Yesterday’s House Committee on Oversight hearing on so-called sanctuary policies wasn’t actually meant to elicit any information from the Democratic governors of Minnesota and Illinois and New York. No, Tim Walz and JB Pritzker and Kathy Hochul were invited to Washington to be props to be hectored by Chairman James Comer and his allies.
Comer has before abused his oversight power to attack political enemies and advance an ideological agenda. It’s clear that the legislators intended the hearing to be a trap that these blue-state governors would walk into and be shredded. Yet this effort failed for the simple reason that the governors knew the game that Comer and his colleagues were playing and refused to give them more surface area to attack. If anything, they should have more thoroughly ridiculed the inquisitors’ absurd premises.
Republicans played their part by cherry-picking out specific crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants in an effort to paint the entire immigrant population as somehow particularly dangerous or violent, a narrative that quite simply is not true. Immigrants of all stripes commit crimes — from petty to serious — at lower rates than the native-born, while forming the backbone of multiple industries from agriculture and construction to health care and tech.
As much as the Republican members tried to make the notion of sanctuary policies sound sinister or otherwise improper, all it really means is that the localities at issue won’t go above and beyond what is legally mandated to cooperate with civil federal immigration enforcement.
As the trio of governors repeatedly noted, civil immigration enforcement by law and longtime legal precedent is exclusively a federal function, and constitutional separation of powers principles dictate that the feds can’t commandeer state officials to advance their own federal enforcement efforts. For a crowd that has so often touted the virtues of federalism, they seemed extraordinarily incensed that local and state governments would make their own decisions about the best interests of their constituents.
While the GOP questioners kept claiming that the governors were somehow putting undocumented immigrants ahead of their own constituents, this is absurd for a couple of reasons: first, all of these people, regardless of immigration status, are their constituents. These are folks that live and work and study in their states alongside native-born counterparts, all forming part of the lifeblood of their communities.
Second, they are not, in fact, receiving any kind of special treatment; to the contrary, the only thing that’s happening is that they are being treated the same as everyone else, with the states refusing to go above and beyond.
These governors were exactly correct in pointing out that the real danger to public order and the American public is not their failure to use state resources to further the Trump administration’s indiscriminate immigration crackdown but in fact that crackdown itself, which in California has now expanded to illegally incorporate the military.
As Hochul put it, this is “an overreach of epic proportions” by Donald Trump, who has decided not only that immigrants should be summarily detained but citizens should be harassed and arrested for protesting it. That’s the real crisis.
