Michigan House Republicans implement rule to withhold grant funds from sanctuary cities
(CBS DETROIT) - In a party-line vote, Michigan House Republicans implemented a new rule to discourage sanctuary cities.
House Rule 19 prohibits any state funding outside of normal budgetary spending from going to a county, city, village or township that has a policy in place to not cooperate with immigration and customs enforcement (ICE).
"In my opinion, H.R. 19 was nothing more than a power grab by our House Republicans here," said Rep. Ranjeev Puri, D-Canton. "This is a blatant attempt by the speaker to start controlling which local municipalities can receive state funds under the guise of immigration."
"We just want to try and disincentivize that type of behavior from some of these rogue type of municipalities or counties," said Rep. Joe Aragona, R-Clinton Township.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, Michigan has only one city officially designated as a sanctuary city and a handful of counties, such as Kalamazoo, Washtenaw and Kent.
Puri tells CBS News Detroit he sees the new rule as intentionally vague.
"This is causing a tremendous amount of chaos and confusion for us to kind of kind of figure out what exactly is going on," he said.
However, Aragona says he sees this new rule as fiscal competency. He said the new rule doesn't impact a city or county's regular funding; it would apply to any special state grant funding, which is a smaller pot of money.
"In order to be responsible with these types of dollars, we want to ensure that you don't have any of these what they would call sanctuary city type policies," said Aragona. "A couple of years ago in the budget, there was a number of splash pads that went out in the budget. Now, obviously, those are things that we're looking to cut down on at this point."
