Sanctuary Chicago: PLEASE Don’t Take Our Money, Mr. President!

Several blue city mayors around the country are using Donald Trump’s presidency as an obvious catapult into the national political spotlight, and few are less guarded about it than Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel. The former Obama advisor has managed to run the Windy City into the ground through a series of terrible, mismanaged decisions, and now he wants to move the spotlight away from his own corrupt office and onto his fight with the White House. As such, he’s become one of the most outspoken Democrats against Trump’s immigration policies and that has Chicago in danger of losing some of their precious federal grant money.

To hold onto their allowance, Chicago will file a federal lawsuit against the administration on Monday, hoping to have a judge declare it unconstitutional for the federal government to withhold grant money from sanctuary cities. The thrust of the city’s argument will be that the Department of Justice cannot hold back federal public safety grants just because Chicago isn’t cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

In an interview with a local radio station, Mayor Emanuel said he was committed to standing firm behind the city’s illegal immigrants.

“We are not going to be between picking our values of who we are as a welcoming city, and strengthening our police department,” Emanuel said. “We’re not going to actually auction off our values as a city, so Monday morning the City of Chicago is going to court; we’re going to take the Justice Department to court based on this. We find it unlawful and unconstitutional to be, as a city, coerced on a policy.”

In a statement last week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions outlined the Department of Justice’s new policies regarding sanctuary cities and their supposed entitlement to federal grant money.

“By protecting criminals from immigration enforcement, cities and states with so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies make all of us less safe,” Sessions said. “We saw that just last week, when an illegal alien who had been deported twenty times and was wanted by immigration authorities allegedly sexually assaulted an elderly woman in Portland, a city that refuses to cooperate with immigration enforcement.

“By forcing police to go into more dangerous situations to re-arrest the same criminals, these policies endanger law enforcement officers more than anyone,” Sessions continued. “The Department of Justice is committed to supporting our law enforcement at every level, and that’s why we’re asking ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions to stop making their jobs harder.”

But that’s read by liberal Democrats as “auctioning off our values,” which includes the long-standing American value of harboring fugitives, apparently. Why SHOULD local police departments get extra federal money when they refuse to help enforce the law?

We sorely hope the courts don’t screw the country on this one, because enough is enough of this nonsense. If these cities want to protect illegal immigrants, they need to suffer the financial consequences of their decision.