[Reuters] 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.
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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.
Trump early in his campaign pledged to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and also threatened to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference on Thursday that New York would continue to defend undocumented immigrants.
"We are not going to sacrifice a half million people who live among us, who are part of our community," de Blasio said, referring to an estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants living in New York. "We are not going to tear families apart."
De Blasio said Trump's threat to withhold funds from sanctuary cities was "dangerous," but it was too soon to tell whether the president-elect intended to follow through on all his proposals. |