ICE in the Age of Trump
California businesses find themselves wedged between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the Federal Government's recent crackdown on undocumented workers – a head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says his agency plans to quadruple the number of unannounced visits to work sites, and a recent raid in the Bay Area shows he's serious. The hard place is California's law criminalizing cooperation with ICE when no warrant is presented. State and local leaders are determined to defend their sanctuary status, including Oakland Mayor Libby Shaaf, who announced the upcoming raid on Twitter. This led President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions to retaliate with a lawsuit against the state's directives opposing the Federal Government. Of course, illegal immigrants themselves are left in the ultimate predicament by our schizophrenic politics. Republicans are telling them to "Get in Line! And Stay Out!", while Democrats seem content to keep them as second-class citizens in legal limbo between naturalization and deportation. Mitch Jeserich hosts the award-winning Letters & Politics show on KPFA radio, where he frequently hosts discussions on immigration from a left-leaning perspective. He joins Bob to debate the philosophical differences between libertarians and left-liberals when it comes to immigration, and the constitutionality of the Trump administration's challenge to California's sanctuary state status.