President Donald Trump held a rally in Green Bay Wisconsin, on Saturday night, mostly touting his work in office, calling out Democrats, name-shaming Democrats and spinning a rolodex of cliches often heard at his rallies.
However, when addressing immigration and trying to shore up the southern border with Mexico, the president recalled his recent banter that he would start sending immigrants who overstayed their visits at holding facilities to the so-called sanctuary cities.
"Last month alone, 100,000 illegal immigrants arrived at our borders, placing a massive strain on communities and schools and hospitals and public resources, like nobody has ever seen before," Trump said to the crowd. "Now, we're sending many of them through sanctuary cities, thank you very much."
"I'm proud to tell you that was actually my sick idea," the president said.
Just two weeks ago, President Trump said detention facilities had become overcrowded, and that he would bus immigrant to sanctuary cities, which are actually cities, counties and states with laws and regulations that shield undocumented immigrants from being detained, incarcerated or removed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Here is a map of the sanctuary cities in the U.S.
The president even tweeted the relocation process would make the "radical left" happy.
"The Radical Left always seems to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy – so this should make them very happy!," he said.
Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2019
This comes about one week after ABC's This Week host George Stephanopoulos asked White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about it, in which she responded it "was brought up at a staff level and it was determined at that time that, logistically, there were a lot of challenges and it probably didn't make sense to move forward and the idea did not go further…"
When Stephanopoulos asked about the logistics and legality of moving immigrant families to sanctuary cities, Sanders said the option was not the first or even second by the White House.
"The president heard the idea, he likes it, so — well, we're looking to see if there are options that make it possible, and doing a full and thorough and extensive review," Sanders said then.
And when asked why it even came up, Sanders said it wasn't even the president's idea.
"Again, this isn't the president's plan," Sanders said in this Mediaite story. "His top priority is to stop the flow of illegal immigration coming into our country to begin with. Democrats and courts, frankly, keep tying the president's hands and stopping him from being able to do that."
