Four cities and one county in the US were singled out by the Justice Department on Thursday as having sanctuary policies that could be violating a federal law stating that information cannot be withheld from US immigration officers by local governments.
The department says preliminary findings show that Chicago, Cook County in Illinois, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York City have policies in violation of federal law. It is giving the jurisdictions until 27 October to provide evidence that they are compliant. If the county and those cities are found to have violated the statute calling for information to be shared with federal US immigration officers federal funding for law enforcement could be cut.
But, the Justice Department could find no evidence that some other jurisdictions, including Milwaukee County in Wisconsin, Miami-Dade County in Florida, the state of Connecticut and Clark County in Nevada had violated Section 1373, as the statute is known. The determinations were made following requests from the Justice Department to several local jurisdictions to show how they had complied with the law to determine if they were eligible for specific federal grants.
US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, issued a statement slamming the cities that the Department still has in its crosshairs, declaring them to find protecting criminal immigrants to be of greater importance than protecting the rule of law and their own law-abiding citizens. The jurisdictions claim they have followed the law.