Blue states are seeing red over President Trump’s immigration policies, with many pre-emptively promising to resist any deportation raids of illegal immigrants in their communities.
According to highlights of Trump’s inauguration speech as reported by the Herald, the president will end Joe Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstate Remain in Mexico, end asylum for illegal border crossers, crack down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhance vetting and screening of aliens.
He is also suspending refugee resettlement. One would think blue states would welcome this, after so many were “selected” to shelter wave after wave of migrants, straining local budgets.
But many liberal communities, including the Bay State’s eight sanctuary cities – Boston, Somerville, Northampton, Amherst, Cambridge, Concord, Lawrence and Newton – have reaffirmed their pledges to not assist in ICE rounding up illegal immigrants, since Trump’s win in November.
The anti-Trump vitriol on illegal immigration is so strong, one would think he is the first president to take such a stand.
He isn’t.
“All Americans … are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens.”
Those words were spoken by former President Bill Clinton during his 1995 State of the Union address.
Ten years later a fellow Democrat said this: “We are a generous and welcoming people here in the United States. But those who enter the country illegally and those who employ them disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.
“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.”
That was then-Senator Barack Obama in 2005.
Back then dangerous gangs such as Tren de Aragua weren’t making headlines in the U.S. for terrorizing communities, yet Clinton and Obama recognized the threat of criminal illegal immigrants and the need to protect our country.
Trump, as he noted in his speech, plans to designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
A new poll by the New York Times and Ipsos found that 55% of Americans surveyed either strongly or somewhat support Trump’s proposed mass deportations.
So when sanctuary cities do whatever they can to prevent ICE from deporting illegal immigrants, who are they speaking for? Their neighboring communities who struggle to absorb a migrant population thrust upon them, or the immigrants themselves who live in fear of sexual predators staying in shelters?
Is the idea of deportation anathema to sanctuary cities because they don’t believe immigration laws are important, or simply because this time around, Donald Trump is the one enforcing them?
