The president has again proven this Wednesday that he believes social media to be an appropriate place to air his political grievances. He’s the president of the United States, so you’d think — or at least hope — that he’d be above using what amounts to cyberbullying to get his point across, but here we are anyway.
On Wednesday, he took to Twitter to again slam the California state government for its moves to protect the undocumented immigrant population within its borders. To that end, the state government enacted a law that prohibits communication between state (and local) law enforcement agencies and the federal government on immigration related issues.
Trump simultaneously on Wednesday praised the people of Orange County, California, where the county Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to join a lawsuit filed by the federal government against the state of California over its “sanctuary state” law.
He wrote:
‘My Administration stands in solidarity with the brave citizens in Orange County defending their rights against California’s illegal and unconstitutional Sanctuary policies. California’s Sanctuary laws release known dangerous criminals into communities across the State. All citizens have the right to be protected by Federal law and strong borders.’
The president misses the point here in that the “sanctuary state” status of California does not all of a sudden mean that the state no longer punishes criminals. “The Purge” has not all of a sudden come to life within the confines of the state, as the president seems to suggest.
Rather, the state legislation making it a “sanctuary” jurisdiction simply removes potential conflicts of interest from the decision-making of state and local law enforcement agencies. Rather than acting as extensions of federal immigration authorities, law enforcement officers in the state of California are, under the law the president is so opposed to, simply freed to do their jobs without interference.
Even still, none of this has deterred the president and his allies from hounding California and other jurisdictions that dare to follow the same path. The Trump administration has tried to keep federal funds from going to so-called sanctuary cities in the past, but the court system has stifled those efforts.
They have some allies; besides the Orange County Board of Supervisors, the government of the California city of Los Alamitos recently voted to exempt themselves from the state’s “sanctuary law.”
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department has also made its own move to defy the state law, making the release dates of inmates it’s holding public and therefore accessible to federal authorities seeking undocumented immigrants for deportation.
Besides the president’s efforts to undercut the state of California’s “sanctuary laws,” he also still wants to see a wall go up in between the United States and Mexico, under the impression that such a structure will solve the supposedly nearly insurmountable problem of undocumented immigration to the United States.
Unsurprisingly, the president hasn’t exactly found it easy trying to get funding for his wall, and he’s recently been reported to be floating the idea of the military paying for it.
He threatened to veto the recently passed federal government spending bill because it didn’t include as much funding as he wanted to pursue the wall idea, although he ended up signing it.
Check out Twitter’s response to the president below.
Featured Image via Chris Kleponis-Pool/Getty Images
