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From what I can see, sanctuary cities were acting within the law. Their only stance was that they wouldn’t spend precious time and resources verifying immigrati
by true_religion 11mo ago
From what I can see, sanctuary cities were acting within the law. Their only stance was that they wouldn’t spend precious time and resources verifying immigration status for schools, and city services. As these are paid for and voted on by city residents, that seems fair.
If states, and cities aren’t bound to help the federal government enforce every law, unless congress writes a law to say they must.
CBP and ICE always had the general authority to be more effective, but did not use it. As we can see from actions in this era, enforcing immigration law at all costs has draconian side effects on civil liberties, and general happiness and wellbeing.
While it’s true, the immigration issue has been marinating for a while, the current policy is not a good solution.
- scoofy 11mo agoI’m not suggesting that nullification is against the law. It’s not. States have the right to ignore federal laws if they choose to. However if the states refuse to cooperate with law enforcement, and especially when they pass laws making cooperation illegal, it is for very obvious reasons likely to result in political escalation, as the feds will need to spend a significant amount of resources on statewide enforcement. When you refuse to allow city and state law enforcement to assist federal agencies, don’t be surprised if federal law enforcement show up. It’s not even unprecedented, it’s just an issue of scale. Ultimately, this is about democracy, and how refusing to participate when laws we don’t like pass, it is a recipe for extreme political conflict because it’s inherently undemocratic.
- true_religion 11mo agoWhen it comes to cooperating with other entities, governments have to take a unified approach. Rather than have individual teachers deciding to question students on immigration status or not, they decided to not pursue the matter at all. It seems fair. Immigration policy isn’t supposed to be enforced by local authorities to begin with. And unlike hiring a worker, there’s no easy way for people to verify immigration status. Finally, immigration offenses can be misdemeanors so spending effort in upholding hard to determine civil infractions seems unwise for local officials. If ICE or CBP actually shows up and investigates, local authorities do help. Even in Chicago where the public is very much against it, the local police continue to cooperate with ICE … if nothing else just to shield them from protesters. All sanctuary laws said is that local authorizes do not have to do thankless investigative work on people hundreds if not thousands of miles away from a land border with another country. As someone who cares about democracy, I think it’s best practiced at the most local level possible, and if federal authorizes disagree with local policy they can override it via laws. You just don’t see thus happening in many cases because local laws agree with federal ones, or are even more stringent. But this is a case where the locals could not, constitutionally, make a law (it has been tried, like in Arizona to have locals investigate legal immigration status but it’s been deemed unconstitutional). For the record, I don’t think we a huge difference in opinion. I’m not surprised that ICE and CBP is out in force. I’m surprised it took so long, but think they could be more targeted, less brutal, and overall more competent.
- scoofy 11mo agoYea, I’d say we generally agree. Though I think noncompliance laws like sanctuary city laws are a significant escalation over just choosing a different allocation of resources. My point is only that if the feds are going to go full agents in schools and shit, I think we ought to follow the harm reduction principles so people don’t actually get hurt when the violence kicks off. My concern is we’re nontrivially flirting with a genuine civil conflict.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoDo you feel the same way about states that don’t enforce federal laws against weed and actively endorse it?
- scoofy 11mo agoIf by “feel the same way” you mean “wouldn’t be surprised if random folks start getting charged with marijuana possession if the administration starts enforcing the laws on the books,” then yes. I don’t “support” what the administration is doing, I’m just saying we’re actually on the losing side of the argument… and we’re actually flirting with real political violence with a losing argument. If the states that have legalized some kind of marijuana uses wanted to (40 of 50 states), they could trivially actually legalize it.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoThere was “real political violence” because people wanted Trump to be president in 2020 and more recently a state lawmaker was swatted in Indiana because he didn’t go along with Trump’s redistributing demands. In fact Romney said that some lawmakers were afraid to go against Trump because they were afraid for their families and they couldn’t afford armed security like he could. Is that really how we want to make decisions in this country?
- scoofy 11mo agoAgain, I agree with this sentiment. Unfortunately whataboutism isn’t an argument.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoThere is no whatsboutism. Refusing to act is not “violence”.
- scoofy 11mo agoI never suggested it was… which is exactly why pointing to unrelated political violence is whataboutism.