On Tuesday, we began discussing Xavier Becerra, who was named Attorney General of the State of California early last year by Governor Jerry Brown and who has made use of the powers of that office to stand up to President Trump’s policies on immigration and travel. Notably, he has challenged Trump’s attempt to restrict entry into the U.S. by people from certain foreign countries.
But get this: while fighting Trump’s proposed travel bans from countries that represent a real threat to American security, Xavier Becerra has imposed bans on state- funded or state-sponsored travel from California to Alabama, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Texas. Why? Because, he says, those states discriminate against LGBTQ people. Of course, some of the countries that would have been covered by Trump’s proposed travel bans execute gay people. But don’t try to view Becerra’s ideology through a lens of logic. He subscribes to the kind of leftist thinking whereby Americans who question the injection of puberty-delaying hormones into supposedly transgender children are vile bigots, whereas Muslims who throw gays off of the tops of buildings are acting upon the dictates of a culture that Westerners have no right to criticize.
Becerra has, unsurprisingly, also stood up for the so-called “sanctuary cities,” suing the U.S. Department of Justice in August for limiting certain types of funding to municipalities that systematically refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, even harboring felons in order to protect them from deportation. (As it happens, California became a sanctuary state at the beginning of last year.) As federal officials have noted, sanctuary city policies have been responsible for the murders of several U.S. citizens, most famously Kate Steinle, killed in San Francisco on July 1, 2015, by a Mexican who at the time had seven felony convictions, had been deported from the U.S. five times, and was in San Francisco precisely because he knew that it was a sanctuary city whose government would help him evade federal immigration officials. Implicit in the arguments of Becerra and other champions of sanctuary city policies is that lives like Steinle’s are worth sacrificing in order to protect illegal aliens.
Becerra hasn’t been exclusively preoccupied with immigration and travel issues. On March 28 of last year, he took action on those controversial videos in which Planned Parenthood officials were caught having chilling, unconscionable conversations about their practice of selling fetal body parts obtained through partial-birth abortions. Needless to say, Becerra didn’t go after these reprehensible Planned Parenthood officials – he went after the activists who had recorded the videos, whom he slapped with fifteen felony charges. (The charges were later dismissed by a Superior Court judge.)
But nothing Becerra has done as Attorney General approaches the chutzpah of his latest move. As the Washington Free Beacon reported on January 19, Becerra “warned employers in the state that they will face legal consequences if they voluntarily provide information on their employees’ immigration statuses to federal authorities.”
In other words, if you are a law-abiding citizen who dares to help federal law-enforcement officials carry out their legal obligations, you will be viewed as a criminal by the State of California. Meanwhile, actual criminals – people who have entered the U.S. illegally – will be protected from your efforts to help bring them to justice. Welcome to Xavier Berecca’s California, where the very meaning of the word justice has been turned upside down.
