The last member of the Trump Justice Department’s so-called sanctuary cities working group has departed, marking the potential end of a second term plan to demote and reassign senior career officials.
The Friday exit of a former DOJ immigration judge, who along with at least a dozen other department exiles, was forced in late January to resign or accept this new assignment, leaves the project with no members, said two lawyers familiar with the situation. They were granted anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
Formally dubbed the sanctuary cities enforcement working group, the initiative was widely viewed as punishment from an administration intent on driving away career officials deemed disloyal to President Donald Trump’s agenda. The prior members of the group included those with extensive backgrounds in civil rights, environmental, and national security law.
Others who received the notice chose to quit rather than take a post outside their specialties, such as former criminal division officials Bruce Swartz and Corey Amundson. Those who stayed described the experience as a “sham” in which employees did jigsaw puzzles and called their outpost “the rubber room,” CBS reported in June.
DOJ media representatives didn’t immediately respond to a question about whether the working group is officially disbanded or could be revived by recruiting new members.
Elsewhere in the department, political appointees have spearheaded litigation against states and cities such as Illinois and New York to challenge “sanctuary” policies that prevent local officials from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. But the sanctuary cities group hasn’t played a visible role in those efforts.
The department has fired numerous career employees who worked on the Jan. 6 investigations, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, or who’ve otherwise been labeled obstructionists.
But in the first week of Trump’s second term, before Attorney General Pam Bondi was sworn in, the sanctuary cities reassignments became the go-to approach. The involuntary reassignments signaled the administration was determined to attack civil service norms and would act on its campaign rhetoric that the “deep state” couldn’t be trusted.
In a Jan. 21 memo for the department’s entire workforce, then acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove described the sanctuary cities project as focused on identifying state and local laws that clash with executive branch immigration initiatives and to challenge those policies in court where appropriate.