Trump vs. Dyer on Immigration

of deportation raids. This is coming as the Trump administration is obviously trying to institute the policies that Trump ran on that received that have large popular support for mass deportation of illegal aliens and the rhetoric from Dire There's some things too, I kind of agree with in some things where I'm like, all right, let's let's pump the brakes. I must admit on the immigration on a lot of immigration enforcement issues, There's parts of me that are conflicted

with some of the things Trump has done. For one of the executive orders that were issued by the Trumpets administration was getting rid of certain kinds of protections, saying that ICE or Border Patrol agents could not arrest people on the grounds of churches or schools. Now, on the one hand, there's a part of me that does not really like this policy. I Okay, someone might take advantage of a church well in order to avoid deportation. I mean, they're not going to live at the church, And I'm

i don't know. I don't like the idea of law enforcement being able to come onto the premises of a church and arrest someone initiate deportation proceedings just because someone happened to go to the church. On the other hand, if you've got someone who's like what, you've got someone who's a genuinely really bad guy who's taking advantage of the fact that churches and schools whatever are kind of safe zones or safe havens, that is also not good.

So I'm a little conflicted on that front. There's a part of me that would like protection for this, but I think Mayor Dyer's attitude is kind of bizarre, So he writes he says this. Dyer said he remains committed to ensuring a safe and welcoming place for everyone who calls this city home. Why why is that his job? Why is he committed to ensuring that Fresno is a safe and welcoming place for everyone who calls the city home. Everyone, You're not committed to making it a safe and welcoming

place for criminals? Why are we making it a safe and welcoming place for people who are not legally permitted to be in the United States of America. My primary responsibility, DIYer says, is to ensure the safety of everyone, regardless of their immigration status. Wouldn't checking people's immigration status help with safety If someone is not legally supposed to be there, doesn't that make them more of a I mean, we haven't properly vetted them as a result for their criminal history.

He goes on to be even more emphatic. In twenty sixteen, Dyer told The Bee that officers are not interested in a person's immigration status, but only whether they are involved in criminal activity. That was, in twenty sixteen a quote he gave to The Bee when he was a chief of police in the city of Fresno. Why would the police not be interested in someone's immigration status only if they've committed crime? First of all, again, being in the

country illegally is unlawful activity. Secondly, if they are also here illegally and they have committed a crime, isn't that an even greater incentive to get this person out of here. Dyer continues to say, we have worked hard to earn the trust of our immigrant community and to ensure that they feel comfortable reaching out to law enforcement when they need help or to provide information to officers if federal mandates require local law enforcement to participate in immigration enforcement.

I want to be very clear, Presno, will not sacrifice the trust we've worked so hard to build with our community. All Right. I will admit the question of can the federal can a federal agency common deer a state or local police agency, or direct the work of state and local agencies to insist that they cooperate with federal authorities, that that is a tricky question of federalism, quickie, tricky sort of con law question. To what extent can the state?

Can state authorities cooperate? They can voluntarily cooperate, but if they don't want to cooperate, to what extent can the federal government actually coerce local agencies to work with them?

I agree it's a disputed constitutional question. I could understand maybe a state or local elected official or law enforcement official being jealous of rightly jealous to protect this sort of constitutional ordering of things, this federalist principle that no, the federal government can't tell us to do as far as immigration enforcement issues. But I feel like Diyer's going

way beyond that. I think Diyer's going to the point of saying protecting the immigrant community, that our affection for the immigrant community is more important than a legal mandate to cooperate in immigration enforcement. And I guess I find that to be wild. Dyer knows full well what percentage of people locked up in California jails and prisons are not in this country illegally, or the very least he can make a very educated guess on that front. And

this is what I hate about the immigration debate. I the pro I guess, the standard liberal position is just totally okay with this situation where million, hundreds of thousands of people are coming over the border with no vetting whatsoever, and yet they want to engage in just these broad generalizations and cliches about well, you know, we're a whole nation of immigrants, says Margaret Brennan. Was you know, trying to explain to JD. Vance and Jdci Okay, yeah, we're

a nation of immigrants. It doesn't mean we have to have the stupidest immigration policy known to man. We're a nation of immigrants and these people are just here to work. Some of them are just here to work. But you have no you have done no vetting to establish that that's the problem with this system. You have not vetted

this person adequately. You don't know. You don't know when a person has overstayed their visa, when this person came across the border unlawfully, when this person made a phony asylum claim and is never coming back for their court date, and god knows, you don't know. So this idea that dire is taking this posture. We've worked hard to earn the trust of our immigrant community and to ensure that they feel comfortable reaching out to law enforcement when they

need help or to provide information to officers. It really feels like this Jerry Dyer way of focusing on small picture thinking without having any kind of big picture concepts, like he wants to be sure that Latinos would feel okay calling the police about something, as opposed to the bigger picture question of Hey, if all these people shouldn't be here, shouldn't be here and are the ones committing crimes,

maybe you wouldn't have this problem to begin with. Fresno will not sacrifice the trust we've worked so hard to build without community. Our community. Whose community, what do you mean our community? They're not even in the country legally and that's specifically who we are talking about. Again, I'll admit I'm not crazy about the church and school thing. I maybe I've got just a soft liberal heart in my old age, or you know, I'm listening to the

Catholic Church on this. I'm going to talk about the Catholic Church, by the way, because there's been a lot of stories about this that I think are phony with regards to the Catholic Church's alleged role in illegal immigration. But I find this attitude on the left to be somewhat ludicrous of no, no, well, no, this is our community, we're gonna make it well if these people have come into the country illegally, are we just taking the posture

of absolutely amnesty for all of them? That's what we want, Just absolutely amnesty for everyone who came into the country illegally. Absolutely amnesty for everyone, because they might have children, because they might have roots in the community in some way. After a certain period of time, that all the other considerations that are involved with an orderly regulation of the immigration process, that all of that goes away, that no enforcement is permitted. I just find that to be excessive,

and I find Dyer's attitude strange. I mean, I guess he's just kind of committed to this. He's a cop, he has a cop. He wanted the immigrant community to be able to call the police about stuff, and so he wants to maintain trust and make them not be afraid that they're going to get deported if they call the police. But what if it's someone who should be deported? Dire is also, I'll concede working with a complicated legal framework.

So he's got federal mandates. Well, he's got federal executive orders from the Trump administration to do certain things, but he's also in California. California has legal mandates on law enforcement agencies. We are a sanctuary state by you know, state statute. California law enforcement agencies are limited in their ability to cooperate under state law, limited in their ability to cooperate with ice and border patrol and other kinds

of federal immigration enforcement agencies. And that is something that Fresno PD, for example, is required to follow. Some people, What do you mean for us to follow state law but not a federal executive For local governments and local police are creatures of state government. They are extensions of state government. They have to follow what the statement, what the state mandates. They're local governments don't have the kind of independence from state governments the way that state governments

do from the federal government. Okay, local governments have to follow state mandates. It's a very clear precise thing. When if you've got a federal executive order telling Fresno PD what to do, this is not really a federal versus local thing. It's ultimately a federal versus state thing. What do these state officials Fresno PD? And that's what they are there. Yes, they are a local police department, but they are extensions of state government. That that's what this is.

So Dire is sort of a little bit caught in the middle. I think he has to follow state law. President ped has to follow state law about not cooperating with the federal government. But now we've got these federal mandates coming out that are I think of, you know, highly disputed. Again, this is a highly disputed constitutional question whether a federal immigration agency can sort of command a local law enforcement agency a state ultimately a state law

enforcement agency to do something. And Dire I think is clearly realized. I think Dyer is making the strategic decision that his bread is going to get buttered more by the Democrats in California state government than by the federal government. I think Dyer is basically just decided this. He needs Gavin Newsom to follow through with giving him all that you know that two hundred million dollars we're still waiting for in downtown Presno infrastructure. He's not going to do

things to tick off Gavin Newsom. And I'm sure nothing with tick Gavin Newsom or Rob Bonta off more than Jerry Dyer all of a sudden announcing, oh, yeah, we're going to follow this executive order. We're going to do what whatever President Trump says. So I guess I understand the pressures around Dier and the legal mandates that Presno PD are working under, but his attitude is just really aggressive. It seems like very this is not a conservative approach

to immigration that the Dyer is embodying here. And I don't know if Dyer has any designs or sites set on any kind of higher public office beyond being the mayor of Fresno. I don't know that he's ever indicated such, but I wonder if he's trying to carve some kind of future like that. For himself. I'm not sure when we return the humanitarian issues surrounding immigration. On the other side of it, the problems associated with unrestricted immigration, that's

next on the John Girardi Show. I'm going to level with you guys that I'm a little bit conflicted about what's going on with immigration enforcement policy, probably a lot more than most conservative talkers are. I want to take the statements of Catholic leaders seriously. I am a Catholic. I'm first That's what I try to be, first and foremost in formulating what I believe and what I think

and how I talk about it. And I think that one of the things to understand about Catholic teaching is that it's not a complete handbook for answering every single political question under the sun. The Catholic Church basically gives various kinds of ideal and principles, and it's the duty of Catholics in the here and now to suss out how those ideals and principles apply in our present day situation.

The opinions of people like bishops, even the Pope on those kinds of changing, historically contingent, factually contingent questions are not infallible at all. In fact, there are very few times when what the Church is teaching is Catholics would deem it to be infallible. And it's usually just kind of core stuff that's repeated again and again and again over the course of the church's history. So it's not that every Catholic has to agree on every single issue

all of the time. But I do want to take these things seriously because it's not just like, ah, you can just believe whatever you you know, just believe whatever you want about this contingent historical circumstance. Well, no, if people are being seriously treated unjustly or justly, it really matters. It really matters what you think about these things and how you fall on these things. Is Donald Trump's Immigration Enforcement Grand Plan inflicting serious acts of injustice on large

numbers of people. If it is, then that's bad. If it's not, then that would be good. And I have seen I will note in all of this that the American bishops have received some criticisms that are fair and some that are not fair. First of all, I think some of the criticisms about all the Catholic bishops are getting rich off of they're getting rich off of illegal immigration because they get all these grants for like refugee

resettlement and stuff like that. Well, yeah, they get grants for refugee resettlement or immigrant resettlement that they use on immigrant resettlement. They're not getting rich off of this, okay. And by the also, when we say the Catholic Church or the bishops, we mean a number of different things. For one thing, a lot of a lot of it is Catholic nonprofit agencies sort of Catholic charities types entities

type entities in various areas. They have gotten a lot of these grants, and a lot of these Catholic charity type entities are not always directly under the control of a bishop. For example, Fresno Catholic Charities, which does really wonderful work with poor people, by the way, is not directly under the control of the Bishop of Fresno. It's actually a separate corporate entity. So and basically nobody's getting

rich off of this scheme. Okay. These are non profit entities with not highly paid staffs and executives, and the money they're getting for immigrant or refugee resettlement is less than what they have to spend, so they're not like

making sweet bank off of this whole thing. I think that's a misconception that certain kind of conservative Catholics have been trying to promote, just as because they have this sort of hostile attitude against bishops, thinking that they're all a bunch of liberal squishes, and certainly there have been liberal squishy bishops. I don't know that this is necessarily it. And I think the attitude of priests and bishops and pastors who are directly pastoring churches that are full of

immigrants is gonna be one of concern. These are people that you see at church and whose confessions you hear, and babies you baptize, and sons and daughters you marry. And to see people in that situation distressed about whether or not they're going to be deported, that's a difficult human thing to be dealing with. And they have concern and a protectiveness towards that. And I can see the frustration on the part of Christian leaders to especially over

the last look at the last six years. We go from the Trump administration Trump one point zero, very restrictive, not letting a ton of people in, then all of a sudden we have this total one to eighty with the Biden administration comes in and basically with a big, wide open door, everybody come on in. People rely on that they come in, and in some cases it's because the United States is either openly or tacitly waving them in. The ridiculous CBP one app where people are sort of

pre getting their asylum claim court date in place. I mean the Trump administration, the Biden administration just signaling that they're not going to take border enforcement seriously. People come in based on relying on that, and now all of a sudden, here comes the Trump administration with the most relative to that, the complete one eighty draconian mass deportation policy. I can understand the whiplash that someone in those shoes might feel, so I get the human side of that

to see people who are upset. On the other hand, and I think I'll dig into this when we return. I think the problem is that it should be in some sense, it makes sense, it should be the role of the position, the attitude of the Catholic Church of hey,

we're just here to help people. We're here to provide them with food or to provide them with shelter, to teach them about Jesus Christ to you know, we're not gonna be cracking down on the immigration status of people we're trying to serve in the midst of our nonprofit organization. That's not what we're trying to do. I mean, you know, even within the context of my Obria clinic that I started,

I don't want my Obria clinic. I don't want to be like I don't need to be the immigration police for our patients to see are you here legally or not? If they've you know, hey, you can get medical now if you're here in the country illegally in the state of California. Ah. I don't think that's necessarily a wise policy. I think that's a bad incentive. It's a bad way

to incentivize people to come here. But in the context of our clinic, where we're serving lower income women with prenatal care, I don't want to have to be the one concerned with that. That should be immigration authorities who should have taken care of that problem on the front end. Frankly, and I can see the position of the Catholic Church to say with you know, in response to this executive order from the Trump administration that no immigration enforcement actions

can actually happen at churches or schools. I could see the Catholic Church saying, you know what, that that sucks. No, we don't want people are here to worship. Maybe they did dumb things in the past, maybe they made bad decisions to get here, but they're here now and they're worshiping here, and we don't want our church to be the place where immigration enforcement happens. I completely get that perspective from the Catholic Church, and frankly I agree with it.

Now when don't we return? Though, I want to push back against some of the soft Christian attitudes about characterizing immigrants as all being wonderful assault of the earth people. Many are, but many are not. That's next on the

John Frodi Show. We've learned over the course of American history that a kind of bigotry that sort of pre judges has prejudice against a certain group of people, that they all have a certain kind of characteristic, they all engage in certain kinds of bad behaviors, is something that is harmful to broader society. Having a certain kind of assumption that all black people are bad, therefore I'm not hiring any black people is harmful and malicious and prejudicial

and bad for society. Having these kind of preconceived notions, these kind of preconceived bigotries can in many cases be really really harmful. Something that I think is also true on the flip side, that is more in the realm of rhetoric and political argumentation and sort of pious ideas that people believe is characterizing any one group of people as all being saints. This often happens with jobs and professions, where you'll get some politicians talking about.

there are a lot of people in the middle. I think anyone who's actually in one of those professions will actually be one of the first to vigorously nod their head and affirm that yeah, not everyone in every in

my profession is great at their job. I think we have a real problem in America that one side's way of arguing about the immigration debate is totally dominated by that attitude when it comes to immigrants, treating immigrants as a whole and refusing to distinguish between people who immigrated illegally versus people who immigrated legally versus people makeing a phony refugee claim coming under some sort of cover or

color of law. I think we have a problem that the political left, because of their perception that this group of people will ultimately vote for them because they'll need more social welfare services and they're the party that offers more in social welfare services, that the political left is going to characterize all immigrants as good. The way that people in politics will try to characterize all teachers is

good for some kind of political end. The way that people in politics will characterize all members of the military is good for some kind of political end, or all the members of the FBI is good for some kind of whatever it is. And the fact of the matter is that if you're coming into the country illegally, you've already done one thing that's not great, okay, And so

much of illegal immigration is connected with crime. I'm not saying every illegal immigrant or most illegal immigrants are here to murder people, or rob people who rape people, or transport drugs or narcotics or whatever. However, So I learned this talking to an immigration lawyer who's a friend of mine, and he, you know, this is coming from experience working and talking with these people. He told me basically to get through to the border and dropped off where you

can be picked up at a border patrol checkpoint. You have to pay the cartel two thy five hundred dollars to get a coyote or whatever to transport you across the border without detection twelve thousand dollars. So, now this is just his perspective. He's just one guy, But this is a non zero number of a lot of immigrants coming to the border are getting there facilitated getting there by paying the border patrol by excuse me, by the

opposite of the border patrol, by paying drug cartels. I remembered watching a It's one of these kind of documentary type shows, and it's just at a border patrol checkpoint,

a border checkpoint in Texas. Actually it follows a couple of different border checkpoints in a couple of different parts of the country, all at the southern border, where they're seeing the sort of day to day trials and dramas and tribulations of border patrol, you know, finding people doing illegal things, and the amount of narcotics that are being

transported over the border are daggering. The kinds of things that they're discovering are in saying, the finding of you know, children just being sent by themselves with almost no identifying information, just to the borders, walking there by themselves. Some crying nine year old who's scared and doesn't speak a lack of English and doesn't know who you suppose who he or she's supposed to go see. They're scared witless. Also

not good. So a ton of illegal immigration is facilitating the drug trade in this country, a ton of illegal immigration is coming from drug cartels getting people over, A ton of sex trafficking is being facilitated in the context of illegal immigration. All of these things are really really bad that when you look at California prisons, the percentages of people in California prisons who are illegal aliens is enormous.

And yeah, I'm gonna say illegal alien. I'm tired of this sort of fiction that got shoved on millennials that it was somehow an insensitive and evil thing to say illegal alien. Alien is not a derogatory term. It's a legal term of art. It just means someone who's not from this country, someone who is alien from another country. It's not necessarily a derogatory term. If you are an alien who is in the country illegally, I think it's

perfectly reasonable and used in different places in American laws. Statutorily, to call you an illegal alien, it does not mean that your very identity as a human, your ontology is intrinsically illegal, that that's the sum total of who you are as a person, is someone who broke the no you still have human dignity. I'm not like denying that. I'm not saying that illegal aliens should be hung, drawn and quartered, but your presence in the country as a

foreign national is an illegal one. So I think that especially with Christian leaders, and there's a debate about this within the Catholic Church, where yesterday on Meet the Press, Vice President Vance sort of retorted when Margaret Brennan mentioned that the United States Catholic bishops were critical of several

of Trump's immigration policies. Vance sort of retorted that the Catholic bishops have not necessarily been helpful partners in pursuing a sound immigration policy, and this has led to a lot of inter Catholic intra Catholic debate. Is Vance just rejecting the teaching of the Church when it comes to immigration, Well, I don't know that that's necessarily the case. I think the broad strokes of Catholic teaching and immigration are fairly generic.

The broad strokes of Catholic teaching are that countries have a right to regulate their borders. Countries should be generous in allowing people to migrate, but they don't have to let every single person migrate, And they can have some concern for the needs of the home country and the

culture of that home country in regulating immigration. And you know, when the church is writing, when the church teaches on immigration topics, when popes teach on immigration topics, they're teaching not just in the context of America, they're writing in the context of the global church. And you know, thinking about, well, does Poland have to accept every single Turkish refugee who comes in? No, they don't have to. Does Germany or France have to accept every single Afghan or this or

that whatever foreign you know, non Christian refugee that comes in. Well, no, if it's going to fundamentally change the culture of the home country, then that is something to keep in mind. And the resources of the home country have to be taken into account. You can't necessarily you don't necessarily have

the resources to accommodate everybody. By the way, when people complained about the Catholic church getting federal grants for immigrant resettlement or getting money for their donations for immigrant resettlement.

You know why that is. Remember when Ron de Santis brought like a couple of buses of immigrants to New York City and Mayor Adams acted like like World War III was having when a couple of immigrants came to New York City and all of these big city liberal mayors started freaking out like, oh, we can't sustain this load of immigrants. This is insane, And it was not a ton of immigrants like in New York City. A

couple thousand immigrants is not a ton of people. Meanwhile, do they really think that Brownsville, Texas can accommodate the hundreds of thousands of people who poured across the border during the Biden administration. Brownsville, Texas has the infrastructure to deal with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Texas, you know, South Texas has the ability to deal with

hundreds of thousands of immigrants. But not New York City, not Chicago, not Martha's Vineyard, not all these sanctuary cities in the Northeast that have never seen a Mexican before. That's where a lot of this money, by the way, to the Catholic Church is going. It's going to these parts of Texas and the border that cannot possibly sustain this level of immigration without immense help. That's where that money's going. It's not Catholic bishops living in mansions as

a result of it. So I guess I'm a little bit in the middle. I can't say that I'm thrilled with, for example, the Trump policy about allowing immigration enforcement at churches and schools, although if you have evidence of bad actor illegalaliens deliberately taking advantage of that in order to avoid deportation, I guess I could see some exception to it. But I do sort of accept on the whole that, Hey, it shouldn't be the role of the school or the church to be the site where to have anything to

do with this immigration business. Nobody's living at Catholic churches to avoid deportation. You know. The church should not be the place that has to deal with this. We're here to attend to the spiritual needs of these people. Maybe they made bad choices in the past. Fully willing to grant that that's the whole point of the Catholic Church is to be a place to help take care of people who made bad choices. Churches are supposed to be

hospitals for sinners, not a hotel for saints. But at the same time, I guess I think that a lot of sort of after Christian messaging on immigration is coming from this sort of painting with a broad brush attitude a little that immigrants they're just good people are just trying to make it by not in all cases, and even if they are, it doesn't mean that we as a country have to sustain every single one of them

who is here all right? When we return my quick week one Trump pro life grade next on the John Groardy Show. So we've got one week of the Trump administration, and you know, I being director at Right to Life Essential California, here's my grade on the pro life stuff for the first week. I would say it's an A minus B plus. I think it was really good. He pardoned all the people convicted during the Biden administration for

violations of the Face Act. All of those convictions that not really more the sentences were completely ridiculous, and the whole presence of face I think it's ridiculous he gave a surprise video address to the March for Life, talked about increasing the child tax credit, advanced talk about that the March for Life supporting the Born Alife Victims of Abortion Act, and announced support for various kinds of federal abortion funding restrictions. No mention of limiting the abortion pill yet,

and that's really the biggie. That's something that increased abortion numbers by one hundred thousand per year in the Biden administration. So hope to see that. That'll do it. John Giorlady Show. See you next time on Power Talk.