrant Justice Legal Services Grant Program. City officials said that the fund would also accept donations from individual residents or groups. Nonprofits, private organizations and law firms in Washington will be eligible to win the grant money. Groups can begin applying Jan. 23, the first Monday that Trump will be in the White House. Although the funds are coming through the Latino affairs office, groups that serve immigrants from any region are eligible for grants, aides to the mayor said. The aides also said they envision nonprofit immigrant groups pairing with law firms to win grants, harnessing pro bono work of big firms and creating a network of new legal services for illegal immigrants. Bowser spokesman Kevin Harris played down any possible confrontation with the incoming Trump administration, saying in a statement that the mayor’s plan is not a reaction to Trump but that it “does underscore the Mayor’s belief that one election doesn’t change our values and who we are as a city.” “The Mayor has heard from many residents who are fearful and uncertain about what the future holds,” he said. “We are going to stand with immigrant communities.” But Bowser’s grant program could lay the groundwork for a confrontation with the Trump administration over one of President Obama’s most controversial immigration policies — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The program allowed illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as minors to apply for renewable, two-year deportation deferments to remain in the United States to study or work. The District wants to be poised to react quickly if Trump seeks to use the personal information of those who registered under the program to deport them or their families, aides to Bowser said. According to internal estimates used by the mayor’s office, 400 to 500 illegal immigrants in the city are enrolled in the DACA program. The office also estimates about 25,000 people are residing in the District illegally.

Texas governor poised to sign nation’s harshest anti-sanctuary bill

The governor of Texas is poised to sign a sweeping bill that would outlaw sanctuary jurisdictions in the state and impose costly fines and even jail time on officials who refuse to cooperate with U.S. immigration agents. It makes clear that local law enforcement officers may ask people they detain about their immigration status, a line of questioning that critics say should be reserved for federal immigration agents. “I’m getting my signing pen warmed up,” Gov. Greg Abbott (R) tweeted this week. His state is home to the second-largest number of undocumented immigrants in the nation, some 1.6 million people. The legislation would be the country’s most significant crackdown so far on sanctuary cities, which in general refuse to hold immigrants who have been arrested for local crimes past their release date so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement can take them into federal custody and try to deport them. In March, Mississippi’s governor signed a law that bars sanctuary jurisdictions, while Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) vetoed a similar measure. On Thursday, Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) warned that state and local law enforcement officers are “potentially exposed to liability” if they continue to jail a person whom a judge has ordered released. Last week, a federal judge in California temporarily halted President Trump’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities nationwide. State Sen. Charles Perry (R) has said he sponsored the Texas bill to prevent local officials from letting serious criminals out of jail before immigration agents can take them into federal custody. The measure would fine local governments up to $25,500 a day for policies that block immigration enforcement. Elected or appointed officials who refuse to cooperate with immigration agents could lose their jobs. Sheriffs and other police officers would face misdemeanor charges, punishable by up to a year in jail and fines, if they ignore requests to detain immigrants. The bill would take effect Sept. 1. Church leaders, police chiefs and teachers opposed the bill and vowed Thursday to fight it in court, saying it would make cities and towns unsafe because undocumented immigrants would be more unwilling to report crimes, for fear of being questioned about their own residency status. Houston has reported a significant drop in Latinos reporting rape and other violent crime this year, after fear spread among immigrant communities following Trump’s inauguration. Advocates predicted that Texas could be targeted with boycotts and lawsuits, just as North Carolina was after passing its controversial bathroom bill. “The intention is there to terrorize and put more fear in the community here in Texas,” said Eduardo Canales, director of the South Texas Human Rights Center. “It’s a horrible bill.” Frank Sharry, executive director of the America’s Voice Education Fund, said the bill “attacks the civil rights of every Texan who might look or sound like they are from somewhere else, even if their families have lived in the Lone Star State for generations.” Texas Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas) said he hoped the ACLU or the Mexican American Legislative Caucus would file a lawsuit against the bill once it is signed. He called it “hateful and discriminatory” and said such acts are contributing to a rise in white nationalist propaganda on college campuses. “It’s very sad to see in the state of Texas today,” he said. Texas shares the longest U.S. border with Mexico and had long enjoyed friendlier relations with its southern neighbor than some other nearby states. It resisted passing laws opposing bilingual education or illegal immigration even as such statutes materialized in Arizona, Massachusetts and California. But since Trump’s election, advocates sa **y,** the climate has shifted. Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino, predicted that the harsh sanctuary bill will ultimately backfire, as it did in California, where anti-immigrant ballot measures passed in the 1990s led to a “political awakening” for Latinos. Now California is a leading protector of undocumented immigrants, granting them driver’s licenses and in-state tuition at public colleges. The state Senate recently passed a bill that would transform the state into a sanctuary jurisdiction. After the Texas bill passed the Senate in February, Abbott said he would “not tolerate sanctuary-city policies that put the citizens of Texas at risk.” “Elected officials do not get to pick and choose which laws they will obey,” the governor said. Matthew Dowling, chief of staff for Perry, the bill’s sponsor, said in an email Thursday that law enforcement agents will question the immigration status only of people they have detained for another reason. ****The bill bans racial profiling and exempts schools from cooperating with federal agents, and it would protect immigrants who are crime victims or witnesses, he said. Dowling also pointed out that the fines vary, from $1,000 to $1,500 a day for a first offense and $25,000 to $25,500 for each subsequent violation. “If the Texas Legislature were serious about removing undocumented persons, there are better ways to address this issue than forcing law enforcement to become immigration agents,” the officials said in an opinion piece that was published in The Dallas Morning News. “The Legislature could easily start by addressing the businesses that hire undocumented workers, which is why the majority of the honest, hard-working persons immigrate to this country with or without documentation. “Addressing the primary reason undocumented persons enter this state would free law enforcement to address those people who are committing crimes.”

Three steps for progressive resistance and rebuilding as Trump era launches

As the new year begins, any honest progressive knows the political outlook is bleak. But if we’re going to limit the damage that President-elect Donald Trump inflicts on the country, then despair is not an option. The real question, as Democracy Alliance President Gara LaMarche recently said, “is how you fight intelligently and strategically when every house is burning down.” Indeed, with Trump and Republicans in Congress aggressively pushing a right-wing agenda, progressives will need to invest their resources and attention where they can do the most good — both now and over the next four years. With that in mind, here are three steps to take to resist and rebuild as the Trump administration gets underway. First, while strong national leadership is certainly important, progressives must recognize that the most significant resistance to Trump won’t take place in Washington. It’s going to happen in the streets led by grass-roots activists, and in communities, city halls and statehouses nationwide. There is real potential for cities and states to act as a bulwark against Trump’s agenda. On immigration, for example, a coalition of mayors from across the country — including New York and Los Angeles but also cities throughout the Rust Belt and the South — are already coordinating to fight Trump’s deportation plans. Local Progress, a national network of city and county officials, is working to protect civil rights and advance economic and social justice. And while the Trump administration may ravage the environment, cities and states can also continue the fight against global warming; in particular, California has the potential to become a global leader on the issue, and Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has defiantly pledged to move forward with plans to slash carbon emissions in the state regardless of Trump’s policies. Cities and states also give progressives an opportunity to play offense by advancing policies that truly improve people’s lives, while providing a concrete and actionable blueprint for the rest of the country. Take the Fight for $15. Last year, 25 states, cities and counties approved minimum-wage increases that will result in raises for millions of workers nationwide. And despite Trump’s hostility to workers, there are campaigns to increase the minimum wage planned in at least 13 states and other localities over the next two years, representing a real chance to build on that progress. Second, as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman writes, “We need a broad commitment from activists and donors to take back state governments.” Even if Democrats do well in the midterm elections, they are unlikely to regain control of Congress until after the next round of redistricting, in 2020. Yet there will be 87 state legislative chambers and 36 gubernatorial seats up for grabs in 2018. Progressives would be wise to adopt a laserlike focus on winning these races. A strong performance at the state level in 2018 would do more than improve progressives’ ability to combat Trump’s policies. It would also help create a stronger pipeline of leaders who could eventually run for higher office, following in the steps of incoming House members Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) and Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). Crucially, it would also give progressive Democrats more influence over congressional redistricting in 2020, boosting the party’s prospects at the national level. For that reason, it’s noteworthy that President Obama is planning to get involved in state legislative elections and redistricting after he leaves office, though grass-roots efforts will remain paramount. And third, it will be critical for progressive leaders in Washington to amplify local progress to drive a national message. In the absence of a single party leader — especially one whose success depends on compromising with congressional Republicans — there is more room for strong, populist progressive voices to emerge in opposition to Trump. Already, Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (Ore.) are stepping up,and they will be joined in the House by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose members will play a key role in recruiting and running progressive candidates, connecting with grass-roots movements and driving local issues into the national sphere. Working alongside activist groups, progressive Democrats can present a clear alternative vision for the nation. To that end, the race for Democratic National Committee chair presents a significant opportunity to shift the party’s direction. Regardless of who prevails, progressives would be wise to insist on a return to the 50-state strategy that former chairman Howard Dean championed and that all of the current candidates say they support. Ultimately, the party’s fortunes will depend on recruiting a new generation of progressive leaders, especially women and people of color, who can harness the power of social movements and drive it into electoral politics — everywhere in the country, at every level of government. _Read more fromKatrina vanden Heuvel’s archive or follow her on Twitter._ **Read more here:** Katrina vanden Heuvel: How to mount a progressive resistance Katrina vanden Heuvel: Taking it to the states E.J. Dionne Jr.: The good that could come from a Trump presidency Linda Hirshman: To resist a Trump presidency, ask: ‘What would the abolitionists do?’

Why Trump’s plan to deport criminal noncitizens won’t work

_Kari Hong is a professor at Boston College Law School and an immigration lawyer._ President-elect Donald Trump has tried to soften his approach to immigration by saying he will focus on deporting those with criminal records. This strategy may sound sensible, but based on my experience representing noncitizens with criminal convictions, I can report that it won’t work. Instead, such an approach would be inefficient, cumbersome, expensive, unnecessary and, above all, inhumane. First, current law fails to sort dangerous noncitizens from those who are harmless. Criminal records alone are neither an efficient nor an effective way to determine this. One of my clients — a man who had been in the United States on a green card for 40 years and whose wife and children are citizens — was deported for stealing a $2 can of beer. Another green-card holder with a citizen wife and children is fighting a deportation order issued because, two decades ago, he was convicted of petty theft, an infraction that’s less serious than a misdemeanor. And this problem cannot be cured by focusing on those convicted of violent crime. In theory, that sounds right. But in practice, the definition of “violent” confounds federal judges and sweeps up many people whose crimes would not ordinarily be viewed that way. For seven years, until the Supreme Court finally stepped in, numerous noncitizens were deported because courts wrongfully concluded that state convictions for driving under the influence were crimes of violence. And a Virginia court in 2013 upheld an assault and battery conviction as violent even though it was committed by a teenager who spat at a police officer during his arrest. Second, the immigration courts are already overburdened and cannot cope with a large influx of cases. No matter how many noncitizens are rounded up, each one is entitled to a hearing. This is not a mere technicality: Five in 10 of those in immigration proceedings win their cases. Meanwhile, there is an average three-year wait before a hearing is completed. Any promise to start rounding up criminal aliens or undocumented people, without money, without judges and without courthouses, is illusory. The current backlog is about 500,000 cases; just imagine what would happen if that number increased by just 1 million, let alone 3 million. Third, as a fiscal matter, it is expensive to lock people up while they wait for these immigration hearings. Currently, more than 30,000 people are detained daily at an annual cost of more than $2 billion — an expense that is difficult to justify given that half of them may be entitled to remain. Fourth, stepping up deportation in the way Trump envisions is unnecessary. The southern border is the most secure it has ever been. Despite the rhetoric that hordes of immigrants are sneaking across the border from Mexico with nefarious plans to bring crime, violence and drugs into the United States, the fact is that noncitizens commit fewer crimes than citizens. In addition, the deportation process works, as evidenced by the Obama administration having deported more than 2.5 million people over eight years — more than the combined presidential administrations of the 20th century. Fifth, there are not 3 million undocumented people with criminal convictions; the Migration Policy Institute places the number at 820,000. The call to deport criminal aliens portends a crackdown on noncitizens with green cards that allow them to live and work here legally, but who have run afoul of the law for reasons ranging from serious felonies to minor crimes, including drug possession and misdemeanors. Such people often have served in our military, have children and spouses who are citizens, have lengthy employment histories, pay taxes and are good neighbors. We — as Americans — have a stake in keeping those immigrants here. Kicking them out and disrupting their families over minor offenses would be harsh and absurd. If Trump truly wants to focus on drug dealers, terrorists, murderers and rapists, he should call on Congress to restore immigration law’s focus on those whom prosecutors and criminal judges determined were dangerous in the first place — people who were sentenced to five years or more in prison. That’s what the law used to be, before it was changed in 1996 to cover many more crimes. Instead of penalizing immigrants for minor crimes, immigration law needs to separate contributing immigrants from their non-contributing peers. Those who pay taxes, have children born in the United States, serve in the military, work in jobs American citizens will not take or help those around them need a path to legalization. Those who cause more harm than good should be deported. Restoring proportionality and common sense to immigration law would certainly help make America great again. **Read more here:** The Post’s View: Donald Trump’s immigration hypocrisy Marc A. Thiessen: Trump has always had a soft heart for illegal immigrants Charles Krauthammer: The only immigration solution

Sessions chooses 12 cities to receive more manpower to fight crime

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new plan Tuesday in which 12 cities will receive more federal manpower to combat violence in their communities. “Turning back the recent troubling increase of violence crime in our country is a top priority of the Department of Justice and the Trump administration as we work to fulfill the president’s promise to make America safe again,” Sessions said in Bethesda, Md., at the beginning of the Justice Department’s two-day summit on crime reduction. The first round of cities chosen for the new initiative, the National Public Safety Partnership, are Baton Rouge; Birmingham, Ala.; Buffalo; Cincinnati; Houston; Indianapolis; Jackson, Tenn.; Kansas City, Mo.; Lansing, Mich.; Memphis; Springfield, Ill.; and Toledo. “Our nation’s violent-crime rate is rising,” Sessions said. “In many of our urban areas, this increase is staggering.” Baltimore and Chicago, two large cities where violent crime is increasing, were notably not on the list. Justice Department spokesman Ian Prior said the department is anticipating that more cities will be added later in the year. He said the department is considering reallocating prosecutors to Chicago and has already sent more than 20 additional agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The 12 chosen cities will not receive more money from the Justice Department. But the department will send agency employees and experts to work with them to develop strategies and tactics to best fight violent crime, Sessions said. Crime in the United States is near historic lows, but according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, preliminary figures indicate that there was an overall increase of 5.3 percent in the number of violent crimes nationally for the first six months of 2016, compared with the same period in 2015. Meanwhile, many major cities have seen increases in homicides. The Brennan Center, a New York-based law and policy institute, released a report last year that found that Chicago accounted for a large share in the increase in the nation’s homicide rate. Sessions was joined by the heads of the FBI, ATF and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who praised law enforcement officials in the audience for the risks they take to protect the public. “The attorney general and I understand that every time you pull a vehicle over, execute a search warrant or step out in your uniform, you are faced with a potentially fatal situation,” Rosenstein said. “It gives us the utmost respect for the work you do.” Tuesday’s event was the first time the Justice Department’s top two officials have appeared publicly since their high-profile hearings on Capitol Hill last week, in which they faced tough questioning on the Russia investigation. On Tuesday, Sessions and Rosenstein received standing ovations from state and local law enforcement officials from across the country who came for two days of workshops and said they were pleased with the new initiative. “One thing the Department of Justice does very well is to identify what works in law enforcement and share those best practices with local law enforcement in especially hard-hit cities,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum. “Whether it is using the latest in gun tracking or DNA analysis, this is a positive step that will be welcomed by local law enforcement.”

George W. Bush calls for ‘benevolent’ immigration debate

Former president George W. Bush is wading into the debate over immigration reform, using a speech in Dallas to praise immigrants and ask that the issue be approached with a "benevolent spirit." Bush, who tried and failed to pass comprehensive reform as president, opened a day-long conference on immigration and economic growth organized by the George W. Bush Institute, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Economists, CEOs and policy experts are speaking at the invitation-only event. "Immigrants come with new skills and new ideas. They fill a critical gap in our labor market. They work hard for a chance for a better life," Bush said. "Not only do immigrants help build our economy, they invigorate our soul. America can be a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time." The former president did not offer any specific policy initiatives. Instead, he asked politicians dealing with the issue "to do so with a benevolent spirit and keep in mind the contribution of immigrants." Bush's reform efforts were stymied by Republicans in Congress. He later told the Washington Times that if he could do one thing over, he would push immigration reform in the wake of the 2004 election instead of focusing on a failed Social Security overhaul. Now, in the wake of a bruising election, Republicans increasingly agree that the party's hard line on immigration is politically untenable. Three influential Republican senators recently introduced legislation that would grant legal residency to young people brought illegally to the United States, if they seek higher education or enlist in the military. And pro- immigration conservative activists have descended on D.C. this week to pressure key Republicans to support reform.

Trump White House vows it won’t coddle ‘the rioter, the looter, or the violent disrupter’

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump cast himself as a law-and-order candidate who would always have the backs of local police, though he wouldn’t meddle in their affairs. On Friday, the White House website revealed that promise would be a pillar of his administration.  “It is the first duty of government to keep the innocent safe, and President Donald Trump will fight for the safety of every American, and especially those Americans who have not known safe neighborhoods for a very long time,” the administration said. Trump has long taken a bleak view on crime in America, so his policy position on law enforcement should come as no real surprise. He used the phrase “American carnage” in his inaugural address.  Some cities in recent years, including Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and Charlotte, have seen protests and violence erupt after incidents of black men being killed at the hands of police. The Justice Department under President Barack Obama sent mediators to those cities to try to keep the peace. The Obama administration also aggressively investigated the police with systemic reviews of entire departments to address the root cause of conflict between law enforcement and residents. In the administration’s waning days, the Justice Department announced police reform agreements in Baltimore and Chicago. Based on the Trump administration’s policy statement, that seems likely to change. The statement noted rioters, looters and disrupters, but it made no mention of people’s First Amendment rights to free speech. The only amendment it mentioned was the second, the right to bear arms. “Supporting law enforcement means supporting our citizens’ ability to protect themselves,” the administration said. “We will uphold Americans’ Second Amendment rights at every level of our judicial system.” At his confirmation hearing, U.S. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s pick to be the attorney general, notably declined to say that he would leave unchanged the legal agreements requiring changes at police departments like those in Baltimore and Chicago. But he did promise to enforce the agreements until they were modified.

Senate Democrats block ‘sanctuary cities’ bill

Senate Democrats blocked legislation Tuesday that would crack down on local governments that refuse to fully cooperate with federal immigration authorities in order to protect illegal immigrants from deportation. The bill targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” failed in a 54 to 45 procedural vote. Sixty votes were necessary to advance the bill, which would block such jurisdictions from collecting some federal grants and would toughen criminal sentences for illegal immigrants who are convicted of a serious crime after being repeatedly deported. The House approved a similar bill in July, weeks after an illegal immigrant allegedly shot and killed 32-year-old Kate Steinle on a San Francisco pier, touching off a national firestorm about the immigration policies of that city and others like it who argue that threats of deportation make it harder to police immigrant communities. [ _House votes to strip federal funding from ‘sanctuary cities’_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Steinle’s death continues to reverberate on Capitol Hill. “The city of San Francisco is proudly a sanctuary city. They say to illegal immigrants across the country and across the world, ‘Come to San Francisco. We will protect you from federal immigration laws,'” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “These policies are inexcusable.” _[Sign up for The Daily 202, The Washington Post’s new political tipsheet]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Democrats denounced the legislation as a pander to the Republican base that does nothing to solve the nation’s larger immigration problems. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called it the “Donald Trump Act” in a reference to the GOP presidential front-runner, who has called for a crackdown on illegal immigration. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) on Tuesday said the bill is part of a “stubborn, relentless and shameful assault against immigrants.” “We’ve hit a new low with the extraordinarily hateful rhetoric that diminishes immigrants’ contributions to American history and particularly demonizes the Latino community by labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals,” Menendez said. The Senate bill was authored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who is on the ballot for governor Saturday in Louisiana and is likely to face a runoff election later this fall against a Democrat. The bill has been stuck in committee due to a Republican divide over provisions that would toughen criminal sentences, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) decided to bring the bill to the Senate floor in a move widely interpreted as a bid to help Vitter’s campaign. [ _The Daily 202: Sanctuary cities show vote is pre-election gift from Mitch McConnell to David Vitter_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Two Democrats — Joe Donnelly (Ind.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) — voted to advance the bill; one Republican, Mark Kirk (Ill.), was opposed. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was campaigning for president and did not vote Tuesday. Tuesday’s vote might not mean the end for the legislation in the current Congress — especially with another year’s worth of presidential campaigning ahead. Cruz, who is running for president, on Tuesday called on Republican leaders to attach the provisions of Vitter’s bill to must-pass legislation, adding them to a long list of issues that could play into coming showdowns between congressional Republicans and President Obama. “The next step is not simply to have a vote,” Cruz said. “The next step is to attach this legislation to must-pass legislation and to actually fix this problem.”

DOJ: Some sanctuary jurisdictions ‘boldly asserted’ they won’t comply with U.S. requests

The Department of Justice said Thursday that some sanctuary cities have “boldly asserted” they will not comply with requests from federal immigration agents, setting the stage for a new dispute between localities and the Trump administration. The clash centers on whether local jurisdictions are required to provide information to federal deportation agents about a person’s immigration status, particularly the status of someone who has been arrested in connection with a local crime. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had given 10 state and local governments until June 30 to prove that they share information with federal immigration officials — or risk losing some Department of Justice grant money this year. Federal law bars localities from creating policies that restrict the sharing of immigration-related information. But some **** local officials say the law does not require them to collect details such as a person’s immigration status. Sessions said the governments of all 10 targeted jurisdictions, including California, Connecticut and New York City, maintained that they comply with the law requiring such information-sharing. But he signaled that the Justice Department may disagree. “Some of these jurisdictions have boldly asserted they will not comply with requests from federal immigration authorities, and this would potentially violate” federal law, the statement said. Sessions said the department is reviewing the jurisdictions’ letters. “It is not enough to assert compliance, the jurisdictions must actually be in compliance,” he said in the statement, which cited U.S. Code 8, Section 1373. That law says government officials “may not prohibit, or in any way restrict” employees from sharing information with federal immigration agents about a person’s immigration status. The Justice Department did not make the letters from individual jurisdictions public or identify the allegedly recalcitrant jurisdictions. But Philadelphia shared its 15-page letter with The Washington Post. It said that the city does not violate Section 1373, even though its policy bars officials from collecting immigration information from the people it encounters or arrests, unless such information is relevant to a criminal investigation. “The federal statute does not require cities to inquire about or collect immigration status information, but only prohibits cities from restricting the sharing of that information _if they have it_ ,” City Solicitor Sozi Pedro Tulante wrote. Federal law also does not require local governments to detain immigrants so that U.S. deportation agents can pick them up, but the Trump administration is trying to make those requests mandatory. Hundreds of cities and towns have adopted sanctuary policies that include refusing to continue holding immigrants arrested for local crimes after their release dates so that federal deportation agents can take them into custody. Such jurisdictions say detaining immigrants for that purpose may be unconstitutional and burdens local jails with additional costs. Sanctuary jurisdictions also say cooperating with immigration authorities makes cities less safe, because fewer immigrants are willing to work with local police and report crimes. But the Trump administration says sanctuary policies endanger U.S. communities by returning accused criminals to the streets, where some have allegedly committed heinous crimes. On Jan. 25, Trump issued an executive order threatening to strip federal funding from jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal agents. In April, Sessions wrote to nine jurisdictions he said were identified during the prior administration as potentially uncooperative, demanding proof that they follow existing federal law. ****The jurisdictions are New Orleans; Philadelphia; Chicago; New York City; Clark County, Nev.; Miami-Dade County, Fla.; Milwaukee County, Wis.; Cook County, Ill.; and the state of California. Connecticut, the 10th jurisdiction on the Justice Department’s list, had already told the federal government it complied. In response to a legal challenge filed by San Francisco and Santa Clara County, Calif., a federal judge temporarily halted Trump’s executive order as overly broad. But the judge said the government could restrict funding under the narrower definition the Justice Department says it is using with the 10 jurisdictions. Some U.S. states and cities have joined the Trump administration to push for tougher sanctions against sanctuary cities. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a law in May banning sanctuary cities in the state, triggering another federal lawsuit, which the state defended last month with the support of the Justice Department. The government of Mexico, concerned about its nationals being caught in an expanding immigration dragnet, is siding with the plaintiffs in the case. Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would bar sanctuary cities from receiving many federal grants and make them liable if an undocumented immigrant who is released from jail without notice to immigration agents goes on to commit additional crimes.

President Trump’s latest, greatest, fear-mongering media lie

We know President Trump watches Fox News. We know he watches CNN. We know he watches MSNBC. But does he watch ABC15 in Phoenix? If he does, he’ll surely be happy with a certain strain in the station’s news coverage. Some examples: Get the gist? Yes, there are undocumented immigrants out there involved in illegal or mischievous activity. And the media is chronicling them.   The Steinle case came up in an interview conducted by Fox News’s Kimberly Guilfoyle with Trump last August. After she asked him if he was softening his stance on immigration, Guilfoyle said, “Well, you know, as a prosecutor, I found it very frustrating that we were not observing and enforcing the laws that are on the books and that people would be revolving door coming back in. I was a prosecutor in San Francisco, you know. And then the Kate Steinle case, tragedies like this.”   But forget about the big, hulking national organs of the mainstream media for a second or two. Trump referred to “the media” as being complicit in somehow suppressing the crimes of undocumented immigrants and their victims. And “the media” most certainly includes the small army of local TV stations in the country beaming news to their communities. As a group, these folks have adopted the world’s most nondiscriminatory policy when it comes to covering crime. They cover juvenile crime, young adult crime, middle-aged crime and elderly crime; crime committed by men, crime committed by women; smart crime, dumb crime; crime against innocent, helpless victims, crime against “bad dudes”; white-collar crime, pink-collar crime, blue-collar crime. And yes, crime committed by undocumented immigrants.   Ed Munson, vice president and general manager for KHPO/KTVK in Phoenix, tells the Erik Wemple Blog that his people spent a great deal of time chronicling the activities of former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. “As far as crime is concerned, certainly our colorful sheriff was involved in immigration raids and dealing with crime that was perpetrated by immigrants or illegal immigrants or whatever, so we covered that and continue to cover that extensively,” says Munson. One of the goals of the Arpaio raids, notes Munson, was to round up undocumented immigrants who’d committed crimes — a coverage area in which his newsroom did “countless” stories. Asked how he makes calls about such stories, Munson replied, “Our principle is its relatability to the audience. If it means something to audience, then we’re going to cover it. If it’s not going to affect their lives or uplift them … then we’re not going to cover it. Obviously there are visceral reactions to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. If that is a story — particularly if it results in injury or dying, perhaps it would be moved up the ladder.” And if Munson’s people don’t cover crimes by undocumented immigrants, what’s the reaction from Arizona immigration hard-liners? “I hear from them,” he says. That’s just the point. Local TV news is a cutthroat affair, with one station competing against the next for essentially the same set of stories about the weather, the consumer scam, the NFL squad — and crime, crime, crime. Even if news staffers were inclined to “cover up” the misdeeds of undocumented immigrants, they can’t — if the competition scores ratings with those stories, they lose. In the February sweeps, notes Munson, “there are three of us fighting for the winner in 25-54 [demographic]. We are within one-hundredths of a point of each other and it’s just neck and neck … it’s a horse race for news viewership.”

How enforcing Trump’s immigration actions could hurt public safety

_Jonathan Blanks is a research associate in the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and managing editor ofPoliceMisconduct.net._ Last week, federal immigration officials seized an unauthorized immigrant at an El Paso courthouse where she had been seeking a protective order against an alleged domestic abuser. The judge who oversees the court that issued the protective order expressed dismay that such a seizure took place when the person was seeking protection from violence, and perhaps acting on a tip provided by the alleged abuser himself. President Trump has said his proposed actions to stiffen immigration enforcement are in the interests of public safety, but seizures such as the one in El Paso and the proposed revitalization of the 287(g) program that deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration law make the public less safe and interfere with local policing priorities. Certainly, immigration enforcement falls within the federal government’s prerogative, regardless of one’s opinion on current immigration laws. However, that does not make every single enforcement action wise or justifiable. Moreover, the respect for federalism — the recognition of state and local governments’ priorities over the whims of Washington — has long been a mantra of small-government Republicans. Yet, it is hard to think of a larger and more dangerous federal intrusion into local affairs than undermining local law enforcement. Seizing a person who is seeking refuge from violence subverts the protective function of police officers. If individuals fear as much from law enforcement as they do the criminals living among and victimizing them, they will not come forward to report crimes or cooperate with criminal investigations. Non-cooperation makes police officers’ jobs harder by emboldening and enriching criminals who, consequently, may operate with impunity where people are less willing to help investigators. One Los Angeles Police Dept. detective told the Los Angeles Times, “It is my job to investigate crimes. . . . And if I can’t do that, I can’t get justice for people, because all of a sudden, I’m losing my witnesses or my victims because they’re afraid that talking to me is going to lead to them getting deported.” When he recently approached a group of Latino workers to investigate a crime, they stood up and walked away. Even though Los Angeles has repeatedly asserted its self-appointed status as a “sanctuary city” for immigrants, one of the workers uttered “Trump is coming,” as he left. Montgomery County police chief and head of the Major Cities Chiefs Association J. Thomas Manger lamented the administration’s lack of concern for local law enforcement priorities. He told The Post that local law enforcement is invested in “retaining the trust of the immigrant communities, not having the immigrant communities afraid of contacting the police.” He added, “If we alienate the immigrant community, we’re sunk.” Inherent suspicion of police is dangerous to a community’s well-being, whether that community is comprised of immigrants or the native born. We have seen the deleterious effects of poor relationships between police officers and African American communities. Author and journalist Jill Leovy explains that many black neighborhoods are simultaneously overpoliced for petty crimes and infractions while being underpoliced for violent crimes such as homicide. The lack of trust of police in many African American communities discourages cooperation with police and, consequently, black homicides go unsolved at staggering rates. This dual failure feeds a cycle of mistrust and mutual antagonism between the police and those who need their protection the most. Many law enforcement officials recognize this and are trying to remedy this trust gap. Earlier this week, a group of police chiefs and prosecutors released a five-point blueprint for the new administration to consider as it establishes its law enforcement priorities. Among other “smart on crime” proposals, the law enforcement leaders stressed the importance of fighting violent crime and supporting community policing efforts rather than aggressively pursuing non-violent violations as ways to build community trust. Not only does a lack of trust make policing harder, the release explicitly stated, but also “a mistrustful community puts police officers at risk.” The federal government has the authority to enforce its immigration laws, but it should do so with discretion and in a way that aligns with the public trust. Likewise, local law enforcement should be free to protect the communities they serve in line with each community’s best interests. Taking law enforcement actions against people seeking protection is dangerous and irresponsible. Threatening those most vulnerable to crime is anathema to improving public safety. **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: Is fear the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement goal? Erwin Chemerinsky, Annie Lai and Seth Davis: Trump can’t force ‘sanctuary cities’ to enforce his deportation plans

States’ immigration efforts should promote equity

_Andrew Friedman is executive director of theCenter for Popular Democracy and an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law. Nisha Agarwal is deputy director of the center and a lecturer at Columbia School of Law._ The legal issue before the Supreme Court this week is whether to uphold certain provisions of Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation. S.B. 1070, which passed in 2010, requires local law enforcement to determine people’s immigration status and arrest individuals suspected of being undocumented. It also criminalizes immigrants’ failure to carry “registration” cards or attempts to solicit work. It would be a devastating blow to equality and civil rights in this country if the justices allow Arizona’s law to stand. But whatever the outcome, immigrant and civil rights advocates should act on a lesson we have avoided absorbing for too long: that efforts toward equity and inclusion must be made in states and localities, not merely in Washington. Laws such as Arizona’s are part of an explicit strategy of attrition through enforcement designed to make life in this country close to impossible for immigrants, particularly Latinos. They are akin to Jim Crow-era laws that cultivated a climate of fear in communities of color throughout the South. A question raised by the Arizona case is the extent to which states and cities can regulate immigration. The high court acknowledged “the supremacy of the national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including immigration,” in the 1941 case _Hines v. Davidowitz._ But what precisely this means has become murky over the years. The Supreme Court found in 1976 that not every attempt to regulate immigrants is necessarily a regulation of immigration, and the justices have upheld state laws relating to the employment of undocumented immigrants in California ( _De Canas v. Bica_ ) and Arizona ( _Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Whiting_ ). A panoply of federal policies — including Secure Communities, a program that allows state and local police to check an individual’s fingerprints against Department of Homeland Security databases, and the Criminal Alien Program, through which federal immigration agents are allowed into local jails to screen for undocumented immigrants — has further complicated matters by actively engaging states and localities in federal immigration enforcement. One aspect of federal law, section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, even delegates authority to local law enforcement to make determinations related to immigration. As the federal stronghold on immigration policy and its implementation has weakened, state and local laws, many of which are hostile to those new to this country, have sprouted. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported in December that in the first 11 months of 2011 about 1,600 bills and resolutions related to immigration were introduced in the 50 states and Puerto Rico, and more than 250 of those were enacted. Arizona’s S.B.1070 and copycat bills such as Alabama’s H.B. 56 are just the highest-profile local efforts to “crack down” on immigrants. But there is no reason state and local interventions on immigration must be punitive. Some jurisdictions have begun to shape their laws to create more welcoming communities. Many legislators understand the value of promoting trust and cooperation between government and the governed. Cities such as New York and Chicago and smaller places such as Santa Clara, Calif., have opted to resist increasingly harsh federal immigration enforcement by prohibiting local law enforcement from subsidizing federal deportation policy. After the DREAM Act failed in Congress last May, California and Illinois passed their own legislation, and campaigns have taken hold in other states, including New York, Colorado and Pennsylvania, to promote access to higher education for undocumented young people. The Arizona case underscores the urgency for even more state and local efforts to promote equity and opportunity. Steps should be taken to end racial profiling but also to expand integration of immigrants — improving access to education and health services, for example — and legal protections for low-wage workers. Advocates of immigrant and civil rights should be asking: What, and where, is our anti-Arizona legislation? Yes, there can be dangers when states seek to take over areas of traditional federal authority. Nonetheless, if the Supreme Court approves of states’ rights to legislate in this area, it is essential that supporters of equity and inclusion reclaim this terrain. Defending immigrant communities from racial profiling is not enough. We must also work to promote opportunity wherever possible and to create the welcoming society that that United States has always aspired to become. **Read more on this issue:** The Post’s View: Arizona crossing the line? Dana Milbank: A congressional deal on immigration reform? Dream on. Arthur Hunter: The day-to-day reality of enforcing immigration laws

Donald Trump’s ‘sanctuary city’ nonsense

For one thing, “sanctuary city” is not a legal term, or even a precise term. Some people use “sanctuary city” to refer to municipalities that allow illegal immigrants unfettered access to government services. Others refer to the practice of not reporting individuals arrested for certain crimes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). (Navarrette: “Some ordinances might bar local officers from cooperating with immigration agents at traffic stops. Others might bar federal authorities from ascertaining the immigration status of those booked. Others might prohibit the release to federal officials of any suspect who could be an illegal immigrant.”) But to be clear, no state has the power to prevent an ICE agent from making an arrest, conducting an investigation or stopping a suspected illegal immigrant. This is all about the degree to which ICE can dragoon local officials into doing the feds’ work for them. Trump suggests millions of dangerous illegal immigrants are being harbored by localities. He wants to cut off funding to these states, a draconian solution to an invented calamity. Let’s take a step back here. Conservatives should know that under the Constitution, federal authorities cannot force state officials to do the feds’ work. That has been at the heart of challenges to the Medicaid provisions in Obamacare and other federal statutes that place conditions on money (e.g., expand Medicaid, raise the drunk driving age) going to the states.  So, to be clear, anti-immigrant advocates mislead by saying cities are giving “sanctuary” to illegal immigrants; they are complaining about the degree to which local law enforcement can be pressed into doing ICE’s work, including the use of local jails to house illegal immigrants until they can be processed through the system. There is an irony here that Republicans who insist on federalism when it comes to a whole array of issues (e.g., environment, schools) now want the states to be agents of the federal government when it comes to illegal immigrants.   In sum, the notion that the feds would force localities to become ICE agents and then hold for processing for indeterminate amounts of time every illegal immigrant they find is preposterous and unnecessary — as well as constitutionally suspect. He’s taken a problem of about 80,000, inflated it into an epidemic and highlighted a tiny number of isolated cases in an effort to frighten Americans and force states to become giant holding pens for nonviolent illegal immigrants. (There are plenty of constitutional issues about the excessive time people are being held while the immigration court backlog gets whittled down.) Let’s see what Trump actually comes up with, but simply tossing around the term “sanctuary cities,” making up big numbers and threatening to end all federal funding for major cities should not obscure the constitutional and real problems associated with his scheme. Maybe like so much of what Trump said during the campaign, the issue will just fade away.

Obama says law enforcement must be made fairer

CHICAGO — The day after a grand jury in Ferguson, Mo., declined to indict a police officer in the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, President Obama said he would work to address inequities in the nation’s law enforcement system. “And I want to work with you, and I want to move forward with you,” the president said, adding that he understood why many people were angry in the wake of Monday’s news that there will be no charges filed in Brown’s death. “The frustrations that people have generally, those are rooted in some hard truths that have to be addressed.” Obama said he has asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to “set up a series of regional meetings focused on building trust in our communities” that will focus on “how to make sure that law enforcement is fair and is being applied equally to every person in this country.” The first will take place next week, he said. “We need to make sure that we’re actually bringing about change,” he said. “And if any part of the American community doesn’t feel welcomed or treated fairly, that’s something that puts all of us at risk, and we have to be concerned about it.” Obama decried the violence that has taken place in Ferguson. “Burning buildings, torching cars, destroying property, putting people at risk — that’s destructive, and there’s no excuse for it,” he said. “Those are criminal acts, and people should be prosecuted if they engage in criminal acts.” The president was in his adopted home town primarily to tout the economic benefits of permitting millions of undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States, part of his effort to build public support for his new immigration policy. He spoke in a neighborhood that was once predominantly Polish but is now overwhelmingly Latino. This historic progression of immigrants in U.S. society, Obama said, has allowed the nation to thrive economically and politically. He was introduced by Billy Lawless, a restaurant and pub owner who immigrated to Chicago from Galway, Ireland, in 1998 and became a U.S. citizen this year. Lawless said he started his first business in Chicago with 10 people but now employs more than 250. “But you know what? This is what we immigrants do,” Lawless said. “We work hard, and we build successful businesses.” Obama joked later that it made sense for Lawless to start his business career in Chicago by opening a drinking establishment, “because there was a shortage of Irish pubs in Chicago.” The event took a more confrontational turn when several hecklers interrupted the president’s speech as he began to speak about why he was focused on deporting “felons, not families.” “Mr. President, that has been a lie!” a woman shouted, saying that the administration had deported immigrants who had not violated other U.S. laws. “That is not the truth. You cannot keep saying ‘felons, not families.’ ” “Republicans are not the only ones to blame!” another woman declared. Obama addressed the hecklers directly. “All right, I’ve listened to you. I heard you. I heard you. I heard you,” he said, turning in succession to the different speakers. “Nobody is removing you. I’ve heard you. But you’ve got to listen to me, too. . . . I understand you may disagree. But we’ve got to be able to talk honestly about these issues.” It is true that his administration has deported plenty of immigrants, Obama said. “But what you’re not paying attention to is the fact that I just took action to change the law,” he said, prompting applause from the crowd. “The point is that, though I understand why you might have yelled at me a month ago, although I disagree with some of your characterizations, it doesn’t make much sense to yell at me right now, when we’re making changes.” The enthusiastic crowd at the Copernicus Community Center, which numbered about 1,800 people, welcomed Obama and his pro-immigration message. Kathleen Weiss Boyle, a 51 year-old real estate agent and dog-sitter, noted that her grandfather and three of his brothers came to the United States from Germany in 1921 while eight siblings remained behind. “They’re slamming the doors shut [to immigrants], and who knows what great things they could accomplish if we let them in?” asked Boyle, a Democrat. “We need to open the doors back up and let people in. Why is it not okay now, and was back then?” Even some of those supporting the changes the president is making to the nation’s immigration laws, however, said they were hoping to learn more details. Marketa Lindt, a partner at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin and national secretary of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she and other attorneys in the field are going to have a hard time providing specific advice to their clients until they see either specific guidance from the Department of Homeland Security or other documents that will flesh out the plan. “It’s going to be extremely important and interesting to see what those details are,” Lindt said in an interview.

Sessions takes federal crime policy back to the ’80s

Back in the 1980s, when crack and its associated violence were sweeping through American cities, Congress responded by imposing drastic and often mandatory penalties, and Jeff Sessions was the U.S. attorney for southern Alabama. It was the height of “The Drug War.” And before long, with prisons overflowing and disproportionate sentences being imposed, many in law enforcement concluded that the “lock ’em all up” approach was an overreaction. Better alternatives existed, and both Congress and the Obama administration dialed back The Drug War. On Thursday, the former federal prosecutor from Alabama took the first steps toward a return to The Drug War. The now-attorney general of the United States rescinded a policy issued by his predecessor Eric Holder instructing federal prosecutors to avoid charges with long mandatory  minimums where appropriate. Instead, Sessions instructed, prosecutors should “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense” And to be clear, Sessions wrote, “By definition, the most serious offenses are those that carry that most substantial [sentencing] guidelines sentence, including mandatory minimum sentences.” Many people in the criminal justice system thought federal prosecution had evolved beyond this mindset. Sentencing guidelines were changed from mandatory to advisory, some mandatory minimums were erased and the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences was reduced. Drug treatment was seen as a more effective alternative to heavy incarceration. Sessions’ push for maximum penalties brought immediate groans of dismay from many quarters, including some former prosecutors. John Walsh, the former U.S. attorney for Colorado and past chair of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee of U.S. Attorneys in 2015-16, acknowledged that crime was rising in some parts of the country. “But this policy rests on the misapprehension that charging more severely across the board will have the effect of reducing specific hot spots of crime,” Walsh said. “That has to be addressed in a targeted, focused way. Raising the severity of sentencing across the board, in every U.S. attorney’s office across the country, is not going to have that effect.” “Seeking the maximum possible penalty in every case isn’t justice,” said Barry Pollack, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “It’s vengeance. This is a return to policies that have been tried and failed repeatedly. It will waste great resources going after low-level, non-violent offenders. And it will continue the misguided effort to combat drug abuse with incarceration rather than treatment.” Sessions’ new policy does allow federal prosecutors some discretion in not seeking the highest charge or the longest sentence, with the approval of supervisors. But Walsh noted that in many parts of the country, that may only enable prosecutors to adjust to the leanings of their local federal bench, some of whom may favor stiff sentencing, and some who may not. In the eastern district of Tennessee, where former federal prosecutor Steven H. Cook, a supporter of the return to stiff sentencing, worked, “you’re likely to see sentences skyrocket,” Walsh said. In places such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, where judges take a more liberal approach, “you’re going to have U.S. attorneys wrestling with this with hostile judges.” Some in the justice system have argued that the mass incarceration of the ’80s and ’90s was a good thing because it helped lead to the ensuing decline in the crime rate nationwide. Sessions’ move could be an attempt to reinstitute that philosophy. Pollack responded, “Study after study has shown that mass incarceration was not the reason for the decreases that we saw in some areas in crime rate. Even if you could make the argument that locking everybody up reduces the crime rate, it still makes no sense from a public policy perspective. It’s like a dragnet approach that ensnares non-violent offenders and violent offenders, simply clogs the system while diverting resources from pursuing those individuals whose crimes do merit severe sentences.” Walsh agreed. “The cost to the U.S., and the diversion of resources to the federal Bureau of Prisons and other jails, really distorted the way law enforcement works in this country.” With more discretion in prosecution, Walsh said, “We can be more focused and more fair because we’re not rounding up whole groups of people and locking them up for decades.” Former Utah U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman joined in with Walsh, saying, “To maintain law and order, we need effective policing and prosecution. The Justice Department’s shift to prosecuting and incarcerating more offenders, including low-level and drug offenders, is an ineffective way to protect public safety. Decades of experience shows we cannot arrest and incarcerate our way out of America’s drug problem.” A number of legal affairs groups also weighed in. Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, issued a statement which said that, “When President Trump asked black Americans what we have to lose by electing him, the answer is all the gains we’ve made in advancing justice and fairness. By reinstating a long-discredited policy of harshly punishing individuals who commit low-level, nonviolent drug offenses, Attorney General Sessions has turned back the clock on our criminal justice system, ensuring it will continue to disproportionately punish black people, harming our communities and widening painful divides in our society.” Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, co-director of Human Rights Watch’s US Program, said that “Sessions is willfully ignoring the facts about the cruelty, waste, and ineffectiveness of the ‘tough on crime’ policies of the 1980s and 90s. He seems intent on locking up as many people as possible, for as long as possible, no matter how old or minor the offenses, or how devastating his prosecution binge is to those affected and their families.”

D.C. plans to become a sanctuary city. It should do so carefully.

D.C. MAYOR Muriel E. Bowser (D), eager to show that she is prepared to stand up to the Trump administration, recently announced plans to award grant funding to advocates and defense lawyers who would represent the city’s estimated 25,000 undocumented immigrants in legal proceedings, including those faced with deportation. Protecting a vulnerable community that faces an array of legal travails is an admirable goal, and immigrants with lawyers fare better in legal proceedings than those without. In drafting the program’s fine print, however, D.C. officials should take care: It’s not just most undocumented immigrants facing legal travails who merit protections. So do ordinary Washingtonians. Officials in Ms. Bowser’s office insist, with reason, that the District’s undocumented immigrants are generally law-abiding. Unlike other localities, where most long-term prisoners would be incarcerated in the state’s prison system, those convicted of serious crimes in the District are sent to federal prisons. In the case of illegal immigrants, that means there is little or no chance they will be released back into the District upon completion of their sentence; they are far more likely to be deported. Nonetheless, it is worth bearing in mind the unhappy experience of some other so-called sanctuary cities, whose zeal to defy federal immigration authorities has at times defeated common sense. In the prime example, San Francisco officials in 2015 ignored a detainer, an official request from federal immigration officials seeking custody of an undocumented immigrant with a long record of drug offenses. The man should have been turned over to federal officials; instead, he was released. A few weeks later, he shot and killed a young woman strolling with her father on the waterfront. To its credit, the District gives federal officials a 48-hour heads up before the scheduled release from the D.C. Jail of any undocumented immigrant for whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued a detainer. Officials say they recognize a legitimate middle ground between complete noncooperation and allowing local police to become an auxiliary deportation force. In the District’s case, that means police do not ask the immigration status of those it detains or arrests, although defendants are fingerprinted when charged with crimes, and those fingerprints are available to federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE. That’s a sensible stance, but it could be more sensible. Even if only a small percentage of the city’s undocumented immigrants have serious or violent criminal records, perhaps from other states, that still constitutes hundreds of people who would be logical candidates for deportation. They should be exempted from whatever assistance the city’s grant program might provide, once it is up and running later this year. Other cities, including New York, have taken steps to protect some ex-convict undocumented immigrants from deportation but not others, depending on the severity of their crimes. That’s a sound policy, and D.C. officials should take note. **Read more here:** The Post’s View: Trump pledged to ‘end’ sanctuary cities. Common sense, not threats, should guide him. Erwin Chemerinsky, Annie Lai and Seth Davis: Trump can’t force ‘sanctuary cities’ to enforce his deportation plans Jennifer Rubin: Donald Trump’s ‘sanctuary city’ nonsense

The false assumptions underlying Trump’s immigration plan

Donald Trump’s immigration proposal rests on three assumptions: that immigration hurts American workers; that illegal immigration, in particular, is linked to violent crime; and that illegal immigrants drain government resources. Each of these beliefs is belied by the available academic evidence. “ _The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, and makes it difficult for poor and working-class Americans. . . to earn a middle-class wage._” — Trump immigration plan, August 2015 Trump comes closest to having a point in making this case, although the case — that immigration harms the worst-off citizens — does not justify the remedy he proposes. The laws of supply and demand suggest that a larger supply of labor (more immigrants) will lower wages. But the economic literature points to a counterintuitive conclusion. “The most recent academic research suggests that, on average, immigrants raise the overall standard of living of American workers by boosting wages and lowering prices,” the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project found. “One reason is that immigrants and U.S.-born workers generally do not compete for the same jobs; instead many immigrants complement the work of U.S. employees and increase their productivity.” Economists disagree most sharply over immigration’s impact on the wages of the small share of U.S.-born workers with less than a high school education. Here, research by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University found that immigration reduced the wages of these workers by 4.7 percent, while another study, by two other economists, Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, found that wages for this group increased, albeit slightly. Assume the Borjas-Katz crowd is correct. Even so, if you are concerned about high unemployment among African American youth — and you should be — there are far more significant causes, and far more effective ways to tackle that problem than deporting illegal immigrants. “Overall macroeconomic conditions are a much more important factor in the youth and young-adult labor market than is undocumented immigration,” Katz told me by e-mail. “In fact, attempts to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows . . . could open up opportunities for such workers in ways that might open more entry-level jobs for teens and disadvantaged minority workers.” Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California at San Diego who has co-authored studies with Borjas, noted that immigration from Mexico is down significantly, so the question is not how to stop the influx, but what to do about those already here. “If the issue is black unemployment, sending immigrants back home to Mexico is going to have an almost imperceptible effect,” he said. Meantime, the costs would be astronomical. “ _The impact in terms of crime has been tragic. In recent weeks, the headlines have been covered with cases of criminals who crossed our border illegally only to go on to commit horrific crimes against Americans._ ” The outcry is understandable; the facts prove Trump wrong. Study after study has debunked the notion that increased immigration, legal or illegal, produces a spike in crime. Indeed, the converse may be true. “Over the past 20 years, during a time that immigration into this country has skyrocketed . . . there has been no evidence that immigration is linked to positive increases in crime,” said Northeastern University criminologist Jacob Stowell. “Often there is an inverse association: Higher immigration means less crime.” A 2010 study by University of Colorado sociologist Tim Wadsworth found that “cities with the largest increases in immigration between 1990 and 2000 experienced the largest decreases in homicide and robbery during the same time.” “ _The costs for the United States have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc._ ” Immigration does strain state and local budgets, particularly for education, in areas where immigrants cluster, although immigrants also pay state and local taxes. But for the federal budget, immigration represents a fiscal plus. “The consensus of the economics literature is that the taxes paid by immigrants and their descendants exceed the benefits they receive — that on balance they are a net positive for the federal budget,” the Hamilton Project concluded. Illegal immigrants aren’t entitled to welfare, food stamps, Medicare or Social Security or unemployment benefits. Indeed, they often pay federal taxes and contribute more than $12 billion annually to Social Security alone without being able to collect. Trump is off base — not just in his extreme prescriptions, but in his underlying beliefs. And that is the most disturbing part of this debate because those wrongheaded assumptions are shared by pretty much the entire GOP presidential field. _Read more fromRuth Marcus’s archive, follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her updates on Facebook._ **Read more on this issue:** Donald Trump’s immigration plan would wreak havoc on U.S. society On immigration policy, the GOP is out of touch with the rest of America Ruth Marcus: Trump doubles down on boorishness

Trump administration backs Texas in lawsuit over harsh sanctuary city law

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Friday that the Trump administration “fully supports” Texas’s harsh new ban on sanctuary cities, and the Department of Justice will help defend it against a federal court challenge next week. Lawyers for the tiny border city of El Cenizo, the League of United Latin American Citizens and major cities such as Dallas and Austin say the law requiring them to detain immigrants for federal deportation agents is “patently unconstitutional” for a number of reasons. On Monday, they will urge U.S. District Court Judge Orlando Garcia in San Antonio to block the law from taking effect Sept. 1. The state of Texas argues that the government is within its rights to bar localities from interfering with immigration enforcement. Under the law, officials could lose their jobs, police chiefs could go to jail, and governments could face fines of up to $25,500 a day if they adopt or enforce policies that prevent law enforcement officers from asking about a person’s immigration status or complying with requests to detain immigrants, a job that has been chiefly the responsibility of federal agents. “President Trump has made a commitment to keep America safe and to ensure cooperation with federal immigration laws,” Sessions said in a statement. “Texas has admirably followed his lead by mandating state-wide cooperation with federal immigration laws that require the removal of illegal aliens who have committed crimes.” Luis Roberto Vera, Jr. the national general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens, which is a plaintiff in the case, said the Texas law is discriminatory because it primarily targets Hispanics, one of the state’s largest groups. “It’s a continuation of Donald Trump’s war on Mexicanos,” Vera said. “That’s the sad part about this.” The faceoff comes amid rising tensions nationwide over the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and its relentless march forward despite a string of losses in federal courts. On Friday, congressional aides said House Republicans are advancing a bill that would withhold some federal grant money from so-called sanctuary cities; give greater legal weight to immigration detainers, which are requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to local jails to hold immigrants who are being targeted for deportation; and shield local governments from lawsuits related to detainers. A second bill would increase penalties against deported immigrants who return illegally. Sponsor Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said the bills, which could be voted on as early as Wednesday, “crack down on dangerous sanctuary policies that needlessly put innocent lives at risk.” But advocates say ICE is arresting many immigrants who do not pose a threat to public safety, such as a Falls Church woman deported to El Salvador last week. Some members of Congress have raised concerns about spending limited federal dollars to deport otherwise law-abiding immigrants, who are often parents of U.S. citizens. Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter (D-N.Y.) criticized the GOP-led House for “conjuring up red-meat partisan political bills — like deporting immigrants — despite the major issues facing this country at this time.” Hundreds of local jurisdictions, from county sheriffs to major cities such as New York, have adopted sanctuary policies that limit their cooperation with ICE, the agency that detains and deports immigrants. Sanctuary cities say aiding immigration agents deters immigrants from reporting crime and could lead to racial profiling and deportations for minor offenses. In Houston, which sought to join the El Cenizo lawsuit Friday, police noted a sharp decline in reports by Hispanics of sexual assault and violent crime in the first three months of 2017, compared to the same period last year. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) says the law would enhance public safety by ensuring that sanctuary cities turn over immigrants who have been arrested for crimes. He and others have cited cases in which immigrants have been released and reoffended. **** As a candidate, Trump campaigned against sanctuary cities. On Jan. 25, days after he took office, he issued an executive order vowing to strip federal funding from those cities that refuse to enforce immigration law. In April, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily halted that order after the city and Santa Clara County filed a lawsuit and the Trump administration acknowledged that its crackdown was far narrower than the president and his aides had indicated. Ten states — including Texas — have backed the Trump administration in the San Francisco case.

Trump might not be able to stop ‘sanctuary cities,’ but he’s still scaring immigrants

AUSTIN — Patricia Gomez has already experienced the paralyzing fear of almost losing her father. The memories from 11 years ago are hazy, but Gomez, a 21-year-old undocumented immigrant from Honduras who has lived in the United States for 14 years, remembers when her father was pulled over in North Dallas for speeding. “It was a very close call,” Gomez said, recalling how her father, who is also undocumented and cleans homes for a living, was taken into custody but later released. For years, people like Gomez and her father have lived in an uneasy gray zone when it comes to the random encounters between undocumented residents and law enforcement. In hundreds of cities and counties, local governments have opted — either informally or formally — to limit local law enforcement officers’ involvement in enforcing federal immigration laws, particularly when they come into contact with undocumented immigrants. In these “sanctuary cities,” officials have attempted to ensure that immigrants can get help from police or report crimes without fear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will swoop in to detain them.  “I was scared at first, but as time goes by, I’m feeling more panic,” Claudia Gollinelli, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador who works as an electrician in Dallas, said in Spanish. “And panic debilitates people.” For many of the immigrants living in “sanctuary cities” and places with less formal policies, Trump’s presidency could upset the precarious balance that has allowed millions of undocumented people to live and work in cities across the United States for many years. They are the construction workers that build Americans’ homes and office buildings, and the housekeepers and janitors that keep them clean. They are the fruit and vegetable pickers and the restaurant workers — both putting food on their tables. The nature of the sanctuary policies offered by cities and counties varies widely, which is part of the reason it’s hard to predict how Trump could crack down. Cities in states such as California and Illinois have adopted strict policies that limit collaboration between local law enforcement and federal officials when it comes to the enforcement of immigration laws. In other states, such as GOP-controlled Texas, there are no true “sanctuary cities,” but police officers in cities across the state have opted not to ask the immigration status of people they arrest. These policies date to as early as 1979, when Los Angeles enacted a special order prohibiting officers from initiating “police action” with the objective of determining a person’s immigration status. Similar policies proliferated in the 1980s and extended to New York and other large cities. Trump isn’t the first right-wing critic of sanctuary cities. For years, conservatives and advocates for tighter immigration laws have claimed that a lack of cooperation is making “sanctuary cities” less safe because it results in the release of dangerous individuals who should be deported. “Sanctuary policies needlessly create new victims, and they don’t lead to more crime reporting or better relationships between authorities and immigrants,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter immigration laws. With control of the White House, Trump could try to make it more difficult for municipalities to limit local law enforcement’s ability to enforce federal immigration laws. But immigration lawyers and civil rights activists hope judges might still protect the status quo. Courts already have blocked laws that require police officers to verify the immigration status of the people they arrest or question.  Immigration lawyers looking for reasons to be optimistic about what Trump might achieve also point out that conservatives in Congress and some state legislatures have tried, and failed, to cut funding to “sanctuary cities” in the past. That’s in part because of overwhelming opposition from large swaths of the law enforcement community, said Denise Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. “Every police department has to make decisions about how to best go about policing efforts, and most jurisdictions have decided that if local police are known to be enforcers, it harms their ability to police effectively,” Gilman said, adding that it would be bad policy for Trump to impose any sort of requirement on local law enforcement. When “sanctuary city” legislation has been taken up, local enforcement officials have regularly descended upon capitol buildings to explain that enforcing immigration laws could be problematic not just because they’d be doing the federal government’s job, but also because it could deeply undermine their relationships with the communities they protect. Their argument is rooted in the possibility that witnesses or victims of crimes could be more apprehensive about coming forward and working with police in an effort to avoid any contact out of a fear of deportation. And that could ultimately lead to less safe communities for both immigrants and native-born residents, they argue.  But even without any specifics from Trump or his aides yet, activists and immigrants already say they fear that future traffic stops could be more likely to lead to detention by ICE. That’s a concern that many already have experience with: Gollinelli, the undocumented electrician, was pulled over in October 2014 for driving 42 mph on a road with a 40 mph speed limit. When an officer searched her name, she was found to have a previous removal order. Gollinelli, who has lived in the country for 12 years, said she was held in jail and later moved to a detention center, but she was later released on an “order of supervision” because she did not have any other criminal charges on her record. Gollinelli, a mother of two, said she rarely talks about her arrest in front of her children, particularly her 10-year-old daughter, who begged her not to leave again once Gollinelli was reunited with her family. But she now fears that something similar could happen again — and this time, she won’t be able to come home. Other immigrants, such as Gomez, wonder what would happen if relatives were to be stopped by police enforcing immigration laws. Others, like Jose Sic, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who has lived in Houston for 21 years, worry that the distress he experiences while driving — caused by fears that he may not make it home — may only get worse. “There’s a lot of uncertainty right now and there’s no way of knowing if Trump will do what he says he will do,” Sic said in Spanish. “But as long as the fear of what he could do remains, we don’t know what could happen to us.”

Jeff Sessions isn’t making America safer. He might be making it more dangerous.

Don’t believe it. Between 2009 and 2014, crime fell to its lowest level in a generation, even while prosecutors pared back their use of strict federal penalties. Sessions’s new policy will reverse that progress. While it may fill our prisons, it won’t “make America safe again.”     Lower-level offenders — the type of nonviolent drug users spared under Holder — are poised to bear the brunt of this expansion. Justice Department officials have hinted for months they’re planning a crackdown on marijuana, even in states where the drug is legal.   For anyone concerned about the fairness of our justice system, this is a true crisis. But the attorney general can only use (or abuse) the power Congress gives him. And there are a few ways lawmakers can rein Sessions in.  To be sure, in some cases, such as particularly serious and violent crime, incarceration and longer sentences may be warranted. And some cities, like Chicago, are seeing a troubling increase in violence. But Sessions’s directive goes far beyond reason and risks reigniting the same, misguided “war on drugs” that brought the nation’s criminal justice system to this crisis point, without doing anything to enhance public safety. Sessions’s arguments to the contrary should be dismissed for what they are: more of the Trump administration’s standard mix of half-truths and innuendo.

Fact Checker: Trump incorrectly connects Mexican immigrants and crime

Several readers asked us to fact-check Trump’s initial comment, which has drawn outrage from Latino groups and led to breakups with his corporate partners distancing themselves from the inflammatory remarks.   What do the data tell us about the criminal threat of immigrants?  Immigration and crime levels have had inverse trajectories since the 1990s: immigration has increased, while crime has decreased. Some experts say the influx of immigrants contributed to the decrease in crime rates, by increasing the denominator while not adding significantly to the numerator.     CRS also found that non-citizens make up a smaller percentage of the inmate population in state prisons and jails, compared to their percentage to the total U.S. population.  The trend holds when comparing less educated Mexican, Salvadoran and Guatemalan men — who make up the bulk of the undocumented immigrant population — to their native-born counterparts, as shown below: Are countries like Mexico “not sending their best”?   The GAO found that drug offenses made up the majority of convictions in fiscal year 2008 in the five states (Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Texas) with the largest populations of such inmates. These convictions were both felony and misdemeanor crimes, including use/under the influence, manufacturing, transporting and possession of paraphernalia.    The theory is that immigrants generally have a stronger incentive than native-born Americans to stay out of legal trouble — especially undocumented immigrants, who risk deportation. And those who legally are in the United States (or are pursuing legal status) are required to pass a criminal background check. “Immigrants in general — unauthorized immigrants in particular — are a self-selected group who generally come to the U.S. to work. And once they’re here, most of them want to keep their nose down and do their business, and they’re sensitive to the fact that they’re vulnerable,” said Marc Rosenblum, deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank.  It’s difficult to connect any crime with illegal immigration, by its nature. Drug smuggling and violent crimes do exist, but the cases are not indicative of larger trends in the immigrant population. What we do know about crime rates among non-citizens and inmates with unknown or unauthorized immigrant statuses show Trump’s assertions about a crime wave are not accurate. Trump’s repeated statements about immigrants and crime underscore a common public perception that crime is correlated with immigration, especially illegal immigration. But that is a misperception; no solid data support it, and the data that do exist negate it. Trump can defend himself all he wants, but the facts just are not there.

Trump’s attempt to link illegal immigration to Chicago’s homicide problem is extremely tenuous

Since January, the site has logged 190 killings in the city. About 82 percent of the victims were black. Nine percent were white, and 4 percent were Hispanic.  Why does this matter? Because most of the undocumented immigrants in Chicago are from Latin America — implying that they’re heavily Hispanic.   The implication, just to spell it out, is that most of the immigrants in Chicago illegally are Hispanic, not black. (While the Census Bureau differentiates between race and ethnicity — meaning that one can be both Hispanic and black — the DNAInfo figures do not.) We can’t say from these figures that there is no link between immigrants in the country illegally and Chicago’s homicide problem. There are a number of ways to argue that there may be a link. Perhaps those crimes without known perpetrators — most of them — were committed by such immigrants. (A request for information about the immigration status of known suspects from the state attorney of Cook County was not answered by the time this article was published.) Perhaps some of the victims of the killings fell into that category. Most realistically, perhaps many of the killings can be traced to gang activity that ties, directly or indirectly, to criminal groups linked in some way to Latin America. (How such links would overlap with illegal immigration is another question.) What we can say, though, is that this isn’t what we’d expect the demographics to look like if Chicago’s homicides were tightly intertwined with a population of immigrants who are in the country illegally from Latin America. This is just one city, but it’s one that has driven much of Trump’s rhetoric on crime. There’s no question that the recent increase in killings in Chicago deserve attention and analysis. But it’s very fair to question the role that illegal immigration plays in that increase.

Look where anti-immigrant advocates have taken the GOP

Republicans understood, or some of them did, after the 2012 presidential election that the GOP could not continue to put off Hispanic voters. The GOP nevertheless nominated an openly xenophobic candidate bent on demonizing Hispanics. The very fact that the border problem is minor (net immigration now flows from the United States to Mexico) compared with the visa overstays (many from Asia) suggests Donald Trump is fixated on keeping certain illegal immigrants out — the ones he calls “murderers” and “rapists.” If the GOP had a problem with Hispanics before this election, we can only imagine where it will be after the election.      The anti-immigrant crowd would like to spin their concern as merely preventing illegal immigration. That charade has been dispelled this election cycle. In rejecting legal immigration, Republicans adopt an entirely anti-free-market approach, directly counter to our economic needs. Congratulations: They’ve allowed the Democrats to become the more sensible party on economic growth, technology and international economic leadership.  Immigration and the overt hostility to large segments of the electorate will contribute to Trump’s embarrassing defeat. The GOP’s plunge into xenophobia is also a very good reason for Republicans who believe in tolerance, diversity, scientific progress and economic growth to leave the GOP. Meanwhile, the GOP commits electoral and intellectual suicide. To each his own.

Texas law on sanctuary cities challenged in federal court

SAN ANTONIO — Texas’s tough new sanctuary-city law was debated in federal court on Monday, with lawyers for several Texas cities calling it draconian and unconstitutional and attorneys representing the state and the Trump administration saying it makes sense to compel jurisdictions to work with federal immigration agents. Led by the small border city of El Cenizo, the plaintiffs urged U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia to halt the law before it takes effect Sept. 1, saying it violates the Constitution, could hammer the state economically and illegally targets Latinos. One lawyer called the law a “constitutional train wreck.” But lawyers for Texas and the Justice Department rejected those arguments and said the state has the right to create a uniform immigration policy instead of a hodgepodge of standards that can vary by town. Now the state has one policy: Cooperate with deportation agents. “We are not going to stand in their way,” said Brantley D. Starr, deputy first assistant attorney general for the state. The day-long hearing launched a contentious legal battle over a statute that has roiled state politics in recent months and led to a scuffle on the floor of the state house in Austin in May. On Monday, busloads of people arrived in San Antonio, which is 60 percent Latino, and rallied outside the courthouse in 93-degree heat, holding signs and chanting “Sí, se puede” (Yes, we can). In the courtroom, the American Civil Liberties Union and others argued that the law attempts to conscript local police to help carry out mass deportations at the behest of the federal government — or face stiff penalties if they don’t. Local officials who refuse to cooperate with deportation efforts could lose their jobs, police chiefs could go to jail, and agencies face stiff fines of up to $25,500 a day. “They are setting up a situation that incentivizes people to enforce immigration law to the maximum,” said Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the ACLU arguing on behalf of El Cenizo. Texas said in court filings that the law doesn’t require police officers to initiate immigration interrogations or arrests. Rather, it asks police and jailers to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the same way that they do with other law enforcement agencies. Lawyers defending the statute also said it includes provisions to protect crime victims and witnesses who are immigrants, and who critics say will be less likely to work with local law enforcement if those officers are compelled to cooperate with deportation agents. The Trump administration has praised Texas’s law and said it bolsters the president’s plans, laid out in a Jan. 25 executive order, to dramatically ramp up immigration enforcement. Erez Reuveni, senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department, said in court Monday that federal law does not require cooperation with immigration officials — but state law can. He said federal officials have invited states to assist in immigration enforcement, and Texas accepted that overture. Several states have expressed support for the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, and some have banned “sanctuary cities” that refuse to cooperate with ICE. But hundreds of cities, towns and law enforcement agencies nationwide have enacted policies to protect immigrants from deportation, particularly those detained for minor offenses. In Texas, even some cities that do not consider themselves sanctuary cities and that cooperate with ICE have condemned the law as vague and financially burdensome and potentially dangerous to police officers. Dallas City Attorney Charles Estee said city police, who are still mourning a fatal attack on several officers last year, are worried that having officers closely associated with immigration agents would alienate the community. Houston and San Antonio also have expressed concern that the new law will make immigrants less likely to report crime. In addition, critics say the status could lead to racial profiling, which attorneys for the state point out is already banned by Texas law. Gov. Greg Abbott (R) has said he signed the law in May to promote public safety. He and his supporters have cited cases in which undocumented immigrants allegedly committed major crimes, including murder, after they were released instead of being turned over to immigration officials. “They were acting to protect public safety,” Starr said in court. But El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne Bernal said in court that the legislation “creates, frankly, a less safe community.” Affidavits filed in the lawsuit say domestic violence victims in El Paso tried to rescind protective orders after learning that immigration agents had detained a transgender woman who was seeking protection from an ex-boyfriend at the courthouse in February. State Rep. Ana Hernandez (D) wept on the stand as she described how the emotionally charged debate over the bill reminded her of her own days as an undocumented immigrant. She later became a U.S. citizen, graduated from law school and was elected to state office in Houston, representing parts of the city and surrounding areas. She said many others targeted by the state law are just like her. “I am the undocumented immigrant,” she said. Some cities in Texas say the law, if upheld, could prompt sports organizations and others to boycott the state, similar to the effect of a controversial bathroom bill in North Carolina. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has moved its 2018 conference from Grapevine, Tex., to San Francisco because of the law. **Read more:** ****This tiny border town is challenging the immigration law passed by the state of Texas A bus crossing the border from Mexico is emptier now, but it is still crossing

Mayors form coalition to support Obama’s immigration action

_This post has been updated._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Twenty-five mayors from around the country have formed a coalition to support and help implement President Obama's executive action on immigration. Members of Cities United for Immigration Action said they will work to put the executive action Obama announced last month into effect on the local level, push for congressional action on immigration reform and rally grassroots support.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Twenty-three mayors, including New York's Bill de Blasio, Los Angeles's Eric Garcetti, Houston's Annise Parker and the District's Vincent C. Gray have joined the group. "The president's action on immigration will strengthen our cities. It will keep families together, grow our economies and foster additional community trust in law enforcement," the mayors said in a statement. "We are ready -- and together we're rolling up our sleeves to turn this policy into a better reality for millions of hardworking people in the communities we serve." One of the goals of the group is to send a message that immigrants are welcome in, and a crucial part of, the cities represented and the nation as a whole. They also are trying to delineate between the roles of federal immigration enforcement and local law enforcement.     The mayors will meet in New York on Dec. 8.     "This summit will offer a unique opportunity for mayors of many of our nation’s progressive cities to restate our leadership and responsibility on this decisive issue," de Blasio said in a statement released after Obama's announcement. The group will sketch out a plan "that truly prepares our localities for swift implementation of changes and also advocates for further reforms from the municipal level all the way up to Washington.”     Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said he is a "firm believer in the power of cities taking control of their future," and that mayors who work together strengthen their cities.     "Immigrants in Pittsburgh today mirror the same drive that was true generations ago with the arrival of Irish, Italian, Polish, German, and many others who helped to build our city, and our country," Peduto said in a statement. "Our city's resiliency and can-do work ethic carries on in new immigrants who are opening small businesses such as grocery stores and retail shops, launching careers in our budding tech start-up industry, and setting roots across our city."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Trump open to ‘softening’ laws to help illegal immigrants

After months of demanding that all illegal immigrants leave the United States, Donald Trump said Tuesday that he may be open to "softening" the laws to benefit some of the 11 million immigrants living illegally in the country. Trump's comment came during a town hall with Fox News's Sean Hannity in Texas that aired Tuesday night. It provides the latest indication that the Republican presidential nominee plans to soften his stance on mass deportations, which would be a major shift for a candidate whose campaign has focused heavily on aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration. "Is there any part of the law that you might be able to change that would accommodate those people that contribute to society, have been law-abiding, have kids here?" Hannity asked at one point. "Would there be any room in your mind?" "There certainly can be a softening because we're not looking to hurt people," Trump responded. "We want people — we have some great people in this country. We have some great, great people in this country. But we're going to follow the laws of this country. And what people don't realize, we have very, very strong laws." Trump said numerous times that he would enforce the country's immigration laws — which forbid coming into the country illegally — and reward those who follow the legal process. Trump and his aides have made clear that he is wrestling with how to handle the millions of immigrants who came to the United States illegally but have made a home here. Trump's formal immigration policy, released last summer, did not address this issue, but Trump has publicly said that all illegal immigrants "have to go" and that he would use "deportation forces" to carry out the task. During the town hall, Trump polled the audience on the issue of mass deportations, getting a mixed response, and he promised he "would come out with a decision very soon." On Monday night, Trump said in an interview with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly that he would immediately deport any illegal immigrants who are violent criminals or gang members, something that is already happening in many cases. But he was vague on what to do with those who remain, saying that he plans to continue to do "the same thing" that the Obama administration has done, although "perhaps with a lot more energy." Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said on CNN on Tuesday night that Trump's "tough stance on immigration will not change," although she acknowledged that he could change on the issue of mass deportations. In the past, Conway has advocated for creating a pathway to citizenship for many illegal immigrants. At a rally in Austin on Tuesday night, Trump once again promised to build a massive wall along the Southern border and make Mexico pay for it, his core immigration stance from which he has yet to waver. The crowd repeatedly chanted: "Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall!" "We are going to enforce the law," Trump said. "We're going to protect your jobs and your wages. We are going to protect them. Your companies are not going to flee our country, think they can make their product and sell it back into our country without serious repercussion. We are going to keep our country safe." During the rally, Trump was joined onstage by mothers of children who were killed by illegal immigrants. Several of the women spoke, sharing pieces of their emotional stories and saying that Trump is the only politician who will crack down on violent illegal immigrants. "Your children did not die in vain because we are not going to allow it to happen to others," Trump said.

Baltimore officials, Justice Department promise sweeping overhaul of city police

Baltimore’s top law enforcement and political leaders on Wednesday vowed a sweeping overhaul of the city Police Department after a searing rebuke of the agency’s practices, which the Justice Department said regularly discriminated against black residents in poor communities. Officials promised improved community relations, a purge of race-based policing and a modernized department that better trains officers and holds them accountable. But they warned that reforming an agency entrenched in a culture of unconstitutional policing would be a slow process and could cost millions of dollars. “Police reform won’t happen overnight or by chance,” Vanita Gupta, principal deputy assistant attorney general, said at a news conference officially unveiling the Justice Department’s 163-page report. “It’s going to take time, and it’s going to require a focused and sustained effort.” The Justice Department explicitly condemned many long-standing discriminatory enforcement practices by Baltimore police that allowed for illegal searches, arrests and stops of African Americans for minor offenses. But the highly critical report is also an indictment of “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” policing, which seek to quell crime by targeting minor offenses. Once heralded as groundbreaking crime-fighting strategies, they are now the subject of intense scrutiny amid the national debate over racially biased law enforcement. “The powerful thing about this report is the way in which it validates what many of us have been saying about zero-tolerance policing in Baltimore for a very long time,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who lived in the city for 15 years. “There are many of us who recognized that it was making the community less safe.” Often listed among the country’s deadliest cities, Baltimore has long struggled with racial strife, poverty and high crime. The city’s population had dropped significantly by the 1980s, as the crack epidemic drove the homicide rate to among the highest in the nation. As political leaders in Baltimore sought ways to stem the bloodshed, City Council member Martin O’Malley won the 1999 mayoral election with a “tough on crime” platform. Confronting a decade of 300 or more homicides annually, O’Malley adopted the zero-tolerance policing strategy of New York City. Arrests soared — topping 108,000, prompting lawsuits and forcing judges to free prisoners to avoid overcrowding at the city jail. Homicides dropped to 261 in O’Malley’s first year in office. But the numbers leveled off and then crept back up to 282 in the last year before he took office as Maryland governor in 2007. A decade ago, with new leadership in the mayor’s office, the city abandoned zero-tolerance policing. The new administration concluded that it was not reducing crime and had badly damaged community relations. The Justice Department, after its 14-month investigation, said despite that change, the old practices persisted. “The Department’s current relationship with certain Baltimore communities is broken,” the report states. “This fractured relationship exists in part because of the Department’s legacy of zero tolerance enforcement, the failure of many BPD officers to implement community policing principles, and the Department’s lack of vision for engaging with the community.” In a statement released Wednesday, O’Malley, who made a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, defended his record. He said the Justice Department’s report doesn’t consider “data and trends on enforcement levels, discourtesy, excessive force, and police involved shootings prior to 2010.” The statement also said the report doesn’t consider efforts by his administration to reform the police department and improve training. “Such a review would have shown reductions in each of categories of police misconduct even as Baltimore closed down open air drug markets and achieved historic reductions in violent crime,” the statement said. “Make no mistake about it — enforcement levels rose when we started closing down the open air drug markets that had been plaguing our poorest neighborhoods for years. But after peaking in 2003, arrest levels declined as violent crime was driven down.” The Justice Department found that zero-tolerance policing in Baltimore focused too much on the raw numbers of arrests and stops, which resulted in disproportionate stops of black residents over petty crimes such as loitering or trespassing. The report cites several examples of how the enforcement strategy went wrong: a boy with no criminal record arrested for loitering outside his home; a black man in his mid-50s stopped 30 times in less than four years; and a police sergeant telling a patrol officer to “make something up” when there was no reason to stop and question a group of black men sitting on a corner. “These and similar arrests identified by our investigation reflect BPD officers exercising nearly unfettered discretion to criminalize the act of standing on public sidewalks,” the report says. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D) said that while the findings of the report are “challenging to hear,” the investigation created a “crucial foundation” that will allow the city to change the department. “The report and its follow-up will help to heal the relationship between the police and our communities,” Rawlings-Blake said. Now that the investigation is complete, city officials will work with the Justice Department to implement a series of court-mandated reforms outlined in what is known as a “consent decree.” The mayor said it could cost the city $5 million to $10 million annually to make the suggested changes, which include improved training and new technology and equipment to modernize the police force. The court-enforced order will be independently monitored. City Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said he has already fired officers as a result of the Justice Department’s investigation. Davis also said he would not tolerate policing that is sexist, racist or discriminatory. “Change is painful, growth is painful,” he said, “but nothing is as painful as being stuck in a place that we don’t belong.” Baltimore has long struggled with strained relations between residents and police, but the need to ease those tensions became more urgent after the death of Freddie Gray in April 2015. Gray, 25, suffered a fatal spine injury in police custody, triggering demonstrations and riots that flung the city into the national debate over race-based policing and fatal law enforcement encounters involving black men. Prosecutors dropped charges against three of the six officers charged in the Gray case after a city judge acquitted the other three in bench trials. Gray’s death prompted a number of police reforms, including installing cameras in the back of police vans, accelerating the city’s body-camera program and developing new policies on the use of force. Wednesday’s report — which focused on agency-wide, institutional practices — is separate from a specific, ongoing probe into Gray’s death. **Read More:** Baltimore’s interim police commissioner on mission to mend ties How Loretta Lynch has investigated the police and not made them all hate her

House GOP warns D.C. mayor not to use tax money defending illegal immigrants

House Republicans with oversight over the nation’s capital are investigating D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s plan to use local tax dollars to defend illegal immigrants from deportation. The mayor received a letter Wednesday from Reps. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), head of the subcommittee for District affairs, warning her that her plan appears to violate federal law. Bowser (D) this month joined leaders from Chicago, Los Angeles and New York in announcing that their cities would set up legal defense funds to represent illegal immigrants targeted for deportation under the policies of President Trump. The fund would “double down” on the District’s status as a “sanctuary city”, Bowser said. D.C. police are already instructed not to ask those they stop or arrest about their immigration status, and city corrections officials provide only limited help in identifying nonviolent criminals to federal agents for deportation. Bowser said the $500,000 fund would be used to teach the city’s estimated 25,000 illegal immigrants their rights and to hire lawyers to represent city residents in deportation proceedings and help them apply for asylum. The District’s complicated financial relationship with the federal government, however, means that Washington may have less latitude than other cities to carry out its plan. Because the District is a federal territory, local lawmakers cannot spend any of the city’s local tax revenue — which tops $7 billion annually — in ways that conflict with federal spending rules. And a decades-old federal law known as the Immigration and Nationality Act says that no taxpayer money can be used to assist illegal immigrants in fighting deportation. Chaffetz and Meadows cited the law in their letter and ordered Bowser’s office to turn over all documents related to the planned fund, including any internal legal documents drafted to defend the mayor’s proposal, and a list of outside organizations that could receive grant money from the fund. “The District’s planned use of funds . . . to pay for legal representation of individuals subject to removal proceedings appears to be in conflict with existing federal law,” Chaffetz and Meadows wrote. A spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee declined to comment. Bowser said the congressional investigation highlighted anew the District’s need for statehood and the “special” burden the city’s residents face. “These are the types of questions we will be called to answer,” she said. The letter from Chaffetz and Meadows arrived as Trump was at the Department of Homeland Security announcing an executive order to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to ramp up deportations of illegal immigrants. Trump’s order instructed his administration to identify federal funding that could be withheld from the District and other cities if they maintained sanctuary policies. D.C. budget officials said the order could wreak havoc on the city, potentially jeopardizing billions in annual assistance. But as mayors nationwide weighed in with defiant statements, Bowser’s office remained quiet for more than three hours. Bowser later said that the District would remain a sanctuary city, but added that the letter from Chaffetz demanding that the city produce documents had complicated its response to Trump. Aides to the mayor said she had held a long conference call with Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting representative in Congress, to plan a response. It is not the first time that Chaffetz has tussled with Bowser. Two years ago, the oversight chairman raised the prospect of the mayor facing jail time for violating federal drug laws if she implemented a voter-approved ballot measure that legalized marijuana. Bowser allowed a partial legalization, letting adults to carry and privately consume marijuana. But she did not press a bigger showdown with Chaffetz over taxing and regulating it, as Colorado and other states have done. The District has been left with one of the nation’s most disjointed marijuana policies, in which possession is legal, but sales and purchases remain illegal. Chaffetz dropped the matter amid warnings by then-President Barack Obama that the White House supported the District’s right to set its own drug laws. With a Republican in the White House, it is unclear how far House Republicans may now go in asserting control over the District. This week, the House passed a bill that would permanently ban the District from spending its own tax money to subsidize abortions for low-income women. The White House issued a statement saying the president would sign the bill. Efforts to roll back D.C. gun laws also have been introduced in the House.

Trump is looking more and more like a man without a plan

Attorney General Jeff Sessions showed up unannounced in the White House briefing room to attempt something President Trump very much needed after Friday’s health-care debacle: a change of subject. Sessions, accompanied by White House press secretary Sean Spicer, revived one of the reliable applause lines from the campaign, a crackdown on “sanctuary cities” harboring illegal immigrants. “DUIs, assaults, burglaries, drug crimes, gang rapes, crimes against children and murders,” the attorney general recited. “Countless Americans would be alive today and countless loved ones would not be grieving today if these policies of sanctuary cities were ended.” But for all the sturm und drang, Sessions didn’t have much to announce. “Sounds like you’re applying the standards and the policy that the Obama administration put forward,” CBS News’s Major Garrett observed when Sessions finished his statement. “Are you taking any additional steps?” “Well, that’s a good question,” Sessions replied. And the answer, apparently, is “no.” Sessions said there could be additional requirements “in the future” beyond those the Obama administration had. But not just yet. Such policy anticlimaxes are becoming routine in Trump world. Tough rhetoric, big promises — and no substance. Trump looks more and more like a man without a plan. He promised he would have a health-care plan that would be cheaper and better than Obamacare and would cover just as many. But when it came time to deliver, he had nothing. He left the policy to House Speaker Paul Ryan, and the resulting proposal would have meant 24 million fewer people with health coverage. The bill collapsed in spectacular fashion under opposition from Democrats, moderate Republicans and conservatives — and Trump is blaming everybody but himself. During the campaign, he said he had a secret plan to defeat the Islamic State. He said he had a “foolproof” plan of “defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory.” Now, it turns out, he has no plan. He has asked the Pentagon to create one. “We will figure something out,” he said last week. Vowing to keep Americans safe at home, he originally promised “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” before tempering that campaign promise to the restricting of travelers from certain countries. But since administration lawyers tried to put that vague notion into an actual policy, his attempts at imposing a “travel ban” have been repeatedly shot down in court. Next up after the health-care failure is Trump’s promise to enact “historic” tax reform. But now that it’s time to present a policy, the promise looks more histrionic than historic. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said he wants to have legislation in August, but Spicer on Monday was backpedaling. “I know that Secretary Mnuchin has talked about August as a target date, and I think it depends,” Spicer said in response to a question from Alexis Simendinger from RealClearPolitics. He added that “this is going to be dependent on whether, how, the degree to which we can come to consensus on a lot of big issues.” And he concluded, “So, you know, we’re not — we’re not there yet.” During the campaign, Trump boldly vowed that he would eliminate the U.S. debt, now about $20 trillion, during his term. He then said he would cut the debt in half. But when CNBC’s Eamon Javers asked about whether Trump would allow tax reform to add to the deficit (and therefore the debt), Spicer said it was “really early” to be raising such questions. “You’re asking really early in the process to make that kind of analysis before we have a policy set forth,” he protested. How presumptuous to expect Trump, after campaigning on historic tax reform, actually to have a proposal! The emerging evidence that Trump doesn’t have a plan for much of anything isn’t entirely bad. No plan is better than a bad plan. In theory, at least, this means Trump could change course. And Spicer, expanding on remarks Trump made after the health-care bill collapsed Friday, said the president was ready to work with Democrats. “There may be other opportunities to work with people across the aisle,” he said, later adding that “if Democrats want to join in, then that’s great and we’ll do that.” ABC News’s Jonathan Karl noted that such behavior would “require a serious change of course for the president.” “To some degree, sure,” Spicer readily replied. But Trump has never demonstrated an ability to change, and even if he could, some of his top advisers would resist him, many Republicans in Congress would revolt, and Trump’s supporters would be furious. Having actual policies may just not be part of this president’s plan. **_Twitter: @Milbank_ ** _Read more fromDana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook._ ****

Trump says sanctuary cities are hotbeds of crime. Data say the opposite.

The “sanctuary cities” that President Trump has repeatedly characterized as incubators of crime are generally safer than other cities, according to a new analysis of FBI crime data.  Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump often characterized these locales as dangerous hotbeds of criminal activity and promised to suspend all federal funding to them.   In 2015, the typical sanctuary county in a large metropolitan area experienced 654 fewer crimes per 100,000 residents than the typical non-sanctuary county in a big, metropolitan area. That's an overall crime rate approximately 15 percent lower. In smaller counties and even rural areas, crime rates were also lower for sanctuary areas, Wong found. The exception is medium metros and counties on the fringes of large metro areas, which had slightly higher crime rates if they were sanctuary areas. Overall, across all counties, there are on average 355 crimes per 100,000 in sanctuary counties. Specifically addressing Trump's contentions that sanctuary cities are magnets for homicides, Wong found that the typical sanctuary area saw 1 fewer homicide per 100,000 people in 2015 than the typical non-sanctuary area. While the difference is small, Wong's statistical tests indicate it is highly significant. “The data are clear that sanctuary counties aren't crime-ridden hellholes,” Wong said in an interview. The data only shows correlation; Wong says more research needs to be done to determine whether a causal effect is at work here. But he said he suspects that, by becoming a sanctuary area and refusing to involve local authorities in deportation matters, a city or county may actually make itself safer. If immigrants who came to the United States illegally fear working with police will lead to deportation, they're less likely to report crimes and assist with investigations.   Wong also looked at a number of economic indicators in his analysis and found that in sanctuary counties, income tends to be higher while poverty tends to be lower. He said the he suspects a causal mechanism at work here, too. “If you deport the breadwinner [of an immigrant family], that leaves families more economically vulnerable,” he said. “That means that these economically vulnerable families are more reliant on public assistance.”

Crime isn’t out of control. But the White House wants you to think it is.

In his first address to Congress on Tuesday night, President Trump once more painted a bleak picture of a country besieged by crime, drugs and terrorism. The unexpectedly positive tone he used shouldn’t obscure the falsehoods at the heart of his rhetoric. Drugs “pour in at a now unprecedented rate” across our borders, the president said, and “criminal cartels have spread across our nation.” Trump pledged to stop the country’s “terrible drug epidemic,” return order to our “neglected inner cities” and address “an environment of lawless chaos.” Despite Trump’s bluster, though, crime in the United States actually remains at or near historic lows. The president continues to dish out alternative facts on crime to justify a reactionary agenda. From a wall along the border with Mexico, to a revised “travel ban” on Muslims, to a likely crackdown on drug users, Trump needs to distort the truth to feed these policies to the American people. For a sitting president to stand in front of Congress, and the country, and misrepresent the dangers facing us should be cause for alarm. Indeed, it’s rare for a president to make the state of the union sound worse than it is. But it’s not unprecedented: Richard Nixon framed his 1968 presidential campaign around a promise to return “order” to the United States. Trump modeled his promise to restore “law and order” on this approach, stoking fears about crime and warning that out-of-control violence in inner cities represents an imminent threat.   And later, Trump strained to trace rising crime to immigration, terrorism and national security. He promised to deliver on his signature campaign promise — a border wall with Mexico — as well as locking out terrorists and restoring order to the nation. What we heard doesn’t square with reality.   Despite those facts, the president frequently invokes Chicago as an example of the average. Any increase in violent crime is cause for concern, and this is no exception. But it’s no national crime wave.        Flashy proposals such as walls and travel bans may play well at rallies, and overwrought rhetoric about crime certainly grabs headlines. But the real work of “making America safe again” calls for a little less bombast, and a lot more focused action.

Democratic-leaning cities brace for fight with Trump over sanctuary policies

The election of Donald Trump has Democratic cities from Washington to Los Angeles vowing to protect undocumented residents from being deported, even at the risk of losing millions of dollars in federal funding. As many as 400 places across the country could be affected by Trump’s campaign promise to deny federal funds to what some call “sanctuary” cities and counties, jurisdictions that have broken with some aspect of federal deportation policy. In most cases, the sanctuary label means a refusal to cooperate with federal authorities seeking to deport undocumented immigrants who have been arrested for local violations — often by not honoring requests to hold such inmates beyond their scheduled release dates. But the term could also apply to jurisdictions that prohibit their agencies from denying services to people who are in the country illegally, inquiring about immigration status or alerting federal authorities to suspected illegal immigration. That puts the District, Prince George’s County, Baltimore and several other jurisdictions in the region on the potential hit list. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and the mayors of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles say they will stand by their policies, arguing that to have local authorities crack down on illegal immigration would destroy the trust in police that law enforcement relies on and would wreak havoc on schools, hospitals and other community institutions. “We know that our neighborhoods are safer and stronger when no one is afraid to call on our government for help, and when our police can focus on protecting and serving,” Bowser said this week. Trump pledged during his campaign to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities and counties **—** part of a set of promises to deport illegal immigrants and build a wall along the Mexican border to prevent others from coming into the country. ****Although Trump offered some specifics about his deportation plans in an interview Sunday night on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” saying he wouldtarget those who have criminal records or are “drug dealers, gang members,” the president-elect has not clarified which sanctuary cities he would seek to punish or how he would attempt to do it. Conservative groups say punitive measures against local governments that refuse to hand over those immigrants to federal authorities are crucial, even if it means hurting local schools, community development projects or other services. “They can attach any set of criteria to any aspect of federal funding to try to incentivize cooperation with immigration,” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for Immigration Reform, said about the Republican-controlled Congress. “They could withhold money for highways, for education, for all kinds of things.” However, with 48 Democrats expected to be in the Senate, passing such legislation could be challenging. Several bills seeking to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities have failed in recent years — including one last year that sponsored by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) that focused on two law-enforcement grant programs and Community Development Block Grants that provide money for affordable housing, infrastructure and anti-poverty programs. “Until we end all dangerous and illegal sanctuary city policies . . . the obvious first step is to withhold federal funding from those cities refusing to comply with federal immigration laws,” Vitter said Tuesday. Such a move would be difficult, said Alan Berube, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program of the Brookings Institution. “Unwinding all those federal-local fiscal relationships is a very complicated, legislative, rulemaking, multiyear task that you cannot achieve by executive order alone,” Berube said. “That doesn’t mean the president-elect might not try to do that, but he’ll likely face a bunch of lawsuits if he does.” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, said a possible template for future legislation lies in a Justice Department review already underway. It threatens to withhold law enforcement grant money from 10 sanctuary jurisdictions, including New York, Chicago, California and Connecticut, if they don’t change their policies. The review, launched earlier this year by the Obama administration, so far involved sending letters to those jurisdictions asking them to certify that they’re in compliance with a federal law that requires local governments to share information about undocumented immigrants. In many cases, the affected grants expire in 2017 and may not be renewed if the policies don’t change, officials said. “At its most fundamental level, this is a law enforcement issue,” Vaughan said. “If there are jurisdictions that want to cling to their sanctuary policies no matter what, I think the federal government ought to look to litigation to try to compel them to change their policy.” While several local jurisdictions — including Fairfax and Arlington counties — say they cooperate fully with federal immigration authorities, others that do not are gearing up for the possibility of a confrontation with the Trump administration. At an emotional news conference Tuesday, Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) said his government is prepared to lose federal funds by not assisting immigration officials with investigations unless there is a warrant or federal court order requiring cooperation. “This is about doing what is right,” Leggett said. “So from my perspective, if I’m faced with the choice of having to lose some federal dollars and run the risk of having our citizens treated in an undignified way, disrespected and hauled off to jail and separated from their families, then I’ll have to lose the dollars.” In Takoma Park, Md., just outside the District, officials are notifying residents that they do not plan to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Since 1985, the city of 17,000 people has prohibited police and other employees from cooperating with federal immigration authorities. It also allows non-U.S. citizens to vote in its local elections. Mayor Kate Stewart said the city council is discussing what to do if it loses about $90,000 in federal Community Development Block Grant money. Some wealthier residents have volunteered to chip in to replace any lost federal funds. “There are already residents who are willing to step up to help our community,” Stewart said. “That’s what kind of community we have.” Bill Turque contributed to this report. **Read more on Trump and immigration:** FACT CHECKER: Are up to 3 million undocumented immigrants criminals or gang members?

What Donald Trump gets wrong about gun violence

When Donald Trump talks about the Second Amendment on the campaign trail, he often mentions Chicago as evidence of the futility of gun control. The city, with its high crime rate, is a favorite example of supporters of gun rights and an important talking point in the Republican presidential nominee's final pitch to conservative voters. “In Chicago, which has the toughest gun laws in the United States — probably, you could say, by far — they have more gun violence than any other city,” Trump said in the final presidential debate last week. “We have the toughest laws, and you have tremendous gun violence.”       More than 1,200 weapons came from Mississippi, the report found. Some came from as far away as Texas and Florida. According to the report, dealers in other states and elsewhere in Illinois are part of the reason that police in Chicago are seizing guns at such a rapid pace: nearly three firearms per 1,000 residents annually. That is more than six times the rate at which police in New York recover guns, suggesting that far more of Chicago's residents are illegally armed. Criminal gangs in the city are responsible for importing many of these guns, said Philip Cook, an economist at Duke University who has studied guns in Chicago extensively. Forty-four percent of guns that police seize from members of gangs are from outside the state, according to Cook's most recent calculations. “Guns are readily available to the most dangerous people in Chicago, namely the gang members,” Cook said. “They know how to circumvent the local regulations and obtain them.” Cook also noted that gangs in Chicago tend to use older guns. On average, the weapons that police seize from members of gangs were purchased at retail nearly a dozen years earlier.  Doing so would mean investigating resale dealers who supply guns from other states to Chicago's black market and prosecuting straw purchasers, or people with clean records who buy guns on behalf of someone involved in crime. Often, straw purchasers are girlfriends or other women who shop for gang members. It is a tall order for law enforcement agencies already tasked with solving so many of society's problems, Cook said. “The laws and the regulations can only do so much. You really have to invest in enforcing them.” The available research suggests that the city is violent not because it has gun laws, but because it has guns, and lots of them.

Big city police chiefs, mayors troubled by Trump immigration order, police union and sheriffs untroubled

The U.S. Conference of Mayors, representing more than 1,400 cities with populations over 30,000, issued a joint statement Wednesday night with the Major Cities Chiefs Association, representing 63 large police departments, saying that they had “strong reservations with provisions to withhold federal funds” and that Trump’s order “does not provide a clear definition of what constitutes a sanctuary jurisdiction.” The two groups called on the new secretary of Homeland Security and new attorney general to meet with them “to discuss these issues and develop an approach to immigration enforcement that does not interfere with strong police-community relations or place inappropriate burdens on local police officers, and upholds our nation’s immigration laws.” Though the Trump administration did not consult with the big city chiefs before announcing the new policy, officials with the national Fraternal Order of Police officers’ union and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, representing 18,000 departments of all sizes, did meet with the Trump transition team, both groups said Wednesday night. The IACP did not have an immediate reaction to Trump’s executive order. But the police union was largely untroubled by the new policy, in part because it carved out an exception to the withholding of funds from sanctuary cities and counties “as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by the attorney general or the secretary” of homeland security. Jim Pasco, the executive director of the FOP, said penalizing the safety of citizens for the policies set by politicians was dangerous, but the exception for law enforcement purposes was helpful. “We’re actually heartened,” Pasco said, “by the fact that the administration appears have taken our concerns to heart and they’re reflected in the executive order.” The FOP endorsed Trump in the recent election.  On Thursday, the National Sheriffs’ Association, representing over 3,000 county sheriffs who oversee 85 percent of the nation’s jails, offered a hearty endorsement of Trump’s policy. “We think the president’s initiatives are long overdue,” said Jonathan Thompson, the association’s executive director. He applauded the planned addition of 10,000 immigration agents to assist in processing illegal immigrants out of the jails, as well as increasing the use of the “287(g)” program to deputize local law enforcement to handle federal immigration. “We are holding between 250,000 to 500,000 people who are serious criminal aliens,” Thompson said. “We’re certainly optimistic that the president not only gets it but supports it, and that he will follow through with his promises.” The statement by the mayors and police chiefs said that “the U.S. Supreme Court has held that denying federal funds to cities to coerce compliance with federal policies may be unconstitutional.” New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco are among many jurisdictions which consider themselves sanctuary cities, and officials said they didn’t know how widely a Trump administration might withhold federal funds if they maintained their policies. While Pasco acknowledged the concern that immigrants may not report crime or cooperate with police if they fear being arrested, “that’s kind of a double-edged sword. The other side is if there’s criminal activity in that community, including actually being in the U.S., what do you do? You can’t just throw out a whole body of law because one day you might need a violator to go to court for you.” He said that “no cop on the beat with a good heart is arresting people who report crimes to him. Police officers use common sense every day in deciding whether to arrest or ticket someone.” He said local police officers would not resist enforcing federal law if ordered to do so. At present, some police and sheriff’s departments participate in the 287(g) program, which deputizes local officers and deputies with federal authority, grants them access to immigration databases and enables them to refer illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Trump’s order calls for the Department of Homeland Security “to authorize state and local law enforcement officials…to perform the functions of immigration officers” to detain illegal immigrants. Pasco said the resistance from big city police chiefs is “a management issue. Police chiefs are not free agents. They report to the councils and boards who hire them. Whatever they might personally think, they’re going to articulate the position of the elected officials, and their politically correct position against enforcing the immigration laws.” FOP President Chuck Canterbury issued a press release Thursday echoing Pasco’s support for exceptions to the federal fund withholding for law enforcement purposes and supporting increased immigration enforcement. “We do need to encourage cooperation between all levels of law enforcement,” Canterbury said, “to ensure that arbitrary policies do not put a dangerous person back on the streets.” One reason illegal immigrants weren’t always detained and deported was because there simply weren’t enough federal immigration agents to process them. Trump’s order calls for the hiring of 10,000 more immigration agents. To reduce the number of potentially deportees to a manageable number, and to maintain good relations with the immigrant community, federal officials instituted a policy of only detaining and deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes. Trump’s new policy expands that group to those charged with any crime, even if it has not been resolved; those whose acts might constitute a crime; those who have engaged in fraud on the government; and those who, “in the judgment of an immigration officer, otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.” At present, immigrants only face possible detention after they are arrested for any offense, not for random street checks. Those who are convicted of serious crimes, and are in the country illegally, are then turned over to ICE. But many jurisdictions do not recognize detainers filed by ICE because they are civil actions, not criminal warrants requiring detention. “ICE detainers,” the mayors’ and chiefs’ statement said, “do not provide sufficient legal justification for detention, arrest and incarceration by local officers.” Trump’s order calls for publication of a regular ICE document called “Declined Detainer Outcome Report” listing those jurisdictions who have refused to turn over prisoners. “Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States,” the order states, “willfully violate federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal.” In addition, Trump’s order called for the immediate termination of the Priority Enforcement Program and reinstitution of the Secure Communities program. Both programs enabled local jails to provide names of illegal immigrants convicted of crimes to ICE, but the Secure Communities program was felt to be too wide-ranging by many police officials, and Priority Enforcement was put in its place in 2014. “I’m disappointed,” said J. Thomas Manger, chief of the Montgomery County, Md., police and head of the Major Chiefs, “because Priority Enforcement was designed after long discussions with local police about our interests. That is, retaining the trust of the immigrant communities, not having the immigrant communities afraid of contacting the police. It really struck the right balance.” Manger said “the vast majority of police departments in this country are cooperating with ICE, but are refusing to do immigration enforcement themselves. It’s always been a federal responsibility.” He said the chiefs association “is just fundamentally opposed to using federal funding to try and coerce our local policing. But it’s their prerogative to do it.” There are some jurisdictions, Manger said, “who have trained their folks in 287(g). If that’s what those jurisdictions want to do, fine. But ninety-plus percent want to strike that right balance between getting bad people out of the community and making sure you’ve got people living in your jurisdiction who will cooperate with police.” Manger said Trump’s policy poses serious problems for jurisdictions with large immigrant populations such as his, where he said one out of three residents were not born in the U.S. “If we alienate the immigrant community,” Manger said, “we’re sunk.” Here is the FOP’s press release from union president Chuck Canterbury:

President Trump is likely to keep a close eye on this brewing sanctuary city battle in Texas

As the White House announced plans Wednesday to end federal grants to sanctuary cities, a high-stakes, highly partisan showdown over how to close them was already underway in Texas.  In Texas, things are already contentious. The newly elected sheriff for Austin and the county it sits in, Travis County, is refusing to comply with federal deportation requests she doesn't agree with. Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez has said she would abide by deportation requests for people charged with serious crimes such as murder — but that she would not promise to abide by all requests. Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who won a showdown with the sheriff in Dallas in 2015 over sanctuary cities,  is demanding that Hernandez change her mind — or risk losing some $1.8 million in state grants and even her job. “We will remove her from office,” Abbott warned in an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News. Abbott is calling for legislation to ban sanctuary cities, remove any officeholder who refuses to comply with federal deportation requests and even impose criminal and financial penalties on that person. A bill to ban sanctuary cities has been introduced in the GOP-controlled legislature. In some ways, the battle between governor and sheriff over these cities is uniquely Texan. Texas, with its conservative state government and pockets of liberal cities, is one of the only states where a flashy showdown between governor and sheriff could take place. But Abbott is also the first up to bat in a new paradigm in which the president has signaled he has a zero-tolerance policy for cities that shelter immigrants who are in the country illegally. And opponents of sanctuary cities will be watching to see if he can help them blaze a path through the web of constitutional, legal and political hurdles that sanctuary city opponents in more liberal states — or even the federal government — could use in a way they never could under the Obama administration. Jessica Vaughan, with the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, says the Trump presidency is already changing the landscape. “I expect [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] to go back to saying: This is not a request. This is not optional. When we issue a detainer, we expect you to honor that just as you would for any other law enforcement agency in the country,” Vaughan said. “That will reinforce what Governor Abbott is trying to do.” Sanctuary city opponents could also flex their newfound muscle by working with the Department of Justice to make public which immigrants the local governments refuse to help deport, along with their criminal histories. Even their names could be made public, Vaughan suggested. “That will create a dynamic where the sheriff could have to start explaining why these individuals were released, and people will have the opportunity to judge for themselves whether it makes sense,” she said. Research has indicated that immigrants in the country illegally don't commit crimes at a higher rate than legal residents, but opponents say no one in the country illegally should be allowed to commit a crime and stay.   Pursing a legal challenge is a risky endeavor. The existence of a sanctuary city, with clearly stated policies that might be in conflict with federal law, has never been challenged in court. There's not even an agreed-upon definition of what a sanctuary city is. It's true if the Trump administration won, it could be game over for the current system in those cities. But immigration experts aren't sure such a demand would hold up in a court of law.  “I think it's pretty clear that the federal government cannot tell local governments how to run their affairs in minute detail, without at least paying for all of it,” said Alex Nowrasteh with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute.  The constitutionality of a state government using political, financial and legal levers to close these cities is less clear cut, since each state has its own rules about how much authority it can exert over localities. Which brings us back to Texas and the fact that the showdown between governor and sheriff is not likely to play out in states across the United States, which are either mostly liberal or mostly conservative. The real battle will be between the federal government and liberal cities such as Oakland, Las Vegas, New York and Chicago.

The director of ICE just declined to support a central argument of Trump’s candidacy

“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” Donald Trump said at his campaign kickoff in June 2015. He was already off script, about two minutes into his remarks. It was what he said next, though, that came to define his candidacy. It was instantly contentious, spurring huge media attention that helped fuel the first few weeks of his campaign. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense.” This casual comment, implying that the majority of immigrants crossing into the United States from Mexico were criminals, kicked off a firestorm of protest. Trump wasn’t yet considered a serious presidential candidate, so the response was what you might see if some other celebrity said something that could be interpreted as racially insensitive. Sponsors dropped deals; business partners walked away. Trump leveraged that backlash to draw attention to his unusually hard line on immigration. Within weeks, he was standing on a stage before thousands of supporters in Maricopa County, Ariz. — home of then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a fervent critic of undocumented immigrants — championing the idea that immigrants from Mexico were inextricably linked with a crime problem in the United States.  On Wednesday, speaking to the White House press corps as part of the regular news briefing, Thomas Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — an agency now under the control of President Trump — was asked whether immigrants in the country illegally were more likely to commit crimes. He suggested that they weren’t. Homan was describing a number of crimes that had been committed by immigrants in the United States and advocated for building a wall on the border with Mexico. “Aren’t you concerned, though, about exacerbating fears about undocumented immigrants?” CNN’s Jim Acosta asked. “You’re making it sound as if undocumented immigrants commit more crimes than people who are just native-born Americans.” “What is your sense of the numbers on this? Are undocumented people more likely or less likely to commit crimes?” Acosta asked. “Did I say aliens commit more crimes than U.S. citizens? I didn’t say that,” Homan replied. (He did note that such immigrants had committed one crime: entering the country illegally.)  The idea that immigrants in the country illegally were inextricably linked with crime was embedded deeply in Trump’s candidacy. He would bring parents of children killed by undocumented immigrants onto the stage during his rallies and appeared with them at news conferences. When a San Francisco woman named Kate Steinle was shot to death by a man who’d repeatedly been deported, she became a central figure in his rhetoric. It worked. Trump won last November in part because he won the vote of those who considered immigration the most serious issue facing the country — 13 percent of voters — by a 2-to-1 margin.    “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable,” he said. “You should look over your shoulder.” Yet Homan declined to say that those immigrants were more likely to engage in criminal activity than American citizens were. After the White House briefing, reporters were taken to an event being led by Trump. In it, the president introduced a number of people who had lost family members to undocumented immigrants, including some who had been regulars on the campaign trail. “They’ve had members of their families killed by illegal immigrants and people in some cases with multiple deportations,” Trump said, according to a pool report. “I’m especially honored to be here with so many courageous families.” He then assured them that their loved ones hadn’t died in vain.

While Trump was tweeting about Mika, Congress gave him a win on sanctuary cities

They voted to make clear his administration has the power to withhold certain law enforcement grants as punishment for sanctuary cities protecting certain people who are in the country illegally. “It's a simple principle that if you're going to receive taxpayer dollars from the federal government to keep people safe that you've got to follow the law and keep them safe,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chairman of the House's judiciary committee. The House passed it almost entirely along party lines. If this bill passes the Republican Senate, Congress will have given the president a legal tool no president has had before to try to force sanctuary cities to hand over those in the country illegally.  Sanctuary cities have become the most high-profile method of resistance to the Trump administration. Dozens of cities and counties have said they won't oblige every federal government request to turn over immigrants in the country illegally (though almost all make exceptions for those charged with violent crimes).    The bill the House of Representatives passed Thursday attempts to specify that when it comes to these specific grants, the president can withhold them from a city specifically because it's a sanctuary city. Basically, the bill says: Consider yourself warned, sanctuary cities. This could cost you financially. But even if this bill passes the Republican Senate (a very big “if” given Senate Democrats can filibuster it) and gets signed by Trump, he still legally may not be in the clear to pressure sanctuary cities, Somin said in an interview Thursday. The Supreme Court has made clear that federal grants have to very clear which grants can be withheld, and Somin thinks opponents could argue the wording in the bill is too vague. Some anti-illegal-immigration experts think if this doesn't work, the Trump administration could just take these cities to court. Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, said the Trump administration could ask a federal judge for an injunction demanding these sanctuary cities hand over any immigrants the federal government wants to deport. They could argue it's technically against the law to shield some immigrants from deportation. That's never been tried before, though, and it risks bringing the courts into yet another legal battle the Trump administration might lose — and one with which Congress can't really help him out. Constitutional scholars warn that telling cities and states what to do in their communities could steamroll over their constitutional right to govern themselves.  And of course, sanctuary cities could always just go without the grant the federal government holds. Put another way: Trump is one-third of the way toward getting a tool that may or may not help him enforce one of his core campaign promises. Tweeting didn't stop House Republicans from voting on a bill so critical to his agenda, but Trump certainly isn't helping himself by stealing headlines away from one of his few policy victories with Congress.

Trump wants to deport MS-13 gang members. El Salvador is dreading their return.

SAN SALVADOR — The Trump administration’s push to deport more Central American gang membershas alarmed officials here who fear that the returning gangsters could exacerbate violence in one of the deadliest countries in the hemisphere. This year the U.S. government has deported 398 gang members to this country, compared with 534 in all of 2016, according to Salvadoran government statistics. This sharp increase in the rate of gang deportations — and the prospect of more gang roundups in the United States — has prompted Salvadoran authorities to hold emergency meetings and propose new legislation to monitor suspected criminals who are being sent home. “This clearly affects El Salvador. We already have a climate of violence in the country that we are combating,” said Héctor Antonio Rodríguez, the director of the country’s immigration agency. “If gang members return, of course this worries us.” In tweets and speeches, President Trump has made MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, the leading symbol of the dangers of illegal immigration and the need for more and faster deportations. He has compared the gang’s “meanness” with that of al-Qaeda. He promised last week that the organization will be “gone from our streets very soon, believe me.” Recent high-profile killings, such as that of a 15-year-old Salvadoran girl in Springfield, Va., and a string of slayings on Long Island, have fueled concerns of an MS-13 resurgence in the United States. In El Salvador, this gang and rivals such as the 18th Street gang have terrorized neighborhoods for decades. MS-13 formed in Salvadoran immigrant communities in Los Angeles in the 1980s, building its ranks with refugees from the country’s civil war. Waves of deportations over the years helped MS-13 take root in El Salvador and grow into a powerful criminal organization with tens of thousands of members across Central America. Since President Salvador Sánchez Cerén took office in 2014, the Salvadoran government has been on a warlike footing against MS-13 and the 18th Street gang. Authorities have deployed thousands of extra police officers and soldiers to hunt down gang members and limited access to prisons in an effort to stop gang leaders from using visitors to relay orders to members on the outside. Police and soldiers have regularly been accused of human rights violations and extrajudicial killings during this offensive. Salvadoran authorities think they have slowly been making progress. The number of homicides, which peaked in 2015 at more than 6,600, dropped by 20 percent last year and has continued to fall. Even so, El Salvador has one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere and gangs regularly prey on communities, kidnapping residents and demanding extortion payments. Law enforcement officials in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities have launched raids recently to capture dozens of MS-13 and other Latino gang members. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced this month the arrest of more than 1,300 gang members across the country in what it described as the largest anti-gang crackdown in agency history. Salvadorans are dreading the return of those captured in the U.S. raids. “Probably we won’t feel the symptoms today or tomorrow or the next week. But probably in six months or a year we’ll be feeling the symptoms of what these deportations are causing now,” San Salvador Mayor Nayib Bukele said in an interview. Gang members make up a small fraction of the deportee total. Salvadoran authorities say 6,922 people were brought back here from the United States in the first four months of the year, up slightly over last year. This year the total number of deportations by United States has dropped about 12 percent, to around 56,000 people, compared with the same period last year. Officials have attributed the decline to the fact that the federal immigration court system is overtaxed. But the Trump administration is clearly working to expel more gang members. “You know about MS-13?” Trump said during a speech in April to the National Rifle Association. “Get them the hell out of here, right?” Salvadoran officials worry that although the number of killings has fallen this year, gangs could quietly be strengthening or reorganizing. MS-13 has at least 49 “cliques” in El Salvador, according to Guadalupe de Echeverría, the head of the homicide and anti-gang unit at the attorney general’s office. Over the years, some of these cliques have named themselves after the cities in the United States where members lived before being deported. One important dynamic within MS-13, Echeverría said, is a recent rupture between the historic leaders, most of whom have long been imprisoned, and an offshoot known as the “503” — the telephone country code for El Salvador. “They have already formed a new group, and very probably with deported people,” she said. “We’ve already seen a certain amount of violence between them.” To prepare for moredeportations, the Sánchez Cerén administration recently proposed legislation to monitor gang members who return to the country. Under the measure, if the suspected gangster had no warrant for crimes in El Salvador, he would be asked to check in with police once a month and notify authorities whether he moved. The law also would create “internment centers,” possibly guarded by the military, that would be something like a halfway house for returning gang members. Rodríguez, the head of the immigration agency, said that many gang members in the United States had fled conflicts with rivals in El Salvador. “To return,” he said, “some run the risk of danger for having escaped. That’s why we think there is an opportunity in the internment centers to protect them and be able to reinsert them into society.” Human rights workers here have questioned the legality of holding suspected gang members if they have not been charged or convicted of a crime in their home country.

Trump’s campaign words stalk him in court on sanctuary cities, just as in travel ban cases

Ordinarily, Seattle would have a hard time getting a federal judge to even consider the merits of its claim because the courts require a showing of injury before they’ll let a lawsuit proceed. Neither Seattle, nor any other city, has yet been specifically threatened with a cut-off of funds by the administration. In its lawsuit, however, Seattle argues that Trump had Seattle in mind when he issued the order and that the city is indeed specifically threatened by the order. The evidence comes, Seattle says, from “the campaign trail.” On “the campaign trail,” the city’s suit says, “Trump referenced a 2007 Seattle homicide in his dislike for sanctuary cities.” “In an interview with a Seattle radio station on August 29, 2016, Defendant Trump was asked about Seattle’s sanctuary city policy,” the suit says. “He responded that ‘sanctuary cities are out … sanctuary cities are over.’ He added that ‘the federal government is going to have to get involved and they’re going to have to get involved very sharply.’” In a speech in Everett, Wash., on August 30, 2016, the lawsuit says, “‘Defendant Trump stated that we ‘are also going to secure our border to stop the drugs from pouring in,’ and specifically referenced the Seattle area.” The “executive order creates irresolvable uncertainty surrounding whether federal funds that currently benefit all Seattle residents will be cut off if the city is deemed a ‘sanctuary jurisdiction.’” Seattle expects to receive $150 million in federal funds this year, including $2.6 million in grants from the Justice Department.  Seattle is one of at least three dozen cities that have brought suit, individually or jointly, challenging the sanctuary cities executive order. San Francisco, Santa Clara County, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Oakland, Berkeley, Calif., Santa Ana, Calif., and Denver are among the plaintiffs. The suit by the city and county of San Francisco, which is set for a hearing on April 14, also threw Trump’s words back at him to justify its standing to sue. “For example,” the suit argued, “in a written campaign speech then-candidate Donald J. Trump gave on August 31, 2016, he expressly referred to San Francisco as a Sanctuary City.” It cited as well a Trump interview with Breitbart News in which, specifically referencing San Francisco, he called sanctuary cities “a safe-haven for criminals … It’s just unacceptable. We’ll be looking at sanctuary cities very hard.” Whether these and other arguments made by the lawsuits will prove convincing to the federal judges considering them remains to be seen. The definition of a “sanctuary city” varies from place to place, but usually entails an unwillingness, sometimes enshrined in municipal law, to cooperate with the federal government by turning over names of undocumented immigrants encountered by city officials, including police, in the course of their duties or by holding them in custody so that federal agents could come and get them.  The plaintiffs generally make two arguments in support of their claim of unconstitutionality. One is that by placing a burden on cities to act in assistance of immigration agents the federal government is “commandeering” or effectively conscripting state and local officials “to enforce federal law,” as San Francisco says in its suit. They cite as precedent a 1997 Supreme Court opinion involving gun control written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Trump’s model Supreme Court justice. The federal gun law, the “Brady Bill,” obligated police across the country to perform background checks on gun purchasers until a federal system of checking was up and running.  “We have the law on our side,” Murray, the Seattle mayor, said. “The federal government cannot compel our police department to enforce federal immigration law and cannot use our federal dollars to coerce Seattle into turning our backs on our immigrant and refugee communities. We simply won’t do it.”  Whether the judges in the cases address those claims, however, will depend in part on their answers to the threshold question: Do the cities, before the government has threatened to cut off any funding to them, have standing to sue. And that may very well depend on Trump’s rhetoric.

U.S. mayors to file legal brief in support of Obama’s immigration executive actions

A group of big-city mayors led by New York's Bill de Blasio and Los Angeles's Eric Garcetti announced plans Friday to file a legal brief supporting President Obama's executive actions on immigration, which are being challenged in federal court by 25 states. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is among those who signed onto the brief.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The brief will argue that "the public interest across the country is served clearly and overwhelmingly by implementing immigration reform by executive action," the mayors said in a statement. They made the announcement at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which is taking place in Washington. "Delaying implementation of the President’s executive action will further hurt our families, negatively impact our economies, and create unnecessary insecurity in our communities,” de Blasio said in a statement. Obama announced in November that he would use his executive powers to protect as many as 4 million illegal immigrants from deportation and make other changes to border control policies designed to focus federal resources on violent and repeat criminals. The president said he acted after Congress failed to approve a comprehensive immigration reform bill last summer. But Republicans have challenged the actions, calling them unconstitutional. The lawsuit from 25 states, led by Texas, argues that the "unilateral suspension of the Nation’s immigration laws is unlawful." The mayors of Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Denver and San Francisco also joined the brief in support of Obama's actions. So far 28 mayors in all have signed on.

Trump is right about violent crime: It’s on the rise in major cities.

_Sean Kennedy is a visiting fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. Parker Abt is a student at the University of Pennsylvania._ Last month, the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch convened their political network to discuss a path forward. Top on the list was criminal-justice reform — a passion the Kochs share with President Obama. The strange bedfellows, Obama and the Kochs, argue that crime can be tackled even as punishments are reduced, but they are running headlong into Donald Trump’s counternarrative that crime is on the rise and “law and order” must be restored. Obama and the Kochs insist that crime is actually at all-time lows. Mark Holden, the Koch brothers’ political adviser, is convinced the evidence backs up his argument, saying: “I don’t think the data shows that [crime is rising]. I think it shows the opposite. I think you’ll see the data shows some spikes in some cities on some issues, but I think we’re much safer, and that’s what the data shows.” Obama echoed the sentiment in his Democratic National Convention speech last month, when he said, “The crime rate [is] as low as [it’s] been in decades.” Yet the public is clearly worried about crime, which allows Trump to continue with his “law and order” rhetoric. According to an April 2016 Gallup poll, 53 percent of Americans were concerned “a great deal” about crime and violence — a 15-year high. So given these opposing claims, what does the data actually show? The FBI houses a crime clearinghouse called the Uniform Crime Reporting system. More than 18,000 police agencies from across the country self-report based on FBI collection guidelines on every offense known to police, ranging from murder to vandalism, which in turn becomes an annual report called “Crime in the United States.” A myriad of fact-checkers have relied on this data to “disprove” Trump’s claims on crime. Many, like Obama and the Kochs, note that from 1960 to 1991 crime rose dramatically in the United States but has since then fallen almost as dramatically through 2014. The consistent drop was impressive, especially in large cities. There’s one problem, however. Most of those who reject Trump’s crime claims don’t cite any data beyond 2014, the last year of fully available FBI statistics. To any claims that crime has risen since then, they respond that there are only “upticks” in a few cities. But the FBI reports nationwide data for the first six months of the previous year every January. In January 2016, it reported crime figures for the first half of 2015. That data showed significant increases in violent crime categories. Homicide was up 6.2 percent across the country, while rape was up 9.6 percent. While the data reported is classified as “preliminary,” the 2015 FBI data is directly drawn from more than 70 percent of participating law-enforcement agencies. It is preliminary only in the sense that it is drawn only from the first half of the year and compared with the first half of the previous year — a statistically valid comparison. Academic research also backs up the FBI’s newest data. In June, well before Obama’s remarks and most of the fact-checks of Trump’s claims, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri at St. Louis documented, in a study of 56 major cities conducted for the Justice Department, that homicides were up 17 percent on average. Forty of the cities saw homicides increase, and 12 of those cities saw them increase by more than 50 percent. Furthermore, data collected by the Major Cities Chiefs Association indicate that this trend has continued into 2016. In the first half of the year, homicides are up 15 percent over 2015. Non-fatal shootings (up 4 percent) and aggravated assaults (3.4 percent) both jumped in the first half of the year as well. Our own analysis of 20 large cities, gathered directly from publicly available police department data, finds that crime is rising overall, although the increases are spread unevenly across the country. And compared with 2014 lows, some types of violent crimes are not just rising; they are rising at alarming rates. For example, since 2014, violent crime is up 47 percent in Los Angeles, 26 percent in Baltimore and 23 percent in Dallas. In Chicago, arguably the worst-hit city, homicides have risen more than 70 percent since 2014. With almost 400 murders to date, the Windy City is on track to tally more than 650 murders this year alone — the most in almost two decades. In New York City, homicide jumped almost 6 percent while rape is up 10 percent over the past two years. It’s true that in some cities, such as Boston and Oakland, homicides and violent crime have continued the long-term downward trend. However, while the rise in homicide rates is not uniform, in aggregate murder is up 21 percent in the major cities we surveyed, comparing the first half of 2014 to the first half of 2016. Even as robbery dipped slightly, aggravated assault jumped 10 percent. Total violent crime figures for the selected cities rose 6 percent, according to our analysis. So violent crime, in most major cities at least, is on the rise. But why? To borrow a line from the band Buffalo Springfield, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Pundits and criminologists can argue about theories — but neither side is entitled to its own facts on crime. **Read more on this topic:** George F. Will: Sentencing reform alone won’t fix crime and punishment in America Colbert I. King: Why is America so hostile to gun control? George F. Will: When everything is a crime Eli Sanders: The horrific crime that shows just how broken our nation’s mental-health system is Danielle Allen: How the war on drugs creates violence

Obama wants judges to decide whether immigrants convicted of minor crimes should be deported

Buried in the White House's draft immigration bill is a new proposal that would give judges greater discretion to decide whether immigrants convicted of minor criminal offenses should be allowed to remain in the United States.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Under current law, non-citizen immigrants convicted of what's known as an "aggravated felony" face automatic penalties that make it far harder for them to be spared from deportation. While the term suggests a crime of a serious and violent nature, the definition of an "aggravated felony" has been expanded over the years, to the point where it includes crimes that are neither "aggravated" nor "felonies." Obama's draft immigration bill would narrow the definition of an aggravated felony by giving immigration judges greater discretion to grant leniency to individual immigrants convicted of minor offenses. Originally, only a small handful of serious crimes were classified as "aggravated felonies" in immigration law, but the definition was expanded in 1996 to encompass a host of other more minor offenses. "As initially enacted in 1988, the term 'aggravated felony' referred only to murder, federal drug trafficking, and illicit trafficking of certain firearms and destructive devices," explains a brief from the Immigration Policy Center, an immigration advocacy group. "Today, the definition of 'aggravated felony' covers more than thirty types of offenses, including simple battery, theft, filing a false tax return, and failing to appear in court."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University "Under immigration law, 'aggravated felony' can be as simple as a bar fight. The reason is that it's not measured in terms of the severity of the crime—it's measured in terms of technical sentence," says David Leopold, the general counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "Even offenses that sound serious, such as 'sexual abuse of a minor,' can encompass conduct that some states classify as misdemeanors or do not criminalize at all, such as consensual intercourse between a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old," explains the Immigration Policy Council.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Many crimes are classified as "aggravated felonies" if they carry a sentence of one year—regardless of whether that sentence is actually imposed or carried out in full. Immigrants convicted of such crimes are automatically required to be detained by federal immigration authorities after they're released from criminal custody and can then be summarily deported without a hearing before a judge. Aggravated felons are also ineligible for asylum or reprieve from deportation by a change due to family hardship, and they're prohibited from ever returning to the United States without special permission from the government. (Permanent residents are granted a hearing, but the judge still has limited authority to prevent deportation.) Obama's draft bill would it possible for more immigrants convicted of minor criminal offenses to remain in the United States by giving judges far greater discretion to decide whether they should be deported. The proposal would redefine an aggravated felony to encompass crimes that carry at least a five-year penalty. It also would require fraud offenses to result in at least $100,000 in losses for victims rather than the current $10,000 to be classified as aggravated felonies. That doesn't mean that all immigrants convicted of more minor crimes would be granted a reprieve from deportation: Rather, it would give immigration judges greater leeway to decide whether they should be deported or get a second chance. (Under Obama's draft bill, undocumented immigrants would be disqualified from receiving legal status if they serve more than a year in prison for a crime they've committed.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The proposed changes have heartened immigration advocates, who believe that the draft bill reveals the White House's concern for due process and fairness. "The reason that's so important is because immigration judges have no jurisdiction over the kind of release in terms of an aggravated felony," says Leopold. "If somebody's committed a crime, let an immigration judge make the decision." But the proposed changes are likely to be contentious: The Senate's bipartisan immigration group has yet to support such reforms, which weren't detailed in Obama's initial framework for reform. And immigration skeptics believe that loosening such standards would lead potentially dangerous, destructive criminals to remain in the United States.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

The 1984 Olympics fueled L.A.’s war on crime. Will the 2028 Games do the same?

During the bidding process, the major concern of the International Olympic Committee was the city’s legendary problem with traffic and congestion. Security and visas for foreign athletes have also been central concerns, but they have not been viewed as an obstacle to hosting a successful Games. Perhaps they should be.  As Los Angeles officials prepared for the 1984 Olympics, they were not concerned about the fate of African American or Latino youths living in neighborhoods devastated by an economic recession, unemployment rates that had topped 40 percent or a growing drug epidemic. Rather, they focused on combating the international attention that drug-related crime and rising gang violence had brought to the city. Such attention, officials feared, would ruin the image of Los Angeles as a city of the future and gateway to the Pacific Rim. To ensure that these African American and Latino youths did not embarrass Los Angeles on the world stage, local lawmakers, national security administrators and officials from the Los Angeles Police Department invested heavily not in jobs programs or addiction services, but in get-tough policing and security measures. As a result, for many poor African American or Latino youths living in the South Central neighborhoods surrounding the Coliseum — the venue which hosted opening and closing ceremonies as well as track and field events — the Olympic Games did not lead to prosperity. But they did lead to the greater possibility of police harassment, arrest and incarceration that came to be associated with the War on Drugs.   The same reliance on federal resources accelerated the city’s militarized police tactics three decades ago. The LAPD used its federally allocated Olympic budget to buy an arsenal of machine guns, infrared-enhanced viewing devices and a radio system for its SWAT teams. The department also deployed spatially targeted policing operations for Olympic security in 1984. To do so they fast-tracked a new wave of recruits through training to conduct what Commander William Rathburn, the LAPD’s Olympic coordinator and future director of the gang and drug sweep program, called an “unprecedented” crime-fighting project. Cooperation among local, state and federal agencies also helped. More than 170 police agencies teamed up to create a crime alert network stretching from Oregon to the Mexican border during the month of the Games. The Olympics Major Crime Task Force, made up of LAPD, Los Angeles Sheriff Department and FBI officers, conducted mass sweeps to rid the Coliseum area of gang members, drug dealers and homeless residents before the Games. Partnering with the Department of Defense, the LAPD hired additional officers, at a cost of more than $20 million, to “sanitize the area” and keep crime to a minimum during the Games. These resources and tactics didn’t disappear when the athletes left town. They would continue to be used for aggressive policing and punitive policies in the city’s most vulnerable communities in the years that followed. On Feb. 6, 1985, an LAPD SWAT team used a military-grade V-100 tank-like vehicle received from the Olympics and equipped with a 14-foot battering ram to smash down a wall of a suspected “rock house.” The officers found two women and three children eating ice cream, no guns, a small amount of marijuana and no cocaine.  Garcetti and other boosters can praise the 2028 bid and its potential profitability as a means of making Los Angeles a more equitable and prosperous city just as Mayor Tom Bradley did in 1984. But without paying serious attention to the ways the 1984 Olympics expanded police militarization and authority, they may very well find that the Games will leave an expanded security state in place, one with the potential to exacerbate tensions between the police and residents of color in the future.

Trump wants to empower local police to enforce immigration law, raising fears of racial profiling

President Trump on Wednesday directed his homeland security secretary to deputize local law enforcement officials to enforce immigration laws, a move that civil rights advocates fear could embolden police to racially profile those they encounter. The directive came as part of a sweeping executive order that cracks down on people in the country without documentation and the cities that don’t readily hand them over for deportation.  The directives send “a shot across the bow of immigrant communities and those localities or states that are welcoming of immigrant communities,” said Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Certainly, I think the immediate purpose is to scare immigrant communities and to scare states and localities that have these so-called sanctuary policies, but I do think there’s meat to this,” Wang said. “It’s not an empty letter, and it’s not an empty threat.”  Trump had promised on the campaign trail to crack down on illegal immigration, and his early actions make good on that vow. He also signed an order Wednesday attempting to spur construction of a proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement still has 36 agreements in 16 states, but they are all in jails, not with local or state police agencies, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman said. Jessica M. Vaughan, the director of policy studies and the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates reduced immigration levels, said in 2008 there were more than 60 agreements, including three dozen involving work outside of jails. She said the agreements were a “great program” that at one point were responsible for nearly 20 percent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement criminal deportations.  Trump’s order, Wang said, would “unleash police agencies that want to get into the deportation business.” Trump also on Wednesday ordered the return of the Secure Communities program, another controversial immigration enforcement mechanism that the Obama administration had dialed back. The program, which was administered from 2008 to 2014, checked the fingerprints of everyone taken into custody in the United States against immigration records, and immigration officials would then move for them to be detained and possibly deported.  “It’s basically just broadening again the untrammeled discretion of ICE agents to determine who they want to pursue for deportation purposes,” Wang said. Trump also gave his homeland security secretary power to designate sanctuary jurisdictions, and he decreed that such jurisdictions should not receive federal grant money. D.C. officials warned that the nation’s capital could lose millions — or even billions — in funding over the order, though it remains to be seen if and under what circumstances federal officials will actually act on it. There is no uniform definition of a sanctuary city. Some places refuse detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement; others provide identification cards and driver’s license to undocumented immigrants. Trump’s order seemed to define such jurisdictions only as those that violate a federal law saying officials may not restrict government entities from sending or receiving information regarding a person’s immigration status.

Homeland Security chief says administration is just ‘enforcing the law’ on immigration

MEXICO CITY — Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly on Friday defended the Trump administration’s policy of targeting immigrant families that pay to bring their children up from Central America, saying that the United States is finally “enforcing the law” on illegal immigration in that and other ways. During an interview at the conclusion of a three-day visit to Mexico, Kelly described the migration flow, which has sent hundreds of thousands of people north to the United States in recent years, as an “overwhelmingly economic” phenomenon rather than a matter of people fleeing violence, as many in Central America insist. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have focused on detaining and deporting people with criminal records, he said, despite allegations from the Mexican government and others about a wider crackdown. But they have also begun arresting people who pay smugglers to bring their children or other young relatives into the country. “If they do have family in the United States that then says, ‘We’ll take them and sponsor them,’ we’re going to look at the family,” Kelly said of youngsters apprehended at the border. “If the family is illegal in the United States and we can make the case, which I think is very easy to make, that they were part of this human-smuggling process, then they broke the law. And we’ll take the appropriate measures.” President Trump’s executive orders and harsh rhetoric on immigration have alarmed many immigrants and their advocates. While deportations are roughly similar to levels under the Obama administration, the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants has risen sharply under Trump. Mexican officials have grown increasingly concerned about who is being deported from the United States and raised that issue with Kelly during his visit. The Mexican government, through its embassy in Washington, has compiled a list of deportees who may have been “subject to a violation of due process” and are looking for relief from the U.S. government, said Carlos Sada, a deputy foreign minister in charge of North American affairs. “These cases are something where the law has been applied dramatically,” Sada said in an interview. Sada said that ICE agents are applying the law more strictly than in the past and that they should use more “flexibility,” particularly in cases of immigrants who have lived for years in the United States, have children, are not violent and do not pose a threat to the country. Kelly, in the interview, said that ICE “doesn’t do sweeps, doesn’t do roadblocks, doesn’t do raids into places of employment where they round everyone up and check on them.” But in the course of an arrest, an agent can ask other people in the vicinity about their immigration status and detain those people, Kelly said. “We much prefer to do these in jails, but since many jails don’t cooperate with us, then we have to do this in neighborhoods,” he said. The other population of deportees, he said, consists of people who have gone through the immigration court process and been ordered to leave the country. “These are court-ordered deportations,” he said. “I get a lot of calls from members of Congress on individual cases. What I say to them is: ‘I’ve got a court order. I can’t ignore it.’ ” “I’m going after the people who have broken U.S. law, in addition to being in the United States illegally,” he said. “So when members of Congress and others threaten me and chastise me for not using my discretion, I am.” Kelly said that under the Trump administration, about 45,000 people of Mexican descent have been detained in the United States but that the Mexican government has called to question only a “handful” of the cases. Before Trump’s private meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto at the Group of 20 summit Friday in Hamburg, Trump told reporters that he “absolutely” still wants Mexico to pay for his proposed border wall. Kelly said that in his discussions with Mexican officials since Wednesday, “we didn’t once talk about the wall.” Kelly — who was accompanied for parts of his visit here by CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — held a number of meetings with top Mexican officials, including Peña Nieto and Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray. On Thursday, Kelly met with the leaders of Mexico’s army and navy at a military base in Acapulco, which has been the deadliest Mexican city for several years running. On the same morning as his visit, a prison riot in Acapulco left 28 people dead, several of them beheaded, according to Mexican officials. Along with the Mexican military leaders, Kelly flew to the opium poppy fields of Guerrero and watched as Mexican soldiers burned crops. Guerrero produces more than half of Mexico’s poppy and supplies much of the heroin consumed in the United States. Kelly described the U.S. opioid epidemic — in which some 60,000 people died last year — as a crisis that needs more attention. “We should be ashamed of ourselves at not having gotten our arms around this problem,” he said.

Trump’s claim that sanctuary cities ‘breed crime’

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump regularly blasted “sanctuary” cities by featuring family members of victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in such cities. So it is no surprise that Trump’s immigration executive order directs federal agencies to withhold grant funding for sanctuary jurisdictions. Trump claims that sanctuary cities “breed crime.” Is that the case? (The White House did not respond to our requests for evidence to back up the claim. We dug into it anyway.)  Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can issue an “immigration detainer,” or a request to be notified when a noncitizen convicted of a crime is being released at state or local levels. ICE can then take custody of the offenders and figure out if they should be deported. But some agencies decide not to alert ICE. Some fear that victims and potential witnesses may not come forward to report crimes if they are afraid of being reported to federal authorities for their immigration status. Others cite dwindling local and state law enforcement resources.  Trump likes to use stories like Steinle’s to assert that sanctuary policies are a public safety threat. But there is little research looking at the impact of sanctuary policies on crime. It’s a difficult correlation to study; many factors affect crime, and state and local law enforcement do not always track inmate citizenship status.    Other studies showed that in some jurisdictions, immigrant-friendly policies led to a decrease in crime, PolitiFact found. Opponents maintain that sanctuary policies are a threat. The issue is not crime rates, but the release of criminal aliens who commit additional crimes, said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for lower levels of legal and illegal immigration.  Of the roughly 8,100 individuals released without being turned over to ICE, 73 percent (6,278) had no subsequent criminal arrest and 27 percent (2,414) were associated with a subsequent criminal arrest.  Trump claims sanctuary cities “breed crime.” But there is limited research on the impact of sanctuary policies and crime. The research that does exist, including one study published by advocates of immigration, challenges Trump’s claim. These studies either found no statistically significant impact of sanctuary policies on crime, or a reduction in crime due to immigrant-friendly policing strategies. Sanctuary jurisdictions release inmates after their criminal case is complete, and extensive research shows noncitizens are not more prone to criminality than U.S.-born citizens. Moreover, some sanctuary jurisdictions do cooperate with the federal government if they believe the inmate is a public safety threat. It’s one thing to raise concerns about the impact of sanctuary policies, but Trump goes too far declaring that the cities “breed crime.” He not only makes a correlation, but also ascribes a causation, without facts to support either. We award Three Pinocchios.       Share the Facts

Crime stats should inform the public. Trump is misusing them to scare us instead.

Federal crime data collection relies on voluntary self-reporting to the Justice Department by state and local law enforcement agencies. And Washington has long demonstrated an inability to compile it, even when the law mandates such collection. For example, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 required the attorney general to publish annual reports on the use of excessive force by police. Those efforts failed largely because compliance was voluntary, and many state and local law enforcement agencies did not participate. Within just a few years and with no consequences, the Justice Department abandoned any efforts to comply with the law. The type of data required by the statute on excessive force simply isn’t collected in any usable form by most of the more than 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States. And where it is collected, agencies are often reluctant to report it because they don’t want the feds to see them as a problem.   The government already does such a bad job of collecting vital data that starting a new weekly report — involving statistics that no agency is likely to be keeping, to prove a political point — is the last thing it should be attempting. Focusing on the areas where past data collection efforts required by statute have failed should be the priority. All too often, criminal justice policy is driven by outliers, to the detriment of research and data collection policies that would provide far more substantive knowledge about illegal activities.  Available crime data does not support many of Trump’s claims, and his continual misuse of crime statistics is reckless and bizarre. In the end, it’s simply bad crime policy.

Defiant LAPD chief says department will refuse to help Donald Trump’s deportation efforts

For now, Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has no plans to help him do it.   Beck called any effort to arrest and deport people a “monumental task” and estimated that there are 500,000 undocumented residents in the city of Los Angeles alone. “This is a population we police by creating partnerships, not by targeting them because of their immigration status,” he added. Since the earliest days of his presidential campaign, Trump has made immigration enforcement a central pillar of his controversial message to voters. He has promised to build a massive wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, labeled undocumented immigrants “rapists” and pledged to aggressively deport millions of people.  “What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” he said. Stahl had pressed Trump about his campaign pledge to deport “millions and millions of undocumented immigrants.” Trump told her that after securing the border, his administration would make a “determination” on the remaining undocumented immigrants in the country. “After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about — who are terrific people. They’re terrific people, but we are going to make a determination at that,” Trump said. “But before we make that determination … it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.”  As for how many of those people are illegally present noncitizens, there are conflicting figures from the think tank Migration Policy Institute and the Center for Immigration Studies. In a fact check, The Post rated Trump’s figures “Two Pinocchios,” noting that federal immigration enforcement data is “not always transparent or reliable.”  If there was one location in the United States in which Trump could make the largest dent in the country’s undocumented population, it would be sprawling Los Angeles County, where citizens and noncitizens have lived side-by-side for decades.   The LAPD has spent decades avoiding a significant role in the enforcement of federal immigration policies, even as the city’s undocumented immigrant population swelled.  In a subsequent interview with the L.A. Times, Beck reiterated that working with the Department of Homeland Security on deportation is not the department’s job. “I don’t intend on doing anything different,” he said. “We are not going to engage in law enforcement activities solely based on somebody’s immigration status. We are not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts. That is not our job, nor will I make it our job.”  “The Los Angeles community has become significantly more diverse during the past several years with substantial numbers of people from different ethnic and sociological backgrounds migrating to this City,” the order states. “Many aliens, whether from Latin American, African, Asian or European countries, are legal residents. Others are undocumented and are residing in the City without legal sanction.” Since Beck became police chief in November 2009, the Times reported, the department has gone even further to remove itself from playing a role in deportations. Officers no longer hand people “arrested for low-level crimes to federal agents for deportation and [have] moved away from honoring federal requests to detain inmates who might be deportable past their jail terms,” the paper reported. Beck told the Times that his command staff has met with community leaders and has delivered a consistent message when asked about immigration enforcement: “This is the same LAPD you had Monday, a week ago,” he said. “We have not changed because of the election on Tuesday. We have the same principles. We have the same values,” he said. “This is not going to change the way that the Los Angeles Police Department enforces the law.” The Times reported that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti also reiterated that police would continue to enforce Special Order 40. “Our law enforcement officers and LAPD don’t go around asking people for their papers, nor should they,” he said. “That’s not the role of local law enforcement.” Though Trump has threatened to withhold federal tax dollars, mayors of U.S. cities across the country have promised to protect their residents from deportation. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio even left open the possibility of deleting a database with the names of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants living in New York. He was joined in opposition by Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel and Seattle’s Ed Murray, both of whom have pledged to resist efforts to deport their residents.

In Va., lawmakers want to tighten stance on illegal immigration

RICHMOND — Amid the national debate over illegal immigration, several Republican lawmakers in Virginia are trying to tighten the state’s already aggressive stance. Three Republican legislators have pitched separate bills aiming to crack down on people living in Virginia who are in the United States illegally. Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William) wants to make sure cities and counties comply with federal immigration detainers, which usually are requests to local law enforcement officials to hold jailed individuals beyond their release dates while federal agents decide whether to begin the deportation process. State Sen. Richard H. Black (R-Loudoun) has a bill that would hold cities legally responsible if officials release an illegal immigrant who then commits a crime. And state Sen. Thomas A. Garrett Jr. (R-Buckingham) wants to prohibit “sanctuary cities,” a term for communities that try to block illegal immigrants from being turned over to federal authorities. “It’s the role of the states to tell the federal government to do their damn job,” said Garrett, who is running for Congress. “Obama, Congress, the entire federal government is pretending there’s nothing to see here.” Compromise legislation will come before lawmakers for final votes in the last week of the legislative session, which begins Monday, and it is unclear whether amended versions of some of the measures will pass. But the debate has tapped into a national concern about illegal immigration voiced by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. Also fueling worry is the 2015 high-profile shooting death in San Francisco of 32-year-old Kate Steinle, allegedly by a Mexican national who had previously been deported five times. Lawmakers also cited the terrorist attacks in Paris last year and said they had concerns that Syrian refugees fleeing the Islamic State would export terrorism to the United States through federal resettlement programs. Similar laws were put forward this legislative session in Florida, Arizona, Nebraska, Kansas and Wisconsin, according to Church World Service, which tracks what it calls anti-sanctuary-city bills. So far, only North Carolina has enacted such a law. “Unfortunately, this really is a symptom of the discriminatory rhetoric in this election cycle targeting immigrants and Syrian refugees,” said the Rev. Noel Andersen, the national grass-roots coordinator for CWS. “The anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim organizations have taken this opportunity to join forces.” Opponents say the measures could discourage victims from reporting crimes because they fear deportation and might undermine efforts by Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) to portray Virginia as open to newcomers, thereby hurting the state’s economy. Sen. Scott A. Surovell (D-Fairfax) said the bills are part of a trend first seen in Virginia in 2007 when Prince William County directed police officers to check the immigration status of people if there was probable cause to believe that they were in the country illegally. “We can continue to send that kind of message,” he said in a floor speech. “We can continue to say that Virginia’s not open . . . that Virginia doesn’t like people that don’t look like us or people that don’t share our values.” But Del. David B. Albo (R-Fairfax) said illegal immigration puts too much of a strain on public safety and other resources. He said he began to work on the issue after a dozen of his constituents were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the Pentagon. “I would venture to say we have about every single law that you can have in Virginia to fight illegal immigration,” he said. For example, Virginia already requires law enforcement to check the immigration status of every person who is arrested. Ever since Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (D) issued an opinion last year declaring federal detainer requests optional, lawmakers have looked for ways to make them mandatory. Albo, chairman of the House Courts of Justice Committee that hears these bills, said consensus was building around new language that would require sheriffs to comply with “lawful detainers” before an inmate’s release date, on the condition that federal officers promise to pick up detainees or pay for their stay. That is already what happens in Arlington County, according to Paul Larson, chief deputy at the county sheriff’s office. If U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement makes a detainer request, the federal agency pays for food and medical care and picks them up within 48 hours. “If they didn’t, we would release them,” he said. “They have not missed a person.” As in Arlington, Virginia Beach Sheriff Ken Stolle, a former Republican state senator, said he will not hold anyone past their release date without a judge’s order. “Last thing they want is law enforcement making decisions about who should be held and who should not be held,” he said. “There’s due process. There’s a court system for that.”

When politicians bash immigrants

As fellow GOP presidential candidates, including Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham distance themselves from Donald Trump’s statement that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs . . . bringing crime” and are “rapists,” Ted Cruz says that Mr. Trump is “terrific” and that he “speaks the truth” [“ Trump’s poll surge cheered by (a) Trump, (b) Democrats,” front page, July 2]. Trump’s statements are problematic because they are not the truth. While a few immigrants have been convicted of serious crimes, the vast majority have not. In fact, research by organizations such as the Immigration Policy Center consistently find that immigrants actually commit crimes and are incarcerated at significantly lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens. Violent crime rates have plummeted over the past two decades as the number of immigrants has skyrocketed. When Mr. Trump spouts these falsehoods, and Mr. Cruz affirms them, they are maligning the character of millions of individuals. It’s unacceptable, even if it may be a way to score short-term political points by playing on people’s fears. ****Matthew Soerens** , Wheaton, Ill. **

Republicans need to challenge Democrats on sanctuary cities

If you’re still confused about why Democrats lost the election, look no further than the issues they prioritize. Instead of focusing on jobs, the economy and national security, the Democrats obsess over climate change, bathroom breaks and, curiously, sanctuary cities. Now is a good time for the Republicans to pick some fights, and the issue of sanctuary cities is a prime target. It’s a perfect reminder of what Democrats have become. As my old boss Lee Atwater used to say, “Never kick a man when he is up.” And right now, the Democrats are down, divided and in disarray. The issue of sanctuary cities is one that is ripe for Republicans, if for no other reason than the Democrats’ position is so indefensible. The very idea that city officials will blatantly disobey the law in furtherance of aiding foreign nationals who have entered city limits illegally is wrong on so many levels. Republicans should seize the opportunity to make the Democrats publicly defend their position.   It’s time for Republicans to challenge Democrats on this issue. As long as Trump is still tweeting too much, this is worth a tweet.