sanctuary city

President Trump’s border advisor told reporters Thursday that federal authorities planned to increase immigration raids in Los Angeles and other so-called “sanctuary cities,” with Chicago likely the next target.

“You’re going to see a ramp up of operations in New York; you’re going to see a ramp up of operations continue in L.A., Portland, Seattle, all these sanctuary cities that refuse to work with ICE,” Tom Homan said.

Since June, Southern California has been ground zero of thousands of immigration arrests as well as legal battles over whether the raids violate the U.S. Constitution.

There is no agreed-upon definition for sanctuary policies or sanctuary cities, but the terms generally describe limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Homan did not elaborate on specifics about new raids in L.A.

But talking to reporters Thursday morning, he said Immigration and Customs Enforcement is considering using a naval base north of Chicago as its hub when potential enforcement raids take place in that city.

Tom Homan said, “there’s discussions about that, yes,” when asked by reporters outside the White House.

He didn’t provide an exact timeline for the use.

“The planning is still being discussed,” he said. “So, maybe by the end of today.”

Earlier this week, Trump said Chicago would likely be the next city in which he’ll direct a crackdown on crime and, in particular, illegal immigration.

He recently sent 2,000 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. after having dispatched soldiers, ICE and border patrol agents to Los Angeles since early June. The Department of Homeland Security said that as of Aug. 8, ICE and Border Patrol agents had arrested 2,792 undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area.

“I think Chicago will be… next,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

He also called the City of Broad Shoulders a “mess” and that its residents were “screaming for us to come.” Three days after Trump railed about crime in Chicago, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson released a statement, saying overall crime in the city had dropped by 21.6%, year to date, with homicides falling by 32.3%.

Homan would not commit to how many soldiers and agents would be used in any immigration enforcement.

“We’re not going to tell you how many resources we’re going to send to the city,” he said. “We don’t want the bad guys to know what we’re sending.”

He added, “It will be a large contingent.”

Since a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting federal agents from targeting people solely based on their race, language, vocation or location, the number of arrests in Southern California declined in July.

But raids are continuing, with Home Depot stores becoming a common target in recent weeks.

On Aug. 1, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a Trump administration request to lift the restraining order prohibiting roving raids.

CHICAGO — A judge in Illinois dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit Friday that sought to disrupt limits Chicago imposes on cooperation between federal immigration agents and local police.

The lawsuit, filed in February, alleged that so-called sanctuary laws in the nation’s third-largest city “thwart” federal efforts to enforce immigration laws.

It argued that local laws run counter to federal laws by restricting “local governments from sharing immigration information with federal law enforcement officials” and preventing immigration agents from identifying “individuals who may be subject to removal.”

Judge Lindsay Jenkins of the Northern District of Illinois granted the defendants’ motion for dismissal.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said that he was pleased with the decision and that the city is safer when police focus on the needs of Chicagoans.

“This ruling affirms what we have long known: that Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance is lawful and supports public safety. The City cannot be compelled to cooperate with the Trump Administration’s reckless and inhumane immigration agenda,” he said in a statement.

Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, welcomed the ruling, saying in a social media post, “Illinois just beat the Trump Administration in federal court.”

The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security and did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The administration has filed a series of lawsuits targeting state or city policies it sees as interfering with immigration enforcement, including those in Los Angeles, New York City, Denver and Rochester, N.Y. It sued four New Jersey cities in May.

Heavily Democratic Chicago has been a sanctuary city for decades and has beefed up its laws several times, including during President Trump’s first term in 2017.

That same year, then-Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, signed more statewide sanctuary protections into law, putting him at odds with his party.

There is no official definition for sanctuary policies or sanctuary cities. The terms generally describe limits on local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE enforces U.S. immigration laws nationwide but sometimes seeks state and local help.

The Department of Homeland Security’s “sanctuary jurisdiction list” has more holes than the plot for the latest “Mission Impossible” film.

All you need to know about its accuracy is how my native Orange County fared.

The only O.C. city on the list is Huntington Beach — you know, the ‘burb with an all-Republican council that’s suing California for being a sanctuary state, declared itself a “non-sanctuary” community in January and and plans to place a plaque outside the city’s main library with an acrostic “MAGA” message.

Missing from the list? Santa Ana, long synonymous with undocumented immigrants, which declared itself a sanctuary city all the way back in 2016 and has a deportation defense fund for residents.

More laughable errors: Livingston, the first city in the Central Valley to declare itself a sanctuary for immigrants in 2017, isn’t on the list. Yet Santee in San Diego County, so notorious for its racism that people still call it “Klantee,” is.

There’s even Represa. Ever heard of it? Me, neither. Turns out it’s not a city but the name of the post office for two places not exactly known as sanctuaries: Folsom State Prison and California State Prison, Sacramento.

Within hours of his inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order tellingly titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” that, among other things, stated that sanctuary jurisdictions should no longer receive federal funds.

But the May 29 list laying out the jurisdictions that are supposedly subject to the penalty was so flawed that it was taken off the Homeland Security website within days. It’s still not back up. The effort seemed cobbled together by someone who typed “sanctuary” and a city’s name into Google and swallowed whatever the AI spat up without even bothering to cross-check with Wikipedia.

Trump’s opponents are already depicting this fiasco as emblematic of an administration that loves to shoot itself in the foot, then put the bloody foot in its mouth. But it’s even worse than that.

The list shows how blinded by fury the Trump administration is about illegal immigration. There is no mistake too big or too small for Trump to forgive, as long as it’s in the name of deportation and border walls. The president’s obsession with tying all of this country’s real and imagined ills to newcomers reminds me of Cato the Elder, the Roman Republic politician famous for allegedly saying “Carthage must be destroyed” at the end of all his speeches, no matter the topic.

That’s why the pushback by politicians against Homeland Security’s big, beautiful boo-boo has been quick — and hilarious.

Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns listens to speakers discuss the city’s plan to make Huntington Beach “a non-sanctuary city for illegal immigration” during a City Council meeting in January

(James Carbone)

Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns appeared on KCAL News to declare that Surf City’s inclusion was “pure negligence” while holding a small white bust of Donald Trump the way a toddler clings to its blankey.

Vista Mayor John Franklin, meanwhile, was on the city council that voted in 2018 to support the Trump administration’s unsuccessful lawsuit against California’s sanctuary state law. He told ABC 10News San Diego that he thought Vista made the list because “another city in the county that bears a similar name to ours … may have, and I haven’t confirmed it yet, adopted a sanctuary policy.”

Dude, say the city’s name: Chula Vista, a far cooler, muy Latino town closer to the U.S.-Mexico border than Vista is. It’s also on the list and isn’t a sanctuary city, either.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Rep. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) told the Voice of OC that he recently advised Santa Ana officials to “keep their head low” and not make a big deal about their sanctuary city status — as if hiding under a desk, like a “Scooby Doo” caper, will somehow save the city from the Trump administration’s haphazard hammer.

Immigration, more than any other part of Trump’s agenda, exemplifies the Silicon Valley cliché of moving fast and breaking things. His administration has deported people by mistake and given the middle finger to judges who order them brought back. Trump officials are now shipping immigrants to countries they have no ties to, and shrugging their shoulders. Immigration agents are trying to apprehend people in places long considered off-limits, like schools and places of worship.

And yet, this still isn’t enough for Trump.

Deportation rates are rising, but still not to the levels seen in some years of the Biden and Obama administrations, and not even close to Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower-era program that deported over a million Mexican nationals. Trump’s deportation dream team — Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, border czar Tom Homan and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — has berated ICE officials for not doing more to comply with Trump’s wishes.

The sanctuary list embodies all of this. Who cares if the wreckage involves human lives, or the Constitution? The sloppiness is the point. The cruelty is the point.

Homeland Security didn’t answer my request to explain the flaws in its sanctuary jurisdiction list and why it was taken down. Instead, a spokesperson emailed a statement saying “the list is being constantly reviewed and can be changed at any time and will be updated regularly.” The decision whether to include a place, the statement said, “is based on the evaluation of numerous factors.”

Except the truth, it seems.

Let’s laugh at the absurd mistakes while we can. Really, how pendejo can you be to think that Huntington Beach is friendly to undocumented immigrants but Santa Ana isn’t? Let’s laugh while we can, because things are going to get much worse before they get better.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office sent a letter on Friday requesting that the Trump administration remove California from its list of sanctuary jurisdictions that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.

The Department of Homeland Security issued the list this week in accordance with an executive order President Trump signed in April that directs federal agencies to identify funding to sanctuary cities, counties and states that could be suspended or terminated.

In the letter, Newsom’s office contended that federal court rulings have rejected the argument that California law limiting law enforcement coordination with immigration authorities “unlawfully obstructs the enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

“This list is another gimmick — even the Trump Administration has admitted California law doesn’t block the federal government from doing its job,” Newsom said in a statement. “Most immigrants are hardworking taxpayers and part of American families. When they feel safe reporting crimes, we’re all safer.”

California is among more than a half-dozen states that were included on the list for self-identifying as sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants. Forty-eight California counties and dozens of cities, including Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego and San Francisco, were also on the Trump administration’s list of more than 500 total jurisdictions nationwide.

The state strengthened its sanctuary policies under a law signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown that took effect 2018 after Trump won office the first time. Then, state officials tried to strike a balance between preventing local law enforcement resources from being used to round up otherwise law-abiding immigrants without obstructing the ability of the federal government to enforce its laws within the state.

Local police, for example, cannot arrest someone on a deportation order alone or hold someone for extra time to transfer to immigration authorities. But state law does permit local governments to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transfer people to federal custody if they have been convicted of a felony or certain misdemeanors within a given time frame. The limitations do not apply to state prison officials, who can coordinate with federal authorities.

The law has been a thorn in the side of the Trump administration’s campaign to ramp up deportations, which the president has cast as an effort to rid the country of criminals despite also targeting immigrants with no prior convictions.

In a release announcing the list, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said politicians in sanctuary communities are “endangering Americans and our law enforcement in order to protect violent criminal illegal aliens.”

“We are exposing these sanctuary politicians who harbor criminal illegal aliens and defy federal law,” Noem said. “President Trump and I will always put the safety of the American people first. Sanctuary politicians are on notice: comply with federal law.”

The Trump administration’s assertion that California’s sanctuary policies protect criminals from deportation appears to irk Newsom, who has repeatedly denied the allegation. Trump’s threat to withhold federal dollars could also pose a challenge for a governor proposing billions in cuts to state programs to offset a state budget deficit for the year ahead.

Homeland Security said jurisdictions will receive a formal notice of non-compliance with federal law and demand that cities, counties and states immediately revise their policies.