There's so much fog surrounding President Donald Trump's immigration policies that the issue is at risk of getting lost at sea.
Trump talks a hard line on immigration, but has done little other than threaten so-called sanctuary cities with the loss of federal funding.
It's as if the president has turned to threatening Americans to distract attention from the fact that the administration's Muslim travel ban is tied up in court, or that Mexico still isn't paying for a border wall.
A recent study by researchers at the University of California at Riverside and Highline College concluded that there was no evidence of higher crime rates in cities with sanctuary policies.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last week that he would deny federal grants to communities that don't cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sessions said sanctuary cities are breaking federal law, but some legal experts say that has not been established.
A section of the U.S. Code says local governments may not restrict information provided to federal officers regarding the citizenship or immigration status of any individual. But there has been no determination that any city has violated the law, so on what basis would Sessions withhold funds?
The pressure on sanctuary cities to hold people for ICE ignores the costly legal liability those cities would face for violating a person's civil rights. U.S. courts have held that localities cannot hold an undocumented immigrant who has been arrested beyond his or her sentence. That's the law. The Trump administration should attack it, not the cities.
Editorial on 04/05/2017