NYC and L.A. Mayors Learn Nothing, Promise to Continue as Sanctuary Cities

Alternative, more realistic headline for the article: “Mayors of NY and Los Angeles pledge to keep Democrats in extended minority.”

Officials in New York and Los Angeles on Thursday said they hoped President-elect Donald Trump would not follow through on a campaign promise to withhold federal funds from “sanctuary cities” that shield people who are in the country illegally.

The nation’s two largest cities have sharply limited their cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities seeking to deport undocumented immigrants.

President Barack Obama’s administration has used so-called detainer requests to target undocumented immigrants convicted of criminal acts, especially violent ones.

New York and Los Angeles do not hold undocumented inmates in jail at the request of the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unless the detainer request is accompanied by a judge’s order, officials said.

Trump said during a debate with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in October he would seek to deport major drug dealers. “We have some bad hombres here and we’re going to get them out,” he said.

Both media and Beltway types haven’t quite figured out that a good portion of America isn’t in sync with them on “comprehensive immigration reform” and the coddling of people who aren’t in the country legally, many of whom are violent. It was the original engine propelling the Trump machine forward in the early primary days, and remains an issue of great disconnect even now that Trump has won.

There was a lot of talk a few years back about the Republicans becoming a “regionalized party”. Democrats were supposed to take over the map, relegating the GOP to little patches of red. Here is the county electoral map from Tuesday:

Both Republican and Democrat elites can make up whatever reasons they want for what got that map so red, but the disparity between what the public is told America believes about illegal immigration and what America actually believes has a lot to do with it.

De Blasio and Garcetti are obviously preserving their own provincial political futures, but they are painting themselves into corners on opposite ends of the country to do so. These corners may not become red any time in the near future, but then nobody was betting on Pennsylvania to go Republican in the election at this time last week.