Donald Trump is considering sending detained migrants to U.S. “sanctuary cities.” Though Trump staffers had at one point said this plan was dead, Trump confirmed on Friday, April 12, that he still wanted to send illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities and “let that particular area take care of it.”
This and other recent Trump statements and tweets about immigration policy and sanctuary cities are little more than, “You asked for it, you got it” – a thin, half-hearted pretense of “working with the Democrats” and extending a hand across the aisle. It’s apparent that Trump and many Republicans see such a move as political retribution against the Democrats and others who oppose Trump.
On April 13, 2019, Trump tweeted, “Just out: The USA as the absolute legal right to have apprehended illegal immigrants transferred to Sanctuary Cities. We hereby demand that they be taken care of at the highest level, especially by the state of California, which is well known (f)or its poor management & high taxes!”
White House press secretary Hogan Gidley denies that this idea is born out of retaliation against Trump’s adversaries. “…If anything,” he said, it should be considered by the Democrats to be “an olive branch.”
Gidley calls out one possible destination to send detained immigrants: Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district. “Places like San Francisco, or a sanctuary city, they are designed and set up specifically to have people there who aren’t here legally. That’s what their stated goal is, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t be looking at a way to give them exactly what they want.”
Dara Lind, of Vox, says that Trump seems to believe that the people of San Francisco “are secretly just as anti-immigrant as he is, and would freak out if they actually saw immigrants in their neighborhoods.”
Trump’s plan to send illegal immigrants to sanctuary cities, with the apparent expectation that they’ll “freak out,” my well backfire.
It’s clear, says Lind, that Trump “may not understand that a large swath of the public genuinely doesn’t agree with him about immigration. – not just the governments of sanctuary cities, but the people who elect those governments.”
President Trump Says Migrants Will Be Sent To Sanctuary Cities | TIME [2019-04-15]
Tucker: Trump calls Democrats’ bluff on illegal immigrants | Fox News [2019-04-12]
