Trump administration sues Los Angeles in latest attack on sanctuary cities

San Francisco Chronicle​

12 hours ago

President Donald Trump escalated his war against sanctuary policies on Monday in a lawsuit blaming alleged 'rioting, looting and vandalism' in Los Angeles on the city's refusal to allow its police to enforce immigration law or cooperate with federal agents. The suit comes two months after a judge barred Trump's administration from denying federal funds to sanctuary cities, and five years after the Supreme Court rejected Trump's challenge to California's sanctuary law.
'The United States is currently facing a crisis of illegal immigration,' Trump's Justice Department said in its lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court. 'But its efforts to address the crisis are hindered by Sanctuary Cities such as the City of Los Angeles, which refuse to cooperate or share information' with immigration agents.
'Sanctuary policies were the driving force of the violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently witnessed in Los Angeles,' Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.
But a state official said that as of mid-June, two weeks after Trump's deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles, less than 20% of them were actually in the city. Some of those troops were sent to a rural area of Riverside County, 130 miles away, to raid a suspected marijuana farm.
Meanwhile, studies contradict the administration's claims that undocumented immigrants are more dangerous than American citizens.
A report last September by the National Institute of Justice, part of the U.S. Justice Department, said data from Texas showed that undocumented immigrants were arrested less than half as often as native-born Americans for crimes of drugs or violence. Similar findings were reached in October in a nationwide study by the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit that supports immigration.
And in 2018, during Trump's first term, the National Institutes of Health, part of his administration, said data from all states between 1990 and 2014 'reveal that undocumented immigration does not increase violence.'
In an unusual action, six Republican state legislators released a letter they addressed to Trump on Friday urging him to focus immigration enforcement on violent criminals rather than on all undocumented immigrants.
'Immigrants are essential to the fabric of America,' wrote the lawmakers, led by state Sen. Suzette Valladares, R-Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County), and federal agents should try 'to avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.'
The Trump appointee whose office filed the suit, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, is a Riverside Republican known for attention-seeking behavior while serving in the state Assembly from 2022 to 2024. As a legislator, he denounced gun-control advocates as 'fake leftist groups' and unsuccessfully sought to require schools to notify parents whose children identified as transgender.
After a bill banning parental notification won approval in the Assembly last year, Essayli accused its supporters of 'fearmongering,' had his microphone cut off by a Democratic floor leader, then banged his fist on the desk, called the leader a 'f---ing liar' and said he 'wasn't prepared to address the Chinese Communist Party house today.'
Kevin Johnson, an immigration law professor and former law school dean at UC Davis, called the Trump administration's latest lawsuit 'a publicity measure.'
'There is no evidence that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at rates higher than U.S. citizens,' Johnson told the Chronicle. 'In fact, the data shows the opposite.'
'It was Trump's immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area that prompted the massive protests, not the fact that Los Angeles was a sanctuary city,' said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University and author of multiple books on the subject.
Trump took control of California's National Guard on June 7, saying its forces were needed to protect federal immigration agents and property from violence in protests against workplace raids. While a federal appeals court has allowed the deployment to continue, California officials are still urging the courts to conclude that the action is both illegal and dangerous.
California's 2018 sanctuary law, the first in the nation, prohibits local and state officers from notifying immigration agents of the release dates of undocumented immigrants in their custody and holding them so that they can be picked up for deportation. The law does not apply to immigrants convicted of violent crimes.
In a lawsuit by Trump's first administration, the law was upheld in 2018 by U.S. District Judge John Mendez of Sacramento, an appointee of President George W. Bush. 'California's decision not to assist federal immigration enforcement in its endeavors is not an 'obstacle' to that enforcement effort,' Mendez wrote.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his ruling, and the Supreme Court denied review of Trump's appeal in June 2020, with only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas voting to take up the case.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick III of San Francisco cited that case in his ruling April 24 prohibiting the current Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars in federal funding from San Francisco and other local governments with sanctuary policies.
As part of that case, multiple Bay Area law enforcement officials submitted declarations with the court detailing how sanctuary policies make things safer for all residents – the opposite of the Trump administration's contention.
Sanctuary policies 'create an environment where individuals can be candid and forthcoming with law enforcement, and feel comfortable reporting crimes, serving as witnesses, and assisting with investigations,' San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto wrote in a declaration. He also said that responding to federal notification requests takes deputies' time away from ensuring the safety of those they're charged with protecting.
But while there has been little change in the Supreme Court's membership in the last five years – only Trump's appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – Yale-Loehr said the judicial climate seems to have changed.
'The Supreme Court has taken up many emergency appeals by the Trump administration this year,' the Cornell law professor said. 'Also, the court is more conservative now than in 2020. So we could see a ruling on sanctuary jurisdictions sometime this year.'