Trump Faces Another Sanctuary Cities Defeat (Audio)

Trump was selling fear. The President sought to bully local governments with an unconstitutional executive order threatening all of their funding. He sought to commerce local governments into holding people in jail beyond their released release date. Trump responded to the order as he has before, by criticizing the judge. This morning, he tweeted, first the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban, and now it hits again on sanctuary cities. Both ridiculous rulings.

See you in the Supreme Court. Joining us are Dan's I'm President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Joseph Hollenstein of Council at Landau has Simon and Troy Joe explain the basis of judge or its ruling. Essentially, what the judge was doing with the order was to agree with the final position of the government that it only changed when it came to make an oral argument in his court, and that was that there is a very limited number of funds that are directly connected to

federal immigration, um enforcement. And those are the funds that the federal government can tell states or municipalities, well, we're controlling these if you have particular immigration policies. All of the rest and the and the implication from the and the implication and plain language actually of the original executive order was so broad that it effectively threatened federal funding throughout, um, you know, a local government's budget. And um that's what

the judge struck down. He said, you can't you can't connect an immigration policy to know how many police officers federal government is going to help to fund or law enforcement funding, or housing funding or education funding. And that's really what the executive order was designed to do, was to place all federal funding for local municipalities at risk.

And the judge said, simply can't do that. Now. The federal government, the attorney at the oral argument with this essentially backed away from that very very broad reading, which was what was said throughout the entire um publication process around this. This executive order in the Federal attorney said directly, yes, this more limited version is is the is the version that we need to uphold, and in effect that the final ruling of the judge was to say, yeah, you know,

the most you can do is this limited ruling. Dan. The you know, conservatives were very happy with the decision in one of the Obamacare cases about the Medicaid expansion that said that basically, the you know, the federal government can't put a gun to the head over funding you know, to the states and put limits on how coercive the federal government could be about um conditions on federal funding.

And it feels a bit like the you know that argument has come back to haunt the Trump administration in this case. It's kind of ironic, isn't it the judges relying on that argument to uh to prevent the Trump

administration from enforcing this order. Well, of course, it's very frustrating to see the quickness with which these judges are willing to issue these nationwide and junctions on the strength of rhetoric or broad based language which d o J attorneys a certain court is not the proper interpretation of

the executive order. And in this case, of course, there really isn't even a case or controversy because d o J hasn't actually tried to specifically enforce certainly not the executive order in the way that the Santa Clara and the other counties were asserting it was going to be. But you know, remember Arizona wanted to try to assist the federal government in its own enforcement in enforcing immigration laws,

and that was struck down by federal courts. And now you have the federal government exercising a pleanering power, not the commandeer state functions, you know, essential sovereign state functions, but simply to assist the federal government in accordance with federal law in turning over information about an aliens status and in certain cases detaining aliens, putting them on civil immigration holes until Immigration Customs enforcement can come and pick

them up. And you know, none of the you know, to some extent, the judge just kind of got way ahead of himself by saying, Okay, I'm going to enjoy something that the Trump administration wasn't even planning to do, and and it has enormous political implications because of the way the media supported. The way that d o J was planning to interpret this was quite narrowly tailored to law enforcement related functions that are directly related to the

process of of holding aliens or verifying status. So you can argue it's a draconian, drastically overbroad injunction, completely unsupported by the record, and once once again an example of political judicial legislating from the bench. We're talking about a federal judge in San Francisco blocking a Trump order to

withhold funding to sanctuary cities yesterday. Also yesterday, a group of mayors and major police officers met with A. G. Jeff Sessions to talk about the very issue of what is a sanctuary city, and they came out with different impressions, although many said order would be limited to the law on transmitting citizenship information, and that law is one which the Obama administration said last July it would require compliance with We've been speaking with Dan Stein, president of the

Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Joseph Hohenstein, a council at Landau, Hess Simon and choi Dan. If this order is just limited to the order that these cities have already been under obligation to follow under the Obama administration, what was the point of making the order in the

first place. That's a really good question because of d o J asserts Council asserts in court that this is how they're going to enforce it, quite narrowly and consistent with jurisdictions that the Obama administration said, we're not providing information pursuing to federal law. That's a usc three. Then what's the big noise? I mean, what's the big deal? Why issue a nationwide injunction to stop the Trump administration from doing what it wasn't going to do in the

first place. And you can't help but believe that there was a political element where the judge judge or felt that he could invoke a teentiment and constitutional claim, which is really quite ridiculous when you think about it, involving the provision of federal grants. When you have defendants who are asserting, look, we're not trying to interfere with essential

state functions. We simply want states to assist the federal government in verifying an alien status consistent with federal law, which has always been something that the supremacy clause under federal law has entitled the federal government to do. Now that could the judge did say, Congress could go in and change the law. The Congress can certainly condition broader grants and these narrow grants to a state's willingness to

assist in enforcing federal law. But the line on what becomes commandeering and when you're coercing a state to say detained aliens or actually go out and find them, you know, it's it's a pretty bright one. But this case really didn't address that. Joe, you know, would disagree on that. Yeah, so that this department did say that there was you know, this was a very narrow thing to really change the law. It was really more of a bully pulpit kind of order.

And the judge found that that that's not the way he read the order. Can you explain why did the judge read the order more broadly than the Justice Department did? Well? For two reasons. One, the order itself is written that broadly, and there are specific sections of the order that place any federal funds at risk. And second, contrary to the position that was taken after the government was sued and

taken into court. Before they were taken into court, the Attorney General and the president and the president's press secretary, we're all talking about this is going to make sure that we turned the financial screws, which is effectively commandeering on the local um the local municipalities, and in in this situation, that concept of the bully pulpit. To think about the last president who really used the concept of bully pulpit, you know, Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt's philosophy was

speak softly and carry a big stick. What this is is speaking loudly but carrying a toothpick. Because what they wanted to do when it was finally challenged, when the bullies were finally challenged in court, what happened was they backed off and is it all We didn't really mean it. But that's not what that either the order says, and it's not what they were saying before they were challenged.

And um, the politicization is not coming from the judge here, it's coming from the administration itself that issues and sends out orders like this that are written extremely poorly, very overbroadly, and in ways that are designed to stoke concern and

worry and fear. It interrupts the planning process. For a city like San Francisco that gets of its budget overall for things like housing, things like police, and things like its schools, all of that funding was at risk with the way that the order is written and the way that both the president and the president, his Attorney general and his Press secretary, we're all saying they were going

to enforce this. Dan, do you Dan, do you agree that President Trump made a great deal of the signing of this order and it was televised and he said this is going to help with immigration reform, And if it's the same as what Obama was doing, why make a big deal about it on his part? Well, again, that they're you know, there are traditionally rules of construction as well as rules regarding standing and rightness for when a judge is actually supposed to decide whether the plaintiff

has injury in fact. And at this point, until you actually see how the executive order is going to be enforced, until General Sessions actually seeks to withdraw grant money or condition spending and specifically seeks to enforce it, it's hard to understand why the judge would have even proceeded to try to interpret the executive order. And if you allow the judge to start taking in to account again, we see campaign statements and campaign rhetoric being used by judges

to go ahead and try to interpret executive orders. However you know, imprecisely they may have been drafted. Well, there's no end to the kind of pernicious political nature of that kind of legal interpretation. Political campaigns are by definition raucous uh, you know, loud, imprecise uh debates, and they're not. They shouldn't take the place in a courtroom for precise statutory construction. The rules of statutory construction as well as

article free standing. In this case, nobody had tried to take any money specifically away from these jurisdictions yet, and so even you know, these are preliminary junctions being issued even before there's been a full briefing on the marriage. I'm gonna have to stop you there, Dan, We're going to continue with this conversation at some point. Again, I'm sure that's Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and Joseph Hohenstein of Council at LANDAU has

Simon and Choi coming up. We are going to be going live to the White House briefing on the tax plan, and we're also going to be talking about the oversight panel saying that President Donald Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn appeared to violate federal law. I'm June Grasso with Michael Beast. This is Bloomberg