Sacramento County Will Lose Millions After Banning ICE
One interesting consequence of the left’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is that their reflexive opposition to all things related to President Donald Trump can sometimes result in them doing damage to their own causes, whether that damage be financial or merely among public perception.
One such example recently occurred in Sacramento County, California, which will now forgo millions of dollars per year in federal funds in order to send a message to the White House regarding to illegal immigration policies.
According to KOVR, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors voted by a margin of 3-2 last week to cancel a contract the county had with the Department of Homeland Security which gave it millions of federal dollars in exchange for the detention of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation.
That contract with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been in effect since 2013, earned the county $6 million annually for the simple task of housing federal detainees in cells at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center.
Most of those detainees come from the Northern California region and the facility is currently holding 82 such individuals, the vast majority of whom had a prior criminal history and are waiting to be deported.
Since the county supervisors no longer want to detain those criminal illegal immigrants in exchange for millions of federal dollars, the detainees will simply be moved to other correctional facilities to await deportation, perhaps even out of state, meaning they will be placed even further away from their families and friends … which is pretty much the opposite of what the liberal supervisors wanted.
While the supervisors that voted for the change can virtue signal and crow about their “values,” the ones who voted against the move are now scrambling to figure out how they will replace the gaping $6 million hole in the county budget.
“We’ll have to look into our discretionary funds and into our other programs to see what we have to cut to figure out how we’re going to pay for that,” District 4 Supervisor Sue Frost said.
“It’s completely symbolic in nature. It doesn’t solve any part of the problem at all,” she added in regard to the cancellation of the contract with ICE.
The cancellation had been spurred on by a 2015 federal audit of the prison which alleged that some illegal immigrants were being treated inhumanely while detained.
Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones has tangled with the board of supervisors in the past with regard to immigration policies, but he nevertheless issued a statement that expressed “respect” for the decision and vowed to ensure a “smooth facilitation” for the detainees out of his jurisdiction, which is to be completed by the end of June.
We conservatives often lament that the federal government has its hands in too many pies and does far more than it was constitutionally intended to do, but enforcement of immigration laws is widely viewed as one of the few legitimate purposes they are responsible for.
This move by Sacramento County, intended to be a slap in the face of the Trump administration, will likely make the jobs of the federal ICE agents a bit more difficult.
More so than that, though, is the fact that the county just sacrificed a significant portion of its annual budget in order to send a message to Trump, one which will hurt the county far more than it hurts the feds.
This was a rather foolish move by Sacramento County that will ultimately hurt themselves financially and hurt their perception among the public, as they have sided with illegal immigrants against the federal government and law-abiding American citizens.
Alas, much of what the left does due to their “TDS” is foolish and backfires on them, so this idiotic symbolic gesture is really just par for the course where California’s anti-Trump progressives are concerned.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
