logo
‘Bring it on': Sheriff pushes back after blue state leaders sue to stop immigration enforcement

‘Bring it on': Sheriff pushes back after blue state leaders sue to stop immigration enforcement

Yahoo18-03-2025

Klickitat County Sheriff Bob Songer is calling out the "lunacy" of Democratic leadership in deep blue Washington after state Attorney General Nick Brown launched a lawsuit against one of his colleagues for helping enforce immigration law.
"They honestly feel that they can just run over everybody," he said, adding, "Bring it on, I'll fight them."
Brown, a Democrat, sued the Adams County Sheriff's Office on Monday, accusing the office of "illegally collaborating" with federal officials and the Trump administration.
The lawsuit, which was filed in Spokane County Superior Court, claims that the Adams County Sheriff's Office's holding of illegal immigrants in custody based on their immigration status, helping federal agents question people in custody, and "routinely" sharing personal confidential information of Washington residents with federal officials "expressly violates state law."
Tom Homan Warns Major Sanctuary State Will 'Get Exactly What They Don't Want'
The suit cites a 2019 law called the Keep Washington Working Act, which prohibits law enforcement in the state from providing aid in immigration enforcement. Brown is asking the court to force the Adams County Sheriff's Office, led by Sheriff Dale Wagner, to comply with the Keep Washington Working Act.
Read On The Fox News App
This comes the same week that U.S. Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks posted on X that agents had partnered with the Spokane County Sheriff's Office to arrest a Mexican national and suspected illegal firearms dealer, including rifles, shotguns and pistols.
A representative for the Spokane County Sheriff's Office declined Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Songer, who has vowed to help ICE, told Fox News Digital that the attorney general's lawsuit is part of a broader effort by Washington's leading Democrats, including Gov. Bob Ferguson, to intimidate sheriffs into complying with the state's sanctuary policies.
'Get Geared Up' Because 'Ice Is Coming,' Says Leading House Gop Member
He shared that two days after Trump's inauguration his office received a public records request from an individual named Charles Harvey for all of his personal and official phone, text and email communications with federal authorities from 2021 until the present. The request stated that if any communications between Songer and ICE were found they would be reported to the attorney general's office.
Click Here For More Immigration Coverage
"In my opinion, it's lunacy. They are whack nuts," he said. "Why would a governor and legislator and Brown, the new attorney general, why would they not want law enforcement to cooperate with ICE to go after bad people that are illegally in our country that have committed felonies and very serious felonies?"
He commended Wagner and the Adams County Sheriff's Office for standing their ground, calling the attorney general's lawsuit "flat ridiculous."
Young Father Killed By Illegal Immigrant Highlights 'Betrayal' Of Sanctuary Cities, Says Republican
Songer said he would not be intimidated by the threat of investigations or lawsuits because he believes the Constitution is on his side.
"I hope my fellow sheriffs will stand up to the governor and this state and tell them these laws are unconstitutional and we're not going to cooperate," he said. "We just need to pay attention and follow the Constitution and I think if we do that, we're going to have a better country."
"Citizens come first," he concluded. "And I pray, I absolutely pray for Tom Homan to come to Washington state, the blue state and sanctuary state, because I really believe Ferguson, Brown and their cohorts, elected politicians, are in violation of federal law. And if they are, lock them up."Original article source: 'Bring it on': Sheriff pushes back after blue state leaders sue to stop immigration enforcement

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims
Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims

CNN

time5 minutes ago

  • CNN

Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims

One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page. And few Trump administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration's controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process. But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn't get the memo. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn't currently facing such a threat. 'I think at this point in time, I don't see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,' Caine said in response to Democratic questioning. This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn't currently under invasion by a foreign government. You'd probably have heard something about that on the news. But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been. When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport migrants without due process, that law required such a foreign 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' to make his move legal. And Trump said that's what was happening. 'The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,' reads the proclamation from Trump. It added that Tren de Aragua's actions came 'both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.' So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says 'state-sponsored folks' aren't invading. Some flagged Caine's comment as undermining Trump's claims of a foreign 'invasion' in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants. But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump's claims about the Venezuelan migrants. Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense. Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views. 'But I'll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation's contiguous outline,' he said. But if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act. The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: 'Report all foreign invaders' with a phone number for ICE. When asked about the image and whether the use of the term 'foreign invaders' had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like 'invade' or 'invaders' when referring to undocumented immigrants. Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this claim. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump's proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members 'have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.' Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons 'in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.' We soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump's claim. 'Yes, that's their assessment,' Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. 'They're wrong.' Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an 'arm of the Maduro regime,' and that Maduro's regime was 'involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.' The question of Venezuela's purported involvement actually hasn't been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration's Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they've generally ruled that way because of the lack of an 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro's government. One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process. And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.

‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'

Yahoo

time8 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

‘We've lost the culture war on climate'

President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.

Stephen Miller Threatened ICE Leaders With a Furious Ultimatum Over Arrest Targets
Stephen Miller Threatened ICE Leaders With a Furious Ultimatum Over Arrest Targets

Yahoo

time8 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Stephen Miller Threatened ICE Leaders With a Furious Ultimatum Over Arrest Targets

An irate Stephen Miller threatened senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials with termination unless their offices upped their game and started detaining at least 3,000 migrants a day. The White House deputy chief of staff also warned that leaders of field offices ranking in the bottom 10 percent for migrant arrests were at risk of being fired, NBC News reports, citing unnamed sources. The outbursts from Miller, viewed as the architect behind many of President Donald Trump's most hardline immigration policies, came during a mid-May meeting with ICE officials. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was also present, though was reportedly in a calmer mood. Soon after Miller issued his threat, ICE began ramping up its efforts to detain undocumented migrants across the U.S. The plan, dubbed 'Operation At Large,' involved thousands of federal law enforcement officers and special forces, many of whom don't typically assist with immigration, being pulled in to help ICE round up migrants accused of being in the country illegally. The operation has also called for the deployment of about 21,000 National Guard troops, as well as 250 IRS agents who could use tax data to track down immigrants. Trump's push to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history is reportedly sparking friction among federal agencies. FBI agents, who normally steer clear of immigration enforcement and administrative removal orders, are increasingly being tasked with helping ICE arrest undocumented migrants. Teams within the Justice Department working on unrelated matters have also been disbanded and reassigned to focus on immigration-related cases. Federal agencies' intense preoccupation with detaining migrants that is now influencing whether a case is prosecuted at all. In one instance, a U.S. attorney's office dropped a potential federal prosecution involving a dangerous suspect simply because there wasn't a clear immigration angle. The office passed the case to state prosecutors instead. 'Immigration status is now question No. 1 in terms of charging decisions,' an assistant U.S. attorney told NBC News. 'Is this person a documented immigrant? Is this person an undocumented immigrant? Is this person a citizen? Are they somehow deportable? What is their immigration status? And the answer to that question is now largely driving our charging decisions.' In response to reports of Miller's outburst, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said: 'Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump's and the American people's mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe.' The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for further comment from the Daily Beast.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store