Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) is introducing legislation that would allow the Secretary of Transportation to withhold funding from states that do not comply with federal immigration law.
The Enforce Immigration or Lose Transportation Act, obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, would also empower the Department of Transportation (DOT) to audit states and issue regulations to ensure compliance with federal transportation and immigration laws. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has made holding blue states accountable a priority.
“States that don’t comply with federal immigration laws don’t just endanger their own citizens, they put the whole country at risk,” Cotton said of his new legislation. “My bill ensures that these states don’t receive another dime of federal transportation funding until they cooperate with federal immigration authorities.”
Cotton’s bill comes as Democrats on the state and federal levels are escalating their feuds with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. Should Cotton’s bill become law, states like Minnesota could suffer millions of dollars of cuts in federal funds.
Cotton’s fellow Senate Republicans, like Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.), have mused about other ways to incentivize blue states to cooperate with the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. “We should pull out our TSA agents out of their airports and not allow their airport to be classified as international or even a regional hub,” Mullin recently said. “We should pull all of our aid that we have for their law enforcement because there is a tremendous of federal aid that goes into law enforcement from the — from the federal to the county to the — to the city level. We should completely pull out all funding towards that.”
Another Senate Republican leading the charge against sanctuary cities is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who forcefully made the case against sanctuary city policies from the Oval Office alongside President Donald Trump.
Duffy previously explained to the Reporter why Trump’s DOT is cracking down on states that give non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) to unqualified drivers, many of whom are illegal immigrants.
“If you are from my home state of Wisconsin,” Duffy said, “and you think this doesn’t impact you, it does, because the drivers with these licenses, these unqualified drivers, operate in every single state, and so everybody is at risk in the country, which is why this is a federal issue, and that is why we take it so seriously.”