Sanctuary Challenges & Little League Visas Denied

0:00The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand, but by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video. It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it. Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case.

0:54I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio. The Trump administration has taken aggressive action against sanctuary cities and states, filing lawsuits against Colorado and Denver, Illinois and Chicago, Los Angeles, Rochester, New York, four New Jersey cities, and just last week, New York City. The basic contention of the lawsuits is that sanctuary cities and states interfere with federal immigration enforcement. But on Friday, a federal judge dismissed the administration's lawsuit against Illinois and Chicago. Joining me is immigration attorney Leon Fresco, a partnered Holland and Knight.

1:51He was the head of the Office of Civil Immigration Litigation during the Obama administration. Leon, there's no official definition for sanctuary cities, but can you describe what they are? Well, there's two components of what people talk about when they mention sanctuary cities. So one is the issue of information sharing with the federal government. So that is, if a specific city or locality or county or state has information about someone that's been arrested, the question is, should they share that information with immigration so that immigration knows that there's now someone who's undocumented that's been arrested that they should try to pick up as part of an initiative to pick up people with criminal violations.

2:44That's one. And then the second is cooperation with administrative warrants or what are called detainer requests, which is on the other end, when ICE actually knows that somebody is in custody in a city or county jail or a state facility, if there's an ordinance that says, well, if ICE issues an administrative warrant, which is a warrant that can be issued just by an ICE agent, it doesn't have to go to a court, does that compel in any way the city, the county, or the state to actually comply with that warrant? And so what the sanctuary provisions say is, no, you're not compelled to do anything with that.

3:26If there's a federal judicial warrant, fine, then turn the person over to the ICE agent who's showing that federal criminal judicial warrant. But otherwise, just release them and don't do anything just because ICE is commandeering you to perform work on its behalf. And so those are the two things that are commonly meant by sanctuary cities. It's not really that the city itself is in any way sort of creating an amnesty that legalizes undocumented people or anything like that within its borders. But what it's essentially saying is it's not going to do anything affirmatively to help the federal government in its mission of trying to deport people who are deportable from the United States.

4:17So the Trump administration has been targeting sanctuary cities, which are generally democratic cities. I mean, having a sanctuary city, does that really hold up their immigration efforts? So we're not talking legally. We're just talking about as a factual matter. Absolutely. I would prefer one million times out of a million to be given a list every day from states and cities and counties across the country. Here is a list of people that we've arrested today. go look at all of these people in these lists and try to figure out if any of them are undocumented. And there are many cities in America, some in Florida, some in Texas that do this.

5:01They provide ICE every day with a list of people that have been arrested. And then ICE goes and says, well, out of these 100 people on this list, we care about these 14. Detain them. Tell us when you're going to release them, call us and we'll come pick them up. And because that doesn't happen, then those, let's say, 14 people out of that list from 100, ICE has to go find them. So it would be much easier for ICE if they could just literally be handed that human being and put them in an ICE detention vehicle and put them in an ICE facility. But when you have a law that does not permit that, then those people get released and ICE has to catch them again, just like if they had never had any information about them in the first place.

5:50And so as a practical matter, I don't think anybody would dispute that it practically makes the job of deportation of people with criminal interactions. I can't say criminals because some of these folks who get arrested are going to be acquitted. So that's one of the other problems is if you say you're deporting a criminal non-citizen, The issue is, well, are they actually criminals in the sense that they actually did something that they got convicted for, or are they just wrongfully arrested of something? And then, you know, there's the other argument that people make about, well, yeah, but they're here illegally.

6:25So in and of itself, you can call that person a criminal. But putting that argument to the side, which is a semantic argument that people debate in the political realm, the point being that that group, whether you care about whether they were convicted or whether you just care that they were arrested and people shouldn't be getting arrested anyway, whatever you think about that group, it is immensely harder to remove anyone in that group in any of the iterations if the cities don't give that information and share it affirmatively with us. The administration sued New York City Mayor Eric Adams and other officials after the shooting of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer in a Manhattan park a little over a week ago.

7:13They blamed New York's sanctuary city policies for the shooting. Here's Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem two days after the shooting. Make no mistake, this officer is in the hospital today fighting for his life because of the policies of the mayor of the city. and the city council and the people that were in charge of keeping the public safe. Would the suspects have been in ICE custody if New York wasn't a sanctuary city? So according to the lawsuit, one of the two people that had been arrested absolutely did interact with ICE in the sense that ICE placed an immigration detainer on one of the two people, both who committed the crime of the attack on the CBP officer in Fort Washington Park.

7:59Both were here illegally and both were arrested and released in New York. But ICE had actually placed what was called an immigration detainer on one of the two individuals, meaning they told a New York City jail, please hold this person so we can go pick them up and tell us when you're going to release them. And that went unanswered. It was like, you know, If you send a fax to Mars, nobody is there in Mars answering that fax. It's the same concept here. So that detainer is ignored, and then this individual who gets arrested then walks out, and they commit this crime against the CBP officer in Fort Washington.

8:44The argument being, if this had been a locality like some of the ones in Florida or in Texas, for sure that ICE detainer would have been honored, meaning at least one of the two individuals for sure would have been arrested and detained and would never have been able to commit this crime. But even the second one who didn't have an ICE detainer, had New York had an especially cooperative relationship with ICE, then it would have even given the second person, the moment they were arrested, affirmatively the information to ICE and said, hey, please do us a favor and pick up this person because we're really trying to enforce the immigration law.

9:25And so depending on the scenario, either one or both would have been apprehended and would not have been free to commit that crime. Are all the administration's lawsuits against sanctuary cities and states basically making the same arguments based on the supremacy clause? They argue basically three different arguments. They say, number one, that there is preemption, that the federal immigration law actually requires, in a sense, information sharing between the federal government and the state government in the sense that part of the immigration code says that states, cities, and counties cannot pass any laws that prohibit the sharing of information, and here's the key, it says regarding an individual's citizenship and immigration status.

10:23And so the point is, what does that mean? Does that mean only that issue, meaning just number one, are you a citizen? Are you here legally? Or does it mean a bigger basket of information? Are you detained? What time are you going to be released? Where are you detained? What crime did you commit, et cetera? And so that's a debate. Now, to be fair to the states and the cities and the counties, this debate has been had in the first Trump administration and now in the second one. And so far, the Supreme Court hasn't weighed in, but every other court that has weighed in has said that information is just a very narrow, is the person here legally or not?

11:06And is the person a citizen or not? But has nothing to do with this broader basket of information that the federal government seeks. But nevertheless, that's one argument, number one, that what the cities and the states and the counties are doing is preempted because they have to provide this information. And then number two, that it's preempted by the Supremacy Clause because these laws discriminate against the federal government. They give worse treatment to the federal government than they do against others that might ask for this information. They're specifically targeted toward not sharing information with the federal government.

11:40And finally, they actually implicitly regulate the federal government. That's the final argument that was made in these lawsuits, because if you're telling the federal government, here's how you have to operate in a particular location, you have to do this, this, and this in order to get someone from county detention. You have to get a federal warrant. You can't get a civil warrant, et cetera. You can't ask for information. You have to stand outside the jail and try to catch people or stand outside the courts and try to catch people, then you're regulating the federal government in a way that's impermissible.

12:17So those are the arguments that the federal government has made in these cases. But again, to be fair to the states and the localities, they have not been successful at any level, district or appellate court so far, in winning any of these cases so far. Coming up next on the Bloomberg Law Show, I'll continue this conversation with Leon Fresco, why Venezuela's Little League team was denied visas to take part in the league's Senior Baseball World Series in South Carolina. You're listening to Bloomberg. Early morning on a Manhattan sidewalk, a shooting caught on surveillance video. It was an assassination-style killing, and everybody saw it.

13:00Now, as Luigi Mangione prepares to stand trial for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which he denies, a new podcast series from ABC Audio and 2020 goes inside this captivating case. I'm ABC News legal analyst Brian Buckmeyer. Listen to Burden of Proof, Luigi Mangione, wherever you get your podcasts.

13:26The Trump administration has filed a series of lawsuits targeting state and city policies seen as interfering with immigration enforcement. But last Friday, a judge in Illinois dismissed the administration's lawsuit against Chicago and Illinois. I've been talking to immigration attorney Leon Fresco, a partner at Holland and Knight. Leon, the judge dismissed the lawsuit saying the Trump administration didn't have standing to bring the suit. Tell us about her ruling. Very similar laws in Cook County and Chicago and Illinois as the ones we were just talking about in New York. And so the defendants, Chicago, Illinois, Cook County, file a motion to dismiss, and they say, at the end of the day, you can't sue us because you don't have standing because you're not affected by anything we're doing.

14:18If you feel that you are affected by something we're doing, it's because you're forcing us to do things. And, you know, you can enforce all the immigration law you want in Chicago federal government. That's what the city and the county and the state were saying. They're saying you can enforce all the immigration law you want. We don't have officers shooting at you while you're trying to enforce immigration law, or we don't have officers putting up barricades or hiding people or anything else. The problem in these cases is you're trying to make us do things that we don't want to do, and so you don't have standing to make us do things that we don't want to do because the Supreme Court has already held in the famous Prince case, and that was a case where when the Brady Law was passed that developed the National Background Check System, until that system was developed, they said for the states and the localities, they had to do the background checks.

15:14And then the locality sued and said, you can't force us to do background checks. We don't want to do that. You know, there were some localities that didn't believe that constitutionally you could have background checks on guns. And so the Supreme Court agreed. They said the federal government cannot force states and localities, it's called anti-commandeering, into implementing federal regulatory programs. And so that same theory that existed in the Prince case is being applied in these sanctuary city cases, but again in the Chicago case, to say if you actually are saying you have standing because you're being hurt, you're only being hurt because the cities aren't enforcing the law in the way you want them to, and you can't do that.

16:02You can't make a city or a county affirmatively do anything. They can do what they want as long as they're not interfering. And because there was no finding of interference, then the idea was there's no standing because you can't force them to cooperate. You can only force them to not interfere. So can we conclude that the lawsuits against other sanctuary cities and states will likely go a similar way? Yeah, I mean, unless the Supreme Court wants to announce a new doctrine, and there is a final sort of straw that the government is grasping at, which is to say, in the end, we want to distinguish Prince from the sanctuary city cases to the extent that what we're seeking is only information, as opposed to the states or the cities doing anything.

16:54So, for instance, I don't think the federal government will ever be successful in getting the Supreme Court to say that a city or a county or a state has to affirmatively detain somebody because that's an affirmative action that's similar to Prince. But the question is on information sharing, is that going to be something that is covered by print, or will they be able to achieve an information sharing exception, which allows the federal government to force states and cities to share information that they have with regard to foreign nationals, i.e., where are they, where are they detained, when are they going to be released?

17:36And so that is, I think, the final threshold question. And I would say, given that the Supreme Court has been pretty deferential recently toward Trump's efforts to deport people and to enforce the immigration laws, I would say that that one is not so crazy to think that the immigration court might set out an exception for information sharing. We'll have to wait and see. I want to turn to denaturalization, which has been in the news a bit lately. Denaturalizing citizens used to be reserved for extreme cases like war criminals or national security threats. But last month, the Department of Justice made it one of five enforcement priorities for the agency's civil division.

18:26First of all, who are we talking about? We're talking about people who entered the United States, did everything the right way, got green cards, lawful permanent residence, waited the statutory period, passed the English and civic test, and are now U.S. citizens. So they can vote, they can serve on juries, they can apply for security clearances, the whole thing. Yes, these are U.S. citizens, just like someone who was born here. And how difficult is it for the government to denaturalize a citizen? In federal court, when you do a denaturalization, and this is where you can issue all the press releases you want, but in reality, when you do a denaturalization, it is a very resource-intensive action.

19:08You actually have to get the Department of Justice and ICE to work together on filing an actual federal lawsuit against the person, and there actually has to be the equivalent of a trial, and you have to go in and say that a material misrepresentation was made. in either the citizenship application or the green card application, such that had that material misrepresentation been known at the time, there's no way the person would have been approved in their application. And so that's the standard, and it's a very high threshold. It can't be something like, oh, you didn't tell us you were in the Elf Club, and it turns out you were in the Elf Club, or you didn't tell us you were in the, you know, Phi Sigma fraternity, And had we known that, we wouldn't have approved you.

19:54No, no, no. It has to be something serious, like cases where people either didn't disclose criminal convictions or people didn't disclose certain terrorist or national security issues. then theoretically there is some argument. Now, the question is, is this going to be expanded out to slightly more frivolous groups of people? We're going to have to wait and see. But I don't think at least in the short term that's going to happen because the Department of Justice at the moment is in a very big crunch in terms of they've lost a lot of lawyers from the department. These cases are very, very resource intensive.

20:39And so to devote lawyers to these cases when the facts are not so compelling is not going to be a productive use of their resources. But again, in scenarios where a criminal conviction was not reported or with fake identities, that kind of thing might actually be something where you'd want to do this kind of denaturalization action. So Trump has raised the prospect of stripping citizenship from Elon Musk and New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zoran Mondami. Could he do that? So you have to go again to the theories of these cases, which is that material misrepresentations were made on either the green card or the citizenship cases.

21:23So on the green card and citizenship cases, the ones that have been made, I have no opinion, nor am I making any allegations against anyone. I won't hold it against you. But allegations that have been made are that Elon Musk reportedly engaged in unauthorized work while he was on a student visa in the United States, which if he did would have been a violation of his student visa, which if he did when he was asked the question on his green card and his citizenship application, have you ever violated the term of any visa you've held? If he answered no, that would have been a dishonest answer. And then thus you can denaturalize it.

22:00That would be his. The Mamdani one would be even more complicated because his would be based off of memberships in certain organizations that they would claim, hey, this guy was cohorting with terrorist-type people, and he didn't disclose this in his application. And so it's similar to the Mahmoud Khalil type of situation. and even though Mahmoud Khalil is easier because he's just a green card holder, but it's the same concept at the end of the day, which is did you fail to disclose the kinds of affiliations that you had with entities that had you disclosed them, we would never have approved your green card.

22:42And so I think that one will be much more challenging because I don't know if there are any such organizations. I'm not aware of any, but who knows? And then the final case that's been brought up is Rosie O'Donnell. She was born in the United States, so for her, they would actually have to find that she committed one of the expropriating acts, which there's only a few of them, which is that you either go to a U.S. embassy and say, hey, I don't want to be a citizen anymore. That's the main one. or you take up arms against the U.S. in a war. But she hasn't done any of that. So there is no provision in the law I'm aware of where Rosie O'Donnell's citizenship could be taken away.

23:23From that perspective, I think she's safe. Let's transition yet again because there are so many immigration topics in the news. Venezuela's Little League team made it to the Senior Baseball World Series, which is being held in South Carolina, as it always is. but they can't make the competition because the U.S. refused to give them visas. Every year there's a thing called the Little League World Series, and they put it on TV. And each year there's more and more coverage. There used to be only coverage. When I was a young kid, there was just coverage of maybe like the final game or two. Now they show the whole tournament, two, three, four weeks.

24:01I bet there's even gambling on it now. Who knows? There's gambling on everything, so probably. Yes, correct. And so the point is that Venezuela qualified, one of the Little League teams from Venezuela qualified to be in the Little League World Series. They were the winner of their tournament. And because of the travel ban that was implemented several weeks ago that said that Venezuelans who were trying to come on non-immigrant visas, meaning visas that were not visas for immigrating into the United States, like tourist visas, which would be the visas these kids would come in under, can't come into the United States.

24:36They're banned. Now, that tribal ban did have an exception. A, literally had one for like the World Cup itself, because I think they understand that, for instance, I think Iran is qualified for the World Cup. And so that one would be very tough if you don't let them in for the World Cup. But secondly, you know, for other things that are in the national interest. So the Venezuelan kids applied for visa and they were denied. And that was just it. They were not given a chance to get one of these waivers. And so from my perspective, I don't know if this perspective is shared by others in the United States, but even when we had the height of the Cold War with Russia, a nuclear power who was intent on killing us and wiping us off the face of the mat, we still let the Bolshoi Ballet perform in New York.

25:25And we didn't ban them from the United States. And so somehow we made it through the Cold War. I think we'd be able to make it through whatever this period is by letting some little kids play baseball. But call me crazy. So there are these exceptions. But do you think that fewer people will come to the United States to attend the events because of fears of the travel ban or other restrictions? Absolutely. I mean, we already saw that with the Club World Cup, where we had a number of stadiums that were quite empty in cases where you would normally have expected the stadiums to have many more people because people would have been having summer travel to come visit their teams from all over the world.

26:08And there was concern that I heard both specifically from actual human beings, but also that were reported by news outlets. But, you know, I just corroborated with my individual clients who said, we're not going to come in because we're afraid that something will happen to us if we try to enter the United States. I mean, it is a fear that is not justified, just to be clear, if one looks at this from a statistical level and says, what is the actual chance of something bad happening to me if I come to visit some of these events? but nevertheless, because of various media coverage and other things that's happening, and I think the administration needs to be doing more to assuage these concerns, but because that's not happening, then you have these situations where people aren't coming to attend these events, and I don't know what effect it's going to have on the World Cup next year.

27:01We're going to have to wait and see, but it would be a shame if any of those stadiums were empty because I think the president himself wants to see a great World Cup. He's very interested in the event you know he attends and holds the trophy and everything and so from that perspective i would hope that the administration would do what it can to facilitate sports in the united states and so i'm i'm hopeful that they will see the error here and let the venezuelan kids come in because again i just don't see the security concern here of letting those kids come in and play baseball for two weeks. Thanks so much, Leon.

27:40That's Leon Fresco of Holland and Knight. Coming up next, the conservative activist who wants to widen Trump's crusade against colleges. You're listening to Bloomberg. A new chapter in global growth is being written, and much of it is happening in Africa. Africans need to invest. There are deals to be done and business to be won. I'm Jennifer Zabasaja. Every week on the Next Africa podcast, we track capital flows and political shifts shaping the continent's future. The digitalization of Africa is going to power its growth. Riding the world of something like HIV is possible. Population growth is so enormous in Africa.

28:16Listen to Next Africa on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Columbia University reached a landmark deal with the Trump administration to restore federal funding for research. The Ivy League school will pay a$200 million penalty over three years and made other commitments intended to increase transparency and compliance with federal civil rights laws. Christopher Ruffo is a conservative activist who's been influential in the White House's efforts to reshape higher education, and he now wants to expand that campaign. Joining me is Bloomberg Education reporter Liam Knox, who's written about Ruffo.