By Sandy Fitzgerald | Wednesday, 16 Aug 2017 01:30 PM

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is traveling to Miami Wednesday to give the Trump administration's praise for dropping its status as a sanctuary city, but Mayor Carlos Gimenez said that his city has always shared information with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

"We never considered ourselves a sanctuary city," Gimenez told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.

"This has gone through two different administration, as we're going to fight the sanctuary city label to make us eligible to receive federal funding, and so that's really basically what's transpired."

Miami-Dade County detains inmates sought for deportation, which means it complies with at least one part of President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement plan, according to The Miami Herald.

Gimenez said Wednesday that Miami had been labeled a sanctuary city because it was not honoring detainer requests from the federal government, but it changed that policy in February and is now honoring the requests.

"We will hold somebody 48 hours after their time is up in Miami-Dade County Jail," said Gimenez, which gives ICE agents the opportunity to claim that person.

"We've always shared information with ICE," said Gimenez. "We always gave the information to all police agencies. When anybody is arrested in Miami-Dade County, they get fingerprinted, photographed, ID'd, and then all of that information is sent out throughout the country. We always did that. We just didn't honor the 48-hour detainer request."

But now that the 48-hour request is being honored, Sessions "feels that we are no longer a sanctuary city," said the mayor.

Gimenez, an immigrant himself, commented that all immigrants are not the same, but said a vast majority of people who have been arrested are multiple offenders, often with serious crimes committed.

"It's my job as a mayor to protect the citizens, all the citizens of Miami-Dade County, said Gimenez. "We think there's about 150,000 undocumented immigrants here in Miami-Dade County. ICE has picked up maybe 185 of them, so you're talking about a very small fraction of people."

Most undocumented immigrants, he continued, go about their business, but if they break a law, that leaves them open to be picked up by ICE, because "we comply with the law, and that's the policy."

http://www.newsmax.com/Politics/US-m.../16/id/808006/