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Politics

Miami-Dade Mayor Gimenez: I Will 'Fully Cooperate' with Trump's Sanctuary City Crackdown

January 27, 2017 - 11:45am
Carlos Gimenez
Carlos Gimenez

Republican Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez won't join Democratic mayors in other sanctuary cities and counties. He has ordered Miami-Dade jails to "fully cooperate" with President Donald Trump's crackdown on cities that turn a blind eye to undocumented immigrants.

Exactly how many people this will affect is not immediately known.

Gimenez sent a memo Thursday instructing the county's interim corrections director to comply with all immigration detainer requests received from the Department of Homeland Security.

The order comes as several Democratic mayors in the nation's largest cities have banded together to fight the Trump executive order that White House press secretary Sean Spicer said will "strip federal grant money from the sanctuary states and cities that harbor illegal immigrants."

"Miami-Dade County complies with federal law and intends to fully cooperate with the federal government," Gimenez wrote in the memo.

Florida is home to seven “sanctuary counties”  -- Pasco, Hillsborough, Pinellas, Hernando, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.

Since 2013, Miami-Dade, the state's largest county in terms of population, has had a policy of not indefinitely detaining inmates who may be in the country illegally unless reimbursed by the federal government.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, more than 200 cities, counties and states across the United States are considered sanctuary cities. These state and local jurisdictions have policies, laws, executive orders, or regulations allowing them to avoid cooperating with federal immigration law enforcement authorities.

These “cities” ignore federal law authorizing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to administratively deport illegal aliens without seeking criminal warrants or convictions from federal, state, or local courts.

Mayors in cities including Los Angeles, Boston and New York, as well as legal scholars, have vowed to challenge the presidential order, saying the Supreme Court makes it difficult for Washington to punitively withdraw money from state and local governments.

Enforcement of Trump's executive order is complicated by the fact that the term "sanctuary city" has no universal meaning.

Police chiefs around the country have widely varying policies in the degree to which they cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and the lengths to which they will go to protect undocumented immigrants.

In 2008 a bill that would have prevented sanctuary cities in Florida died in the Legislature when Sen. Marco Rubio was then speaker of the House. The bill would have prohibited statewide any sort of government restrictions on disclosing someone’s immigration status in several scenarios, including employment or issuing public benefits. It also would have required all public employees to work with federal agencies to comply with federal immigration laws.


Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith. Information from CNN contributed to this story.

Comments

Talk is cheap.. lets round them up and ship them out..

Gimenez is always willing to sacrifice liberty for money

I like this Mayor Gimenez good and smart Leader.

Ft. Lauderdale won't comply.

You know, I think I remember George C. Wallace saying something like that......

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