The City Council of Clarkston, Georgia, egged on by Mayor Ted Terry, recently passed a non-detainer policy that prohibits the federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from arresting illegal immigrants within Clarkston city limits with a detainer request or an “administrative immigration warrant.”
InsiderAdvantage has learned that ICE officials, before the vote, tried to reason with the Council but got nowhere.
Last week, however, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memorandum to all the “grant-making components” within the Justice Department cutting off any grants to sanctuary jurisdictions like Clarkston that refuse to cooperate on immigration/border enforcement. Hans von Spakovsky, a one-time Georgia attorney and now a Heritage Foundation scholar, says this will no doubt be a surprise to many in the media and in jurisdictions like Clarkson that are misinterpreting the April injunction issued by Judge William Orrick (an Obama appointee) in the lawsuit filed by the City of San Francisco and Santa Clara County. Sessions’ action complies fully with that order, he says.
The May 22 Sessions memorandum says that any city or county applying for a Department of Justice (DOJ) grant “administered by the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services” that requires the applicant to certify compliance with all federal laws will not be eligible for a grant if they are a sanctuary jurisdiction. A sanctuary jurisdiction is defined as any city or county that “willfully refuse[s] to comply with 8 U.S.C. §1373.”
Section 1373 provides that state and local jurisdictions “may not prohibit, or in any way restrict, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, [federal immigration officers] information regarding the citizenship or immigration status, lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” In other words, von Spakovsky says, any city that forbids its law enforcement officials from notifying the feds when they arrest or detain an illegal alien “will be ineligible to receive such awards.”
Von Spakovsky further notes:
“By issuing this memorandum, Sessions is simply implementing the terms of the Executive Order (EO) issued by President Donald Trump on January 25, 2017. Section 9 of that EO directed the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to ‘ensure that jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply with 8 U.S.C. §1373 (sanctuary jurisdictions) are not eligible to receive Federal grants’ (emphasis added). The word ‘grants’ and the specific inclusion of the Attorney General and the Secretary meant that the President was referring to the type of discretionary grant programs administered by DOJ and DHS that local jurisdictions must apply for, not federal entitlement programs and funds such as Medicaid or the Highway Trust Fund or any other executive department.”
“Despite its plain and clear language,” von Spakovsky argues, “Judge Orrick claimed that it was an ‘implausible’ reading of the Executive Order to interpret it as only applying to the discretionary ‘grants’ awarded by DOJ and DHS. Thus, he issued a nationwide injunction stopping the executive branch from cutting off the broad range of all federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions even though there was no threat to cut off all such federal funding in the Executive Order. But most importantly for the memorandum issued by the Attorney General, Orrick wrote a very big (and little noticed) exception into his injunction order that would allow the Trump administration to do exactly what it said it wanted to do in the Executive Order.
Orrick said the injunction would not prevent the “government’s ability to use lawful means to enforce existing conditions of federal grants or 8 U.S.C. §1373, nor does it restrict [the government] from developing regulations or preparing guidance on designating a jurisdiction as a ‘sanctuary jurisdiction.’”
“All of these actions are in full compliance with Orrick’s injunction-but-not-really-an-injunction order,” von Spakovsky said. And Sessions on May 22 specifies that the actions being taken by DOJ will be “in accordance with the law and will comply with any binding court order.” Clarkston needs to rethink its ICE statute.
