Local and state officials make an issue of family separation controversy
By Jennifer G. Hickey | June 28, 2018
In response to President Trump’s executive order addressing family separation, U.S. Conference of Mayors President Steve Benjamin released a statement on June 20 that welcomed the action, but argued it was “merely one small step that still leaves many questions unanswered.”
Echoing the rhetoric of other open border activists, the Columbia, South Carolina mayor asserted that Trump’s “indecision and erratic policymaking” has led to the traumatization of “thousands of lives.”
The following day, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and 16 other mayors traveled to a detention center located in Tornillo, Texas with the intent to “protest the Trump Administration’s family separation policy and call on the Administration for an immediate reversal.”
One of the nation’s most anti-immigration enforcement leaders, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, chose to stay in his city in order to publicly visit a detention center in Harlem.
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced plans to end a long standing agreement with the U.S. Marshal’s Office to house federal immigration detainees in the city’s local jails.
“As we work as a nation to end this despicable immigration policy, the City of Atlanta will not take the risk of being complicit in the separation of families at the border,” she said in a statement.
Joining in the obstructive activism was New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
According to NBC/Telemundo, last week a letter from the New York State Office of Children and Family Services to all New York state agencies ordering them to immediately reveal the name and age of each immigrant child and their parents, and threatening that a failure to comply could “result in the state’s suspension, revocation or limitation of your residential program’s operating certificate; the withdrawal of approval of your program’s authority to board out children; and/or the referral of the matter for criminal prosecution.” They all complied.