Sanctuary City Crackdown: Trump Tries To Pull $8.8B From NYC For Protecting Immigrants

NEW YORK, NY — NYC could lose tens of millions of dollars — and up to $9 billion, if President Donald Trump gets his way — in yearly federal funding because of its status as one of hundreds of "sanctuary cities" across America where local officials refuse to report undocumented immigrants to the feds.

An executive order signed Wednesday by Trump said: "Sanctuary jurisdictions across the United States willfully violate Federal law in an attempt to shield aliens from removal from the United States. These jurisdictions have caused immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our Republic."

As punishment, Trump has ordered his Secretary of Homeland Security and Attorney General to "ensure," through all legal means available, that sanctuary cities "are not eligible to receive Federal grants."

Trump's executive order also calls for an additional 10,000 federal immigration officers to be deployed across the U.S. (Read the document in full at the bottom of this post.)

"This is really a scary time," New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said Wednesday.

“If there was ever any doubt about whether Donald J. Trump's hateful rhetoric truly reflected his intentions," the speaker said, "today’s Executive Orders affirm that his agenda will take our country down a dangerous and divisive path."

By nightfall, thousands of New Yorkers had gathered in Washington Square Park to protest the president's orders.

The exact amount of federal funds to be pulled from NYC coffers is still unclear, as the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General have yet to determine which grants can legally be canceled.

But the figure Trump is shooting for is staggering: Overall, around $8.8 billion in federal funds have been promised to NYC in 2017, according to city officials.

At a late-afternoon press conference, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would continue to protect undocumented immigrants from the feds, despite Trump's intimidation campaign. "It is important to understand that in New York City, this executive order will not change who we are or how we will go about our work," de Blasio said. (Video below.)

"We will not deport law-abiding New Yorkers," the mayor said. "We will not tear apart families. ... And we're not going to undermine the hard-won trust that has developed between our police and our communities."

The mayor and his head legal counsel said they were confident that Trump's order to yank federal money from NYC schools, hospitals, social services, etc., will be deemed illegal by the U.S. Attorney General upon review.

"There is less here than meets the eye," de Blasio said. "This executive order is written in a very vague fashion."

Of the approximately $8.8 billion promised to NYC in 2017, the only federal money that could potentially be withheld, city officials argued, is around $130 million in anti-terrorism grants provided to the NYPD by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.

In this way, de Blasio said, Trump's order "on its face, contradicts its stated purpose" to make America safe again.

De Blasio has long vowed to resist any efforts by federal immigration authorities under Trump to find and deport illegal immigrants living in NYC.

"If the federal government wants our police officers to tear immigrant families apart, we will refuse to do it," de Blasio said in a November speech that went viral on Facebook and has since been viewed by millions. (Video below.)

"If the federal government tries to deport law-abiding New Yorkers who have no representation," the mayor said, "we will step in."

NYPD officers are currently barred from asking for anyone's immigrant status.

"Notice that Trump didn't come out and say, 'All police must turn over immigrants,'" Anna Law, political science professor and Herb Kurt chair of constitutional rights at Brooklyn College, explained Wednesday. "He has no authority to order that. So the only leverage he has is to threaten to withhold federal funds."

However: If, say, federal agents physically storm NYC and begin rounding up immigrants, there's not much the municipal government or police could do, Law said.

"The misnomer of a sanctuary city is that there's an area off-limits to federal enforcement — but that's wrong," Law said. "The federal immigration authorities can conduct raids throughout our city. That can still happen."

Trump's goal, as outlined during his campaign, is to deport 2 to to 3 million illegal immigrants from the U.S. during his tenure, with a focus on “criminals." But those numbers will be much more difficult to reach, Law said, without cooperation from local police, who are needed to play the crucial role of alerting the feds when immigrants in their towns are found to be without papers.

The danger, then, is that Trump's newly expanded force of immigration agents would "randomly pick people who aren't violent criminals just to get the body count," Law said.

In a preemptive move defying Trump, the Brooklyn District Attorney recently announced that at the prosecutorial level, going forward, Brooklyn court officials will make every effort to avoid bringing charges and imposing sentences that could lead to the deportation of minor criminals.

City officials have also been anticipating Trump's attack on municipal funds. In the first draft of de Blasio's 2017-18 city budget, revealed Tuesday, he set aside more than $1 billion in reserves — on top of $5 billion already in reserves — to account for "deep uncertainty at the federal level." These funds can be used in case of emergency, the mayor said.

According to the city's Independent Budget Office, the nearly $9 billion promised to NYC by the U.S. government in 2017 includes:

• $1.07 billion for the Housing Preservation and Development department, including $439 million in Sandy-related disaster relief and $481 million in Section 8 funding

• $1.96 billion for the city's public-housing agency (NYCHA), including $930 million for Section 8 vouchers

• $302 million for public health programs, including $152 million for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment; $25 million for mental health programs; $14 million for drug abuse treatment and prevention; and $15 million for early intervention for children ages 0-3 with developmental disabilities

• $32 million in Medicaid revenue for services such as school health clinics, immunization and drug abuse programs

• $185.4 million for the NYPD, including $130.6 million in anti-terrorism funding for various programs such as the Urban Areas Security, Securing the Cities, and Port Security initiatives

• $104.1 million for the Department of Transportation, including $51.9 million for traffic operations and maintenance; $17 million is allocated for traffic planning safety and administration; and $15.1 million for bridge maintenance, repair and operations

• $1.7 billion for schools, including $679 million to fund Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), targeting to schools with high concentrations of low-income students; $300.4 million for the Federal School Lunch program; and $270 million for the IDEA program (for students with disabilities)

“New York has always been a city of immigrants and we will not be bullied into dividing against one another," U.S. Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, who represents parts of North Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, said in reaction to Trump's executive order Wednesday.

"I am proud our city officials have made clear they will not be accomplices in enforcing policies that create fear in immigrant communities," Velázquez said.

However, many local immigrants are concerned that federal policy could one day override city policy, according to Dennis Flores, a leading civil-rights activist in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, who holds legal workshops for the local immigrant community.

"This is a burden on the whole family," Flores said. Undocumented immigrants are "afraid to go to work, afraid of being targeted," he said. "They don't know what's next. That's the big question: What's next?"

Some are also concerned that NYPD officers themselves, whose union came out as fiercely pro-Trump during the election, might go rogue, Flores said.

"There's a feeling that the big, bad sheriff" — aka, Trump — "is back in town," he said. "A feeling that whatever the mayor says, police could turn their backs on him and do what they want."

Anna Law from Brooklyn College confirmed that technically, "They could."

"It would be in violation of what the mayor ordered, but it wouldn't be illegal," Law said. "So it's a matter of, 'Do we cooperate or not?'"

Trump's crackdown on sanctuary cities like NYC is expected to be just one part of a series of executive orders on immigration issues unveiled over the next couple days. On Wednesday, Trump also issued an order formally moving forward his campaign promise to build a wall on the Mexican border.

Here are both of Wednesday's orders in full:

Editor's Note: This post was continually updated Wednesday to include additional details as they became available.