On Jan. 27, 2017 President Trump issued an executive order called, “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”  This executive order immediately provoked a nationwide, highly organized protest movement.  Several states' Federal District Courts issued temporary restraining orders or stays of execution, halting efforts to implement the Trump EO. 

Title 8 of the U.S. Code, Section 1182, “Inadmissible aliens” is a 38-page list of grounds for refusing admission to any alien.  The president is given broad powers by Congress to implement this federal statute through another federal law:

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

The Democratic Party has long established itself as an “identity group” party.  It has divided the nation up into a list of groups of persons based on ethnicity and race and targeted these groups in their campaigns.  Slogans such as “black lives matter” are intended to influence voters into believing that the Democratic Party alone sympathizes with and will act, using government control of agencies and benefits, to improve the lives of those who are members of these groups. 

These actions by the Democrats have a clearly defined and troubling theme in common: the manipulation of groups of human beings into regions under Democratic control so as to build up and exploit their numbers.  In return, these groups support the Democratic Party and maintain its political power. 

The Feb. 4, 2017 temporary restraining order issued by Judge James L. Robart and judges in other states are best understood in this historical context.  The Democratic Party has a 200-year history of activism with regard to defying federal law in order to control the movement of people.  These efforts have always used one major strategy: to use the local power of mayors and state officials to rewrite and defy federal law.  Now they are using judges sympathetic to the Democratic Party's political strategy.

The state actions to create and preserve sanctuary cities are then best understood as an exercise of rebellion against federal law.   This trend first began in the 1820s when John C. Calhoun and other politicians in the Southern slave-holding states defied the rising sentiment that slaves who entered free states could no longer be held as slaves.  This fight eventually led to the Civil War. 

But the tendency of Democrats to usurp the power of federal government to establish and maintain control over groups of persons has not ended.  It was first expanded to Mexican farm workers; then illegal immigrants, and now immigrants from all foreign nations.

While the U.S. Constitution delegates only to Congress the power “to establish an uniform rule of naturalization” this power was usurped in 1942 when the Bracero program, a guest worker program that enabled Hispanics to legally work in the US, was first established.  The Bracero program began as an agreement signed July 23, 1942 between President Roosevelt and President Manuel Avila Camacho and was ratified on Aug. 4, 1942 as that by the U.S. ambassador in Mexico City and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  This agreement was essentially based on an Executive Order, 8802, and not passed through Congress. 

The Bracero program was abolished by Lyndon B Johnson in 1964, just months before he announced his Great Society federal entitlement programs.  This cancellation resulted in a huge influx of Hispanic illegal immigrants to the U.S. With LBJ’s Great Society benefits, they could be assured that federal benefits would be made available to them.  While some number of illegal Hispanic immigrants always came to the U.S., the number was so low that the U.S. Census Bureau did not even include a race/ethnic group category called “Hispanic” in 1970. 

Two more major actions, not involving Congress, were declared by cities after 1970.  The first was the issuance of “Special Order 40 by the Los Angeles chief of police which formally announced that “it is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department that undocumented alien status in itself is not a matter for police action.”  Since the LAPD is not a federal agency, an arm of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the Department of Homeland Security, the statement is legally meaningless.   It is, in reality, a public relations statement: marketing the city of Los Angeles to illegal immigrants. 

Today, Los Angeles has video links to Youtube on its official website, linking to speeches from the officials of five Central American countries, assuring potential illegal immigrants that they will not be harassed by LAPD if they travel illegally to Los Angeles. However, the LAPD took a step further and engaged in the practice of refusing to “turn over” persons of undocumented alien status when they did commit crimes.  This led to the tragic Kate Steinle incident in San Francisco, another city which formally proclaims its scofflaw status. 

Next came Executive Order 85-1 issued by Chicago’s Mayor Harold Washington, in 1985.  This executive order made a similar statement, but went further and declared that all city services and employment opportunities were to be made available to all residents regardless of citizenship status.  It is a violation of the 1996 Immigration Act for anyone to harbor, aid or assist illegal immigrants or promote illegal immigration.  Today 47% of Chicago’s public school students are Hispanic.  That fall, New York City’s Mayor Edward Koch issued a memo (again, not legally binding) to city agencies effectively creating New York City’s sanctuary policy.  That memo remained in effect until Koch issued his Executive Order 124 on August 7, 1989.   It was reaffirmed by Mayor Bloomberg and remains in effect.  Today 40% of New York City’s population is foreign-born, the highest in its history.

In 2014 President Obama bypassed immigration law and used federal agencies to house illegal immigrant children at detention centers in many areas around the West.  The primary goal of sanctuary cities is to build up the populations of Democrat-controlled cities, most of which are rapidly losing population.

It is interesting to note that a Congressional hearing on immigration held on Feb. 27, 2003 reported a long list of the harm done to residents in New York City, caused by NYC’s sanctuary policy, but now judges around the country are citing potential harm to those non-citizens carrying visas as a reason to halt President Trump’s directive of Jan. 24. 

Judge Robart’s defiance of President Trump’s EO is just another chapter in the long story of how the Democratic Party has rebelled against federal authority for two hundred years.  And all of this defiance has been targeted to achieve one goal: The demographic control of persons to grow their big city populations.