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Democratic governors from Gavin Newsom in California to Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania and JB Pritzker in Illinois are forming a wall of defense against Trump’s executive actions.
Gov. Pritzker was on CNN on Sunday morning where he called out Trump’s intimidation tactics on immigration and said:
We’re going to follow the law in Illinois and federal law too. We expect them to do the same. I’m very afraid that they will not follow the law. The reason they put a memo out like that (DOJ immigration memo threatening state leaders with prosecution) is that that’s already the law. You know, we, everybody, we have to follow federal law. We have to follow state law.
Otherwise, we’re potentially subject to prosecution. Of course, we all know that they’re just putting that out because they want to threaten everybody. They want people to step back and let them do whatever they want to do, the federal officials.
And the reality is that they can’t break the law. You heard them talk about something unconstitutional this year, the removal of birthright citizenship.
We’re going to stand in the way of an unconstitutional order. We’ll also stand in the way of them breaking the law in Illinois if they’re not following federal law. Now, we know that if they show up with warrants to take people away that we’re going to hand them over. There are people who have deportation orders and have had for many years, even during the prior Trump administration, who need to be picked up and who are violent criminals and, again, should be deported.
So, we’re going to do, you know, what we need to do, but we also have a law in the books in Illinois that says that our local law enforcement will stand up for those law abiding undocumented people in our state who are doing the right thing. And we’re not going to help federal officials just drag them away because somebody pointed at them and said, oh, that person’s brown, or that person’s not from here.
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The Democratic pushback is currently clearly centered in two areas. Democrats in the House are pushing back and Democratic governors are pushing back. Both of these groups have more urgent personal motivations than Senate Democrats.
House Democrats have a chance to take back the majority next year, and the Democratic governors listed above are being floated as potential 2028 presidential candidates.
Even though the mainstream media is obsessed with Trump, Democrats are fighting back. There may not be the protests in the streets like there were in 2017, but elected Democrats are refusing to let a president who wants to expand his powers go unchecked.
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