Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf has been in the news quite a bit lately for her imprudent and almost certainly illegal decision to announce in public an impending immigration enforcement action.
She openly declares that she did so in order to defeat the effort, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say she was quite successful at it. She has claimed she's willing to go to jail to back up her ardent emphasis on retaining Oakland's status and reputation as a sanctuary for illegal aliens, including criminal aliens. As I've made clear in prior blogs (here and here), I hope Schaaf gets the opportunity to prove her mettle, because if she is charged with shielding aliens from detection, there is a potential felony count with her name on it for each of the dozens of aliens who fled in advance of the ICE operation. That would potentially amount to decades in jail, if convicted.
Now, London Breed, the mayor of Oakland's proximate neighbor, the city/county of San Francisco, has decided to come out and make a similar pronouncement: "This is one of those issues where I wouldn't mind going to jail for the first time in my life." Go for it, I say!
The federal government has done all it can to avoid showdowns with state and local officials where the matter of sanctuary and other immigration scofflaw policies are concerned. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has (finally) announced that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will sue California over some of its outrageous and outlandish incursions into an arena preserved by the Constitution from encroachment by state and local governments. I hope that this is the first of many steps to clamp down.
I also hope sincerely that ICE and DOJ officials are watching Breed carefully because, sure as the sun shines, a showdown is coming and, for my money, the sooner the better.
We will then see whether the moral courage of Schaaf and Breed, and other sanctuary advocates, consists solely of cheap public pronouncements or whether they have the intestinal fortitude to actually go to federal prison for their so-called beliefs. I still wouldn't agree with them in the slightest, but then at least I might respect them.