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posted by on Friday January 27 2017, @03:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the Emma-Lazarus-would-be-proud dept.

Sanctuary cities are in the news this week. The working definition is a city, county, or state that limits the amount of cooperation their local police force has with federal immigration officers. To the point, local police do not hold people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) when their only crime is being illegal immigrants. This article gives a good overview of the situation.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened to cut funding for one county after its sheriff announced the agency would be scaling back its cooperation with federal immigration.

Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez announced last week she's scaling back the amount of aid her department provides federal immigration agents in detaining suspects who might be in the country illegally, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

Starting Feb. 1, sheriff's officials will begin honoring so-called immigration holds or "detainers" placed by federal authorities only when a suspect is booked into the Travis County Jail on charges of capital murder, aggravated sexual assault and "continuous smuggling of persons."

Otherwise, federal agents must have a court order or arrest warrant signed by a judge for the jail to continue housing a person whose immigration status is in question.

On Wednesday, Jan 25, President Trump issued an executive order stating that sanctuary jurisdictions would not be eligible for federal funds.

[Continues...]

City officials, from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Haven, Syracuse and Austin, Tex., said they were prepared for a protracted fight.

"We're going to defend all of our people regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status," Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said at a news conference with other city officials.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel declared: "I want to be clear: We're going to stay a sanctuary city. There is no stranger among us. Whether you're from Poland or Pakistan, whether you're from Ireland or India or Israel and whether you're from Mexico or Moldova, where my grandfather came from, you are welcome in Chicago as you pursue the American dream."

[...] "The rhetoric doesn't match the legal authority," said Peter L. Markowitz, the director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. "In fact, the president has very limited power to exercise any kind of significant defunding."

According to a 2012 Supreme Court decision, Mr. Markowitz said, Congress is not permitted to set conditions on spending to coerce states or localities to participate in a federal program against their will. Any conditions, at a minimum, must be directly related to the punitive action.

As of time of editing, 12:30AM EDT, this is the newest article on the topic:

President Trump is hailing the first victory in his fight against "sanctuary cities" after a South Florida mayor ordered his employees on Thursday to begin working more closely with federal immigration authorities.

For years, Miami-Dade County has refused to hold some undocumented immigrants in its jails for federal immigration agents. But after Trump signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from sanctuary cities, Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez changed his mind.

Gimenez signed an executive order Thursday ordering the director of his corrections department to begin honoring all requests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hold immigration suspects in Miami-Dade County jails.

[...] Gimenez said he made the decision to ensure that the county does not lose out on $355 million in federal funding it has coming in 2017.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday January 27 2017, @04:11PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Friday January 27 2017, @04:11PM (#459525) Journal

    Sounds good all around to me. I've noticed that there are a number of places where cannabis is de-facto decriminalized as well. I see a similarity there.

    - Do the right thing and scale back enforcement for victimless “crimes” locally.
    - Reduce expenses jailing people who aren't hurting others.
    - Lose federal funding, but what do you need all that funding for now? Property taxes will suffice.
    - Why do we have an income tax anyway that gives the feds all this juicy funding to trickle down from big government's golden shower? Why not just keep the tax money locally collected and locally spent?
    - With local taxation and local spending, this gives jurisdictions even more autonomy to be sanctuary cities if they choose or to de-facto decriminalize cannabis if they choose.

    True, I can see some argument where illegal immigration isn't victimless, but remember we've got free markets right? Plus, employers are only supposed to be hiring citizens, right? Where's the enforcement for that piece of the puzzle?

    (Disclaimer: not an ancap here, just a bleeding-heart libertarian.)

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  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @04:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @04:34PM (#459536)

    Lose federal funding, but what do you need all that funding for now? Property taxes will suffice.

    It doesn't buy the wannabe commandos in the police force enough armored vehicles and other things that they really have no business having access to.

  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 27 2017, @06:07PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday January 27 2017, @06:07PM (#459598)

    The problem is that you can't just keep the income tax money. Income tax is paid by individuals directly to the IRS (or rather, withheld by employers and sent directly to the IRS). Interrupting that relationship would probably end up involving troops being used to occupy any cities/states that prevented tax payments to the IRS.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:24PM (#459610)

      no, people just need to stop funding the scum in washington. only cowards, traitors and/or idiots pay the income tax. what does the income tax pay for? depleted uranium for the middle east? selling baby body parts? stealing land all over the country? turning the world into a surveillance state owned and controlled by international criminals, etc...if you think it's patriotic to pay the income tax you're a damned idiot. If you're an employer who collects taxes for the IRS, you're a complicit traitor.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday January 27 2017, @08:02PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Friday January 27 2017, @08:02PM (#459679)

        only cowards, traitors and/or idiots pay the income tax.

        if you think it's patriotic to pay the income tax you're a damned idiot

        If the only argument you have in favor of something is patriotism and testosterone, you're the idiot.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday January 29 2017, @04:56PM

          by LoRdTAW (3755) on Sunday January 29 2017, @04:56PM (#460294) Journal

          I'm pretty sure he has no testosterone and is compensating.

    • (Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Friday January 27 2017, @06:30PM

      by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Friday January 27 2017, @06:30PM (#459613) Journal

      That's likely exactly what would happen without a 16th Amendment repeal. I just meant to bemoan how having all that tax money sent directly to the federal level allows them to have a bigger say in local affairs than they probably should.

      I wonder what a breakdown would look like compared to the current funding model if we took away the 16th Amendment and have property taxes go up. People take home more since they're not paying the IRS, but then they pay more for housing. The funding has to come from somewhere, but it seems like it would be good to eliminate the slingshot around the feds. Would that funding level be comparable? What would the disparity between wealthy and poor jurisdictions look like compared to the status quo?

      True, I'm not expecting the 16th Amendment to go anywhere anytime soon.

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday January 27 2017, @07:08PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday January 27 2017, @07:08PM (#459652)

        You don't need more property taxes to make up for it; states are free to have their own income taxes, and in fact most of them do. Sure, most of them are little more than "how much did you send the IRS this year? Ok, send us this fraction", but that's by choice. States can also raise more money with sales taxes. Property taxes are the least likely, because right now those are generally local-only, not levied by the state, whereas income and sales taxes are usually levied by the state (though sometimes with additions by localities).

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by fritsd on Friday January 27 2017, @11:15PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Friday January 27 2017, @11:15PM (#459750) Journal

    - Why do we have an income tax anyway that gives the feds all this juicy funding to trickle down from big government's golden shower? Why not just keep the tax money locally collected and locally spent?

    What you're describing sounds like the "principle of subsidiarity": bottom-up government construction [wikipedia.org].
    It's "a thing" in the European Union and in Catholic social teaching.

    It's also a bit like how taxes are spent in Sweden, if I remember it correctly [wikipedia.org]:

    I thought that of the enormous taxes, the first chunk of government income goes to the taxpayer's Kommun's budget (town, say), the next chunk goes to the Län (province) budget (pays for the province's hospitals), and if you earn enough, you pay into the country's national budget (e.g. ministry of defense).

    Most of the money probably goes to unemployment benefits and pensions, so that most of average people's taxes are spent on (other) people within ca. 50 km radius. The appeal to solidarity is therefore small :-) to optimise for citizens with a puny Monkeysphere [wikipedia.org] ("I'm not going to pay bloody tax for some foreigner who lives in the next province 100 km away!")

    I could have remembered it wrong, though.