March 28, 2017 01:02 PM UTC

Boulder To Jeff Sessions: Keep The Change

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Boulder Daily Camera’s Alex Burness reports:

The city and county of Boulder stand to lose a small amount of budget funding if the Justice Department makes good on Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s threat to withhold grant money from so-called “sanctuary” communities.

In a short appearance at Monday’s White House press briefing, Sessions said the Justice Department would require cities seeking some of the $4.1 billion available in grant money to verify that they are in compliance with a section of federal law that allows information sharing with immigration officials.

Boulder, a self-proclaimed sanctuary city, is slated to receive DOJ funding this year, as in 2015 and 2016, in grants that go toward the salaries of two officers through the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office…

Boulder’s “sanctuary” policy, passed shortly before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, promises “no city employee shall inquire into a person’s immigration status,” and formally bans city employees from cooperating with federal authorities with regard to any investigation of a person’s immigration status.

Apparently, the total amount of funding Attorney General Jeff Sessions has the power to threaten Boulder with is somewhere between $23,000 and $25,000. In terms of the total budget for the city of Boulder, somewhere around .007%–small enough to be a rounding error. It’s safe to say the potential loss of those funds will not be enough to deter the city from what it considers a much larger humanitarian obligation.

In fact, it’s a small enough number to serve as a punchline. Chalk it up as the latest Trump administration grandstand that ended with a whimper.