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After four years of chaos at the border leading to overwhelmed state and local resources, especially in cities like Chicago, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker went on MSNBC on Wednesday evening and said that he would do what he could to thwart Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans. When you look past his surface-level defiance, though, there were some hard truths shared by Pritzker that left Joy Reid none too happy.

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REID: Can the State of Illinois prevent the federal government from building internment camps, aka what they’re calling detention facilities in Chicago?

I’ll get to Pritzker’s answer, but can someone ask Reid how a detention facility for illegal immigrants would be an “internment camp” when no one is forcing any of them to remain here illegally? The entire point of an internment camp is that one is held against their will. Illegal immigrants can self-deport today if they’d like, and if they end up in a detention facility because they don’t, they can still ask to be deported. 

All illusions to nazism, which is what Reid is trying to do, are intellectual slop. Countries are allowed to have borders, and enforcing immigration laws is not authoritarianism. It’s basic governance, something Democrats have abdicated for the last four years. 

Now, let’s talk about Pritzker’s response because you could see the life melt out of Reid’s face as he began to explain the situation.

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PRITZKER: Well, we have prohibited by law in the State of Illinois the use of our existing county jails or prisons for the purpose of rounding people up and detaining them. I want to be clear that there are certain circumstances in which the federal government, state governments should work together to allow deportation. An example would be someone who has been convicted of a violent crime, but they’re talking about rounding up people who are law-abiding, undocumented immigrants in this country, many of who are working, paying taxes, not getting any benefits for those taxes, I might add. 

There’s more, but notice that in the very first sentence, Pritzker mentions the federal government not being able to use county jails and state prisons. Why would ICE use county jails to detain illegal immigrants? The process is for the federal government to establish separate detention centers, which is what Reid is asking about. Pritzker’s answer is a deflection, meant to obscure the fact that he can’t stop any of this.

That becomes clear in the next part of his answer, and Reid’s solemnness only grows as he explains.

PRITZKER: And we have a law on the books in the State of Illinois called the TRUST Act which prohibits our local law enforcement and sheriffs and the like from coordinating with the federal authorities. But we can not prohibit them, federal law enforcement, from coming into our state to conduct raids or do anything else like that. 

Meanwhile, I think it would be very difficult for them to just spread out across the country. They do not have enough manpower within the DHS in order to carry that out. So look, I’m going to do everything I can to protect our undocumented immigrants, the residents of our state, and I also, obviously, need to make sure that whatever they’re doing in our state, the federal government, that it is acutally within federal or state law for them to do it. 

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The money quote: “But we can not prohibit them, federal law enforcement, from coming into our state to conduct raids or do anything else like that.”

Pritzker is going to rattle his saber and pretend to stand up to Trump for the talking heads on MSNBC. In the end, though, he doesn’t have the power to stop any federal enforcement of immigration law, and he’s admitting that. ICE can come into Illinois all it wants to detain and deport those here illegally, whether they’ve committed a violent crime or not. 

That Reid and those like her don’t want to accept that is irrelevant. These are the same people who spent the last four years insisting that the federal government has sole authority over immigration. They demanded Texas step aside so the Biden administration could facilitate the flow into the interior. Well, the game has changed, and that flow is now about to go the other way.

Still, it’s clear that Illinois will continue to operate as a sanctuary state regarding cooperation with the federal government. I’ve got a solution to that: Send more buses.

Not every illegal immigrant will end up being deported even under Trump if for no other reason than logistics alone. In the meantime, states like Texas should continue to send Pritzker more “residents” for him to deal with. Make him collapse under the weight of his preferred policies. We’ll see how protective he is when Chicago gets a few hundred thousand more illegal immigrants to pay for.

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