DOJ threatens to subpoena sanctuary cities – prompting mayors to boycott Trump meeting

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Sessions: Sanctuary cities shouldn’t protect criminal aliens

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The Justice Department on Wednesday threatened to subpoena 23 jurisdictions if they don’t turn over information about their “sanctuary” policies — triggering a backlash from mayors across the country who pulled out of a White House meeting. 

In letters to New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and other jurisdictions, the Justice Department demanded records relating to whether these localities are “unlawfully restricting information sharing by law enforcement officers with federal immigration authorities.”

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“I continue to urge all jurisdictions under review to reconsider policies that place the safety of their communities and their residents at risk,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. “Protecting criminal aliens from federal immigration authorities defies common sense and undermines the rule of law.”

The letter drew a fiery response from several Democratic mayors — including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — who said they would boycott a planned working session with the president at the White House on Wednesday.

“I will NOT be attending today’s meeting at the White House after @realDonaldTrump’s Department of Justice decided to renew their racist assault on our immigrant communities,” de Blasio tweeted. “It doesn’t make us safer and it violates America’s core values.”

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who serves as the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, also said he would boycott the meeting.

“Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s decision to threaten mayors and demonize immigrants yet again – and use cities as political props in the process – has made this meeting untenable,” Landrieu said.

“Protecting criminal aliens from federal immigration authorities defies common sense and undermines the rule of law,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

 (Associated Press)

The White House said the meeting would still take place with mayors who chose to still participate.

“We are disappointed that a number of mayors have chosen to make a political stunt instead of participating in an important discussion with the President and his administration,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters. 

“President Trump might be able to tweet whatever comes to mind, but he can’t grant himself new authority because he feels like it,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in November, after the city filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the president’s executive order defunding sanctuary cities.

 (Associated Press)

The letters from the Justice Department state that jurisdictions that fail to respond will be subject to a DOJ subpoena.

“Sanctuary cities” is a phrase typically used to describe jurisdictions that restrict local law enforcement from sharing information with the federal government about the immigration status of those in custody.

“We have seen too many examples of the threat to public safety represented by jurisdictions that actively thwart the federal government’s immigration enforcement—enough is enough,” Sessions said.

The DOJ letter requests documents “reflecting any orders, directives, instructions, or guidance to your law enforcement employees” about how to “communicate with the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and/or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

If these jurisdictions can’t prove they are complying with federal law, senior DOJ officials told Fox News, federal funding could be withheld and the DOJ may demand the return of 2016 federal funding some of the cities have already received.

“We’ve given them federal dollars – your taxpayer dollars – to cooperate with federal law enforcement,” Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for the DOJ, said Wednesday on “Fox Friends.” “They didn’t have to take that money, but they did. And when they took it, they said they would comply with federal law. So what we’re saying is if we find out you’re not complying with federal law, we’re taking the tax dollars back.”

The administration, though, has faced setbacks over trying to withhold federal funds for sanctuary cities. A federal judge in Chicago ruled against Sessions in September; a judge in San Francisco also blocked President Trump’s executive order that denied federal funding to these cities.

“President Trump might be able to tweet whatever comes to mind, but he can’t grant himself new authority because he feels like it,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in November, after the city filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the president’s executive order.

The jurisdictions that received letters on Wednesday, according to the Justice Department: Chicago; Cook County, Ill; New York City; the state of California; Albany, N.Y.; Berkeley, Calif.; Bernalillo County, N.M.; Burlington, Vt.; the city and county of Denver, Colo.;  Fremont, Calif.; Jackson, Miss.; King County, Wash.; Lawrence, Mass.; City of Los Angeles, Calif.; Louisville, Ky.; Monterey County, Calif.; Sacramento County, Calif.; the city and county of San Francisco; Sonoma County, Calif.; Watsonville, Calif.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; the state of Illinois and the state of Oregon.

All 23 of these jurisdictions were previously contacted by the Justice Department, which raised concerns about its laws, policies and practices.

Jake Gibson is a producer working at the Fox News Washington bureau who covers politics, law enforcement and intelligence issues.

Alex Pappas is a politics reporter at FoxNews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexPappas.

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Killings in Kentucky latest in string of school shootings — 11 so far this year

ATLANTA — On Tuesday, it was a high school in small-town Kentucky. On Monday, a school cafeteria outside Dallas and a charter-school parking lot in New Orleans. And before that, a school bus in Iowa, a college campus in Southern California, a high school in Pierce County, near Seattle.

Gunfire ringing out in U.S. schools used to be rare and shocking. Now it seems to happen all the time.

The scene in Benton, Kentucky, on Tuesday was the worst so far in 2018: Two 15-year-old students were killed and 17 more people were injured. It was one of at least 11 shootings involving school property recorded since Jan. 1, and roughly the 50th of the academic year.

Researchers and gun-control advocates say that since 2013, they have logged school shootings at a rate of about one a week.

“We have absolutely become numb to these kinds of shootings, and I think that will continue,” said Katherine Schweit, a former senior FBI official and the co-author of a study of 160 active-shooting incidents in the United States.

Some of the shootings at schools this year were suicides that injured no one else; some did not result in any injuries at all. But in the years since the massacres at Columbine High School in Colorado, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, gun-safety advocates say, all school shootings seem to have lost some of their capacity to shock.

Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group, said that was because in 2012 in Newtown, “20 first-graders and six educators were slaughtered in an elementary school.”

“The news cycles are so short right now in America, and there’s a lot going on,” she said. “But you would think that shootings in American schools would be able to clear away some of that clutter.”

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said the gunman who opened fire Tuesday morning at Marshall County High School in Benton, near the western tip of the state, was not a man at all, but a 15-year-old student. The authorities said the student entered the school with a handgun just before 8 a.m., fired shots that struck 14 people, and set off a panicked flight in which five more were hurt.

One girl who was shot, Bailey Nicole Holt, died at the scene; a boy, Preston Ryan Cope, died of his injuries at a hospital.

The suspect, who was not immediately identified, was taken into custody in “a nonviolent apprehension,” Bevin said, and officials said he would be charged with two counts of murder and several counts of attempted murder. But the authorities had not yet decided whether to charge the suspect, who was armed with a pistol, as a juvenile or as an adult.

Of the 17 people injured, five remained in critical condition, law-enforcement officials said Tuesday night.

The region was scarred about two decades ago by a deadly school shooting in West Paducah, about a 40-minute drive away. Three people were killed when a student opened fire into a prayer circle, and five more were injured.

The town of Italy, Texas, is not any bigger than Benton. On Monday, a 15-year-old girl there was hospitalized after she was shot by a 16-year-old classmate, according to local news reports. That suspect, a boy, was taken into custody by the Ellis County Sheriff’s Department. The authorities said Tuesday that the victim was recovering.

The FBI study that Schweit helped write examined active-shooter episodes in the United States between 2000 and 2013. It found that nearly one-quarter of them occurred in educational environments, and they were on the rise. In the first half of the study period, federal officials counted 16 active-shooter incidents in educational settings, meaning instances of a person “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.”

In the second half, the number rose to 23. (Many, but not all, of the school shootings tallied by advocates so far this year meet that definition.)

According to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office in March 2016, 19 states were requiring individual schools to have plans for how to deal with an active shooter. Only 12 states required schools to conduct drills, but two-thirds of school districts reported that they had staged active-shooter exercises.

School-safety experts say steps like the drills are crucial, if imperfect, safeguards.

In Kentucky, lawmakers have grappled with how to address the risk of school shootings. Last year, state legislators considered, but did not pass, a bill that would have allowed people with concealed-carry permits to bring weapons on to public-school campuses, where, proponents argue, they could be used to respond to active shooters.

A similar bill, limited to college campuses and certain other government buildings, has been introduced this year. It was not immediately clear how the shooting in Benton might affect the debate in Frankfort, the Kentucky capital.

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