It’s Official: D.C. No Longer A Sanctuary City As Trump Cracks Down On Crime

Washington, D.C., has officially lost its status as an illegal alien sanctuary city amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.

Attorney General Pam Bondi stripped the city’s Chief of Police Pamela Smith of her power this week, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order, instead naming Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terry Cole as the new emergency police commissioner.

Bondi also rescinded three orders from the city government limiting law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Attorney General pledged that the district will not be a safe haven for illegal aliens in an interview in which she accused the city’s leadership of “shielding” illegal aliens from the law.

Bondi went on to assert that D.C. politicians are “trying to protect criminal aliens” and that “criminals are going to flee to DC” if the nation’s capital maintains its sanctuary city policies. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

The most recent of the three orders rescinded by Bondi prevented D.C. police from using databases to inquire about the immigration status of people in the nation’s capital.

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“Members shall not make inquiries into any person’s immigration status for the purpose of determining whether they have violated the civil immigration laws or for the purpose of enforcing civil immigration laws,” read the order, which was implemented just last week.

“To the extent that provisions in this Order conflict with any existing MPD directives, those directives are hereby rescinded,” Bondi wrote.

“So, yes, you must comply. You must give the information to our ICE, to our Homeland Security officers,” Bondi said, addressing police officers in the nation’s capital. “If they have information of an illegal alien living in DC, they must give us that information.”

Now the city’s leadership must obtain approval from Cole before issuing new directives. Leaders in the city government have pushed back, with Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, issuing a legal opinion contesting the Trump administration’s crackdown on crime in the city.

“It is my opinion that the Bondi Order is unlawful, and that you are not legally obligated to follow it,” Schwalb wrote in a memo to D.C. Metropolitan Police Department Chief Pamela Smith.

The nascent legal fight comes as federal authorities and the National Guard have begun patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital in an effort to curtail the “out of control” crime that Trump seeks to end.