Trump Has New FBI HQ as Leverage Over Sanctuary County
Potential loss of facility worth 11,000 jobs could convince Prince George's officials to obey the law
by Edmund Kozak | 27 Jan 2017 at 5:20 AM
Prince George’s County, Maryland, is one of two locations vying to be the future location of a brand new, $1 billion FBI headquarters.
The county is competing with Springfield, Virginia, to host the new headquarters. The possible locations for the new complex in Prince George’s County are Greenbelt and Landover.
The region is famous for its crime and corruption — on Jan. 5, two PG County officials were charged in a liquor license bribery scheme and only five days later, former Maryland Delegate and PG County Council member Will Campos pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges in a different case.
But Prince George’s County also happens to be a “sanctuary” jurisdiction, making its consideration for the location of the new FBI headquarters — which is slated to lease offices to agencies involved in immigration enforcement — all the more paradoxical.
In 2014, the county’s Department of Corrections announced it would no longer honor Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers without a warrant signed by a judge that demonstrates probable cause.
"This campus is to include offices for ICE and Border Patrol, yet it will reside in a jurisdiction that openly violates federal law," Sue Payne, a member of the Remembrance Project and former Baltimore-area radio who is concerned about the impact of these laws on her community's quality of life, told LifeZette.
"PG County … is an openly declared sanctuary jurisdiction for illegal aliens. The police do not honor ICE detainers," Payne continued. "How do you put an FBI campus that represents the law enforcement agency in this nation into a jurisdiction that open violates federal law?" she asked.
After President Trump announced his executive order stripping federal funding to sanctuary cities, County Executive Rushern Baker was defiant. "It doesn't matter what President Trump says. It was our policy during the Obama administration; it's going to be our policy during the Trump administration," Baker told local news.
"We're not changing; we're not afraid of what the president has said … because we think we're doing the right thing; we're following the law," he continued.
But one can't help but wonder if Baker's defiance would hold with the additional threat of losing the FBI headquarters — and the money and jobs it would bring to Prince George's County — looming over his head. Such a move on Trump's part would be another effective way of using federal leverage to force the county to obey the law.
In December 2016, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee authorized $834 million in federal funds for the project. President Obama requested $1.4 billion for the complex in his 2017 budget proposal, and the FBI and GSA secured an additional $390 million that was included in the 2016 omnibus spending bill. The project is expected to bring roughly 11,000 jobs to the city that gets it.
Were Trump to order a reevaluation of the decision to consider Prince George's County for the new FBI headquarters, it would go far to send a strong message to the county and other jurisdictions that flagrant defiance of federal immigration law will not be tolerated.
Of course, Trump should seek to ensure Prince George's County isn't chosen for the project regardless. Indeed, Democrats and liberals in the mainstream media would no doubt seek to embarrass Trump with charges of hypocrisy were he to permit the project to proceed.
The alternative, however — Springfield, Virginia — is in Fairfax County, which, while having no official sanctuary policy, is suspected by some in the area to be a sort of unofficial sanctuary jurisdiction. Payne referred to it as an "open secret."
"Nearby Frederick County, Maryland, has a sheriff that has never stopped using [Section] 287(g) [of the Immigration and Nationality Act] and fully cooperates with DHS and ICE," said Payne.
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/t...ctuary-county/
