Jeff Sessions Begins Cutting Funding To Sanctuary Cities

Spat or not spat, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is moving ahead with the Trump administration’s agenda of ending the sanctuary city nonsense. Last week, Sessions made as trip to Philadelphia where he denounced the lawlessness of the sanctuary city movement. Today, he took it a step further.

The target it a grant program called the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program. As the website says:

The JAG Program, authorized under 42 U.S.C. §3751(a), is the leading source of federal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions. The JAG Program provides states, tribes, and local governments with critical funding necessary to support a range of program areas including law enforcement, prosecution, indigent defense, courts, crime prevention and education, corrections and community corrections, drug treatment and enforcement, planning, evaluation, technology improvement, and crime victim and witness initiatives and mental health programs and related law enforcement and corrections programs, including behavioral programs and crisis intervention teams.

In 2016, 1010 grants were awarded totaling $84,063,637.

If you look at the list of 2016 awardees you will see a lot of familiar faces from ICE’s (temporarily suspended) sanctuary cities report.

That is coming to an end.

Attorney General Sessions Announces Immigration Compliance Requirements for Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Programs

The Department of Justice today posted a solicitation for the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Programs (“Byrne JAG”). Recipients for FY 2017 will be notified of new conditions of their grants that will increase information sharing between federal, state, and local law enforcement, ensuring that federal immigration authorities have the information they need to enforce immigration laws and keep our communities safe.

“So-called ‘sanctuary’ policies make all of us less safe because they intentionally undermine our laws and protect illegal aliens who have committed crimes,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. “These policies also encourage illegal immigration and even human trafficking by perpetuating the lie that in certain cities, illegal aliens can live outside the law. This can have tragic consequences, like the 10 deaths we saw in San Antonio this weekend. As part of accomplishing the Department of Justice’s top priority of reducing violent crime, we must encourage these ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions to change their policies and partner with federal law enforcement to remove criminals. From now on, the Department will only provide Byrne JAG grants to cities and states that comply with federal law, allow federal immigration access to detention facilities, and provide 48 hours notice before they release an illegal alien wanted by federal authorities. This is consistent with long-established cooperative principles among law enforcement agencies. This is what the American people should be able to expect from their cities and states, and these long overdue requirements will help us take down MS-13 and other violent transnational gangs, and make our country safer.”

What it means is that in order to be eligible for the DOJ grant program, a jurisdiction must agree to do certain things. To that list DOJ has now added that they must obey federal law in regards to cooperating with federal immigration agents. If they won’t do that, they are simply not eligible for the grant.

Ultimately, money talks and bullsh** walks. I suspect that when it becomes painful to be a “sanctuary city” that a lot of the fun will go out of it because for all their moralizing and hectoring, progressives are all about the money.

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