The Justice Department is asking a federal judge to reconsider its injunction imposed last month against President Trump’s executive order regarding so-called “sanctuary cities.”
The Trump administration sent the request to San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick late Monday following a memo issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that formally defined sanctuary cities and how they could lose some federal grants.
In his Monday memo, Sessions wrote a sanctuary jurisdiction will refer “only to jurisdictions that ‘willfully refuse to comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373,'” and only Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security grants are in danger of being stripped from the cities and counties that are not in compliance with the federal statute.
The memo comes on the heels of the January executive order that sought to withhold funds from sanctuary jurisdictions.
The Justice Department now wants Orrick to reverse or modify his April 24 injunction in which he said the executive order exceeded federal law.
“Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement cannot be threatened merely because a jurisdiction chooses an immigration-enforcement strategy of which the president disapproves,” Orrick wrote in the April decision.
The Justice Department argued Orrick’s injunction no longer applies in the wake of Sessions’ new memo.
“The AG Memorandum contradicts the Court’s interpretation of the grant-eligibility provision and thereby undermines much of the logic upon which the Court’s analysis is based,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in one of the motions filed Monday.
“Although the position articulated in the AG Memorandum is consistent with the position taken by government counsel at oral argument, the Memorandum provides conclusive, binding guidance that explicitly sets forth the position of the government.”
In another motion, the lawyers added one of the “primary bases” for the injunction “namely, non-binding press statements – has been supplanted, the court should reconsider its holding.”
Sessions admitted in his memo that though the definition of a sanctuary city is “narrow,” “nothing in the Executive Order limits the department’s ability to point out ways that state and local jurisdictions are undermining our lawful system of immigration or to take enforcement action where state and local practices violate federal laws, regulations, or grant conditions.”
Last month, the Justice Department wrote a letter to California and at least seven other jurisdictions warning them about their immigration enforcement policies, and giving them until June 30 to prove compliance.
