San Francisco Sues Trump Administration Over Sanctuary City Crackdown

Back in December we learned that San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu was gearing up to fight the incoming Trump administration.

Chiu, 54, is expected to play a prominent role in a courtroom campaign to push back on  Trump if he targets liberal cities such as San Francisco, possibly by trying to withhold federal funds over sanctuary policies he opposes as he seeks to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Yesterday, AG Pam Bondi launched her first lawsuit over sanctuary city policies at the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois. And today it seems San Francisco is responding to that by filing a lawsuit aimed at the Trump administration. 

San Francisco on Friday announced it was filing a federal lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s recent directives to prosecute local officials who impede deportation efforts and to withhold federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities.

“The Trump administration is asserting a right it does not have,” City Atty. David Chiu said during a news conference announcing the lawsuit. “This is the federal government coercing local officials to bend to their will or face defunding or prosecution, and that is illegal or authoritarian. And last I checked, we still live in a democracy under the rule of law, and the federal government needs to follow the law.”

Chiu is leading the effort but he’s not alone. Several other blue cities are joining him and there may be more yet to come.

In addition to San Francisco, Santa Clara County, Calif., and the cities of Portland, Ore., New Haven, Conn., and King County, Wash., joined in the complaint, which officials are expected to file later on Friday. David Chiu, the San Francisco city attorney, said he expects other cities to join in the lawsuit as well.

The legal pushback is basically aimed at two Justice Department memos related to this topic.

A Jan. 21 Justice Department memo warns local jurisdictions that “federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands and requests,” and that sanctuary laws “threaten public safety and national security.” A more pointed memo on Feb. 5 calls for the end of federal funding to cities and states that “unlawfully interfere with federal law enforcement operations,” and includes a strategy to “investigate incidents involving any such misconduct and shall, where supported by the evidence, prosecute violations of federal laws.”

San Francisco and the other cities are arguing that this amounts to unconstitutional commandeering of local resources to carry out federal immigration enforcement. But if that’s the larger legal framework the actual argument seems a lot less grandiose. Basically, ICE wants city jails to hold poisoners they identify as illegal immigrants for an extra day or two so they can come pick them up in relative safety. Sanctuary cities refuse to do that.

The usual argument form the left is that police cooperation with ICE makes undocumented people less willing to cooperate with local police when needed. But the counter-argument is that lack of cooperation means ICE has no choice but to enter homes to pick these people up which is less safe and inevitably results in them crossing paths with other illegal aliens who are also going to be picked up.

You get the impression that what Democrats really want is for ICE to take the hint and just go away. But with millions of people coming to the border each year under the Biden administration, it ought to be clear that sending a loud sanctuary message across Central and South America creates an unsustainable situation. Cities like Chicago, New York, Denver, etc. have all complained about the busing of migrants from Texas to their cities. And yet they don’t seem to have learned anything. Now that the crisis is winding down, they are back to their default position, i.e. it’s Trump’s problem not theirs.