President Donald Trump is attempting to undermine California's sanctuary law by threatening to withhold federal funds to jurisdictions that comply with the law. The California Values Act, enacted in 2017, restricts local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities, aiming to prevent local officers from being involved in deportation efforts. Previous attempts to challenge this law faced legal resistance, with courts siding with California. The current move may pose serious financial risks for California, which relies heavily on federal funds for public services and disaster recovery.
Kevin De Leon, the former state Senate leader who authored the law, told NPR in 2017 that the point of the law was to make clear that the feds cannot enlist local police as a cog in the Trump deportation machine.
It's not clear yet what kind of federal funds the Trump administration would withhold. But, for a state of 39 million people that relies heavily on federal dollars for its public programs and currently for its wildfire recovery, withholding money could be a crippling blow.
Before Trump took office, a nonprofit led by his policy adviser Stephen Miller sent letters to hundreds of local elected officials around the country warning them they faced legal consequences if their sanctuary policies interfered with immigration enforcement.
One of his first executive orders targets the state's so-called sanctuary law, which generally limits how local cops interact with federal immigration officers.
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