On Thursday, The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump's administration has admitted that it lied about New York's immigrant sanctuary policy to justify punitive actions against the state.
The false claims, which were repudiated by government lawyers in a new court filing, had been used for the basis of blocking New York from participating in the Global Entry program — a system that allows for expedited customs clearance for low-risk travelers re-entering the United States from overseas.
"Federal officials had insisted that New York was an outlier in placing restrictions on immigration authorities from gaining access to state Department of Motor Vehicles records. For that reason, they argued, New York was endangering national security and could not be trusted to participate in Global Entry and related travel programs," reported Ed Shanahan. "But in their filing on Thursday, government lawyers acknowledged that several other states, Washington, D.C., and some U.S. territories also restricted access to motor vehicle information and had not been subject to such a ban."
The administration has now reinstated New York residents' access to Global Entry, stating in the court filing that the false claims “undermine a central argument” of the ban and that “The acting secretary of homeland security has decided to restore New York residents’ access to the Trusted Traveler Programs, effective immediately.”
The president has long attacked cities and states with "sanctuary" policies — a catch-all term for a variety of privacy rights protections for immigrants, including bans on local officers from asking for immigration papers, and limits on federal authorities' access to information on immigration status of local prisoners absent a warrant.
His efforts to cut off funding to sanctuary jurisdictions have been rebuffed by federal courts, although some other anti-sanctuary policies, like giving preferential treatment to non-sanctuary jurisdictions for community policing grants, have been allowed to proceed.
