States React to "Family Separation" Media Hysteria
By David Jaroslav | June 28, 2018
As media hysteria continued regarding the Trump Administration’s zero-tolerance policy at the U.S. border, several states took additional steps of questionable legality and wisdom to express their opposition to enforcing our immigration laws, in addition to the previously-reported withdrawal of their National Guard troops.
In Colorado, Governor John Hickenlooper (D) signed an executive order on June 18 barring the use of state resources “for the purpose of separating children from their parents or legal guardians on the sole ground that their families are in violation of federal immigration laws.” The next day, Governor Phil Murphy (D) of New Jersey followed with an executive order of his own. And then, perhaps most bizarrely, Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) of New York tweeted an open letter to Vice President Pence quoting from the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus” as affixed to the Statue of Liberty.
Resolutions of condemnation were filed in the California Senate on June 14 and its Assembly on June 22. The Senate’s resolution has already been voted out of committee and could be taken up on the floor at any time. Similar resolutions have been filed in Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
In probably their biggest single reaction, seventeen states plus the District of Columbia sued the federal government over the issue in Seattle on June 26. Their lawsuit is, unsurprisingly, long on emotional rhetoric but short on any actual law.
By contrast, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (R) publicly proclaimed his full support for the Trump Administration, saying “I agree with the President 100%. If we don’t have secure borders, if a country doesn’t have borders, you don’t have a country … When someone breaks the law, they don’t take their children with them wherever they go[.]”
The mainstream media, of course, continues to press officials in other states that have yet to take public positions on either side, such as by the Kansas City Star editorializing, “Will Gov. Colyer and Kansas officials stand up for the migrant children in Topeka?” and the Tampa Bay Times rhetorically asking, “Pam Bondi opposes family separation and has taken on the feds before. So why not now?”
There is a consistent presumption in this ongoing narrative that the states should “resist” federal immigration law and President Trump’s policies of actually enforcing it. Whether the states either can or should try to interfere with this federal responsibility goes remarkably unquestioned. But the states that aren’t doing so should be commended for not overstepping their authority, being manipulated by open-borders activists (in or out of the media) or actually helping their own citizens.