https://spectator.org/trump-wins-his-first-sanctuary-city-fight/
Imagine, for a moment, that you or someone you know has become a crime victim. The perpetrator, you learn, had been incarcerated before this offense, and federal immigration officials, discovering that he was in the country illegally, wanted to pick him up for deportation. The jail, however, sits in a “sanctuary city,” so it refused to hold the suspect for immigration officials or even notify them before releasing him back into the community — thus allowing him to harm you or your loved one.
This scenario, which has played out numerous times, illustrates why many Americas are angry about sanctuary cities.
Donald Trump, of course, promised to end them. Beginning in 2017, however, his administration lost a series of legal battles with sanctuary cities. In each case, courts prevented the administration from using its grant-making authority to disincentivize sanctuary policies.
Sanctuary cities were having their cake and eating it too — thumbing their noses at the federal government’s request for basic law enforcement cooperation yet taking in federal law enforcement grant funds.
So last July’s ruling in City of Los Angeles v. Barr must have felt like a gut punch. Reversing a lower-court judgment for Los Angeles, a three-judge panel of the famously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld scoring factors used by the administration in awarding Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants — scoring factors that handicapped sanctuary cities.
