The Trump administration is going to try to have a showy showdown over sanctuary policies in California, and likely elsewhere, and they're now setting their sights on county jails and sheriffs in large jurisdictions.
The US Department of Justice put out a press release Thursday, the same day that Attorney General Pamela Bondi was in San Francisco visiting Alcatraz and pretending to follow through on Trump's plan to make it a great prison again. The release announced some requests made to "sheriffs in multiple major California counties — including Los Angeles and San Francisco Counties," for lists of inmates being held in jails who are undocumented.
President Donald Trump and his administration have repeatedly said that they wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" among undocumented people, specifically those who have committed violent crimes. But much like the indiscriminate raids at farms, work sites and Home Depot parking lots in California, in which perfectly innocent, hard-working people are being rounded up for detention and likely deportation by ICE, the administration's aims are very obviously broader than that.
Today's announcement describes lists of any and all California jail inmates, regardless of the nature of their suspected crimes. But then it quickly alides this with violent crime, saying, "In recent years, the United States suffered an invasion of illegal aliens at an unprecedented scale. Far too many of those illegal aliens have gone on to commit crimes on American soil, including rapes, murders, and other violent crimes."
Even though state and local policies prevent sheriff's offices from assisting ICE in enforcing immigration policy, the DOJ release says it is asking them to "assist federal immigration authorities in prioritizing the removal of illegal aliens who committed crimes after illegally entering the United States."
"Removing criminal illegal aliens is this Administration’s highest priority,” says Bondi, in a statement. "I look forward to cooperating with California’s county sheriffs to accomplish our shared duty of keeping Californians and all Americans safe and secure."
The request marks an escalation in Trump's longstanding war over sanctuary policies. And it should be noted that despite there being 17 states with sanctuary policies, the DOJ is only making this request in California, because it's most politically dramatic to do so.
In the release, the DOJ says that it "hopes that California sheriffs will voluntarily produce the requested information." But, it says, "if necessary, the Department will pursue all available means of obtaining the data, including through subpoenas or other compulsory process [sic]."
