Mayors Boycott White House Meeting After Immigration Demand

(Bloomberg) -- Mayors including New York’s Bill de Blasio and New Orleans’s Mitch Landrieu backed out of a White House meeting on infrastructure with President Donald Trump in protest at the administration’s immigration policies and pressure on "sanctuary cities” that limit their cooperation with federal authorities.

Landrieu, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said in a statement on behalf of the the organization that the Wednesday afternoon event had become “untenable” after the Justice Department demanded that almost two dozen cities, counties and states -- from New York City to California -- prove that they’re sharing information with federal authorities about people who are in the country illegally.

De Blasio denounced the Justice Department’s move, which would lead to possible subpoenas and cuts in public-safety grants, calling it on Twitter a “racist assault on our immigrant communities.”

“I came here to Washington this afternoon in good faith,” de Blasio said at a press conference on Wednesday. “This letter explicitly threatens our funding again” and is “a slap in the face” to the whole conference of mayors, he said.

In the meeting at the White House, Trump told reporters that “sanctuary cities are the best friends of gangs and cartels.”

The Trump administration says it’s a matter of maintaining public safety. In his campaign, Trump denounced “weak and foolish policies” that he said had let criminals into the country and then failed to deport them.

Landrieu and de Blasio are both Democrats, though the conference, which is meeting in Washington this week, also includes Republican mayors. Sara Durr, a spokeswoman for the conference, said she wasn’t aware of how many mayors had decided to withdraw from the Trump meeting, which wasn’t an official event of the organization, she said.

De Blasio, who last month traveled to Iowa saying he wanted to influence the national policy debate, was among more than 100 mayors slated to attend the meeting. Mayors Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles and Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, who are also Democrats, had previously said they wouldn’t attend.

“We are disappointed that a number of mayors have chosen to make a political stunt instead of participating in an important discussion with the president and his administration,” said White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters. “President Trump is committed to tackling the challenges facing this country and looks forward to visiting with a large bi-partisan group of mayors that represent both rural and urban municipalities.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the department’s actions on sanctuary cities were simply a matter of enforcing the law.

“Protecting criminal aliens from federal immigration authorities defies common sense and undermines the rule of law,” Sessions said in a statement Wednesday. “We have seen too many examples of the threat to public safety represented by jurisdictions that actively thwart the federal government’s immigration enforcement. Enough is enough.”

About 37 percent of New York City residents are foreign born, the Department of Citywide Planning has said. The number of undocumented immigrants in the city ranges, according to various estimates, from about 375,000 to more more than 500,000. 

It’s been city policy for more than 30 years to disregard an immigrant’s illegal status, providing services including medical care in public hospitals and responding to calls for police assistance without reporting individuals to federal immigration authorities.

That policy preserves open communication between immigrant communities and law enforcement, and is one reason for the city’s record in reducing violent crime 85 percent in the past 25 years, Police Commissioner James O’Neill has said.  

New York is the safest big city in America because it has worked with "all communities", including immigrant communities, de Blasio said Wednesday. That’s been the policy followed by the city’s Police Department during the administrations of Republican mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, he said. Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

“Many mayors of both parties were looking forward to visiting the White House today to speak about infrastructure and other issues of pressing importance to the 82 percent of Americans who call cities home,” Landrieu said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s decision to threaten mayors and demonize immigrants yet again -- and use cities as political props in the process -- has made this meeting untenable.”

At the White House meeting, Trump said that his administration’s infrastructure program would likely generate up to $1.7 trillion of investment. Previously, he put that figure at about $1 trillion.

--With assistance from Arit John Chris Strohm Jennifer Epstein and Justin Sink

To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Goldman in New York at hgoldman@bloomberg.net, Anna Edgerton in Washington at aedgerton@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Joshua Gallu, John Harney

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