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Trump Attacks Oakland for Its Commitment to Protecting Immigrants Against Raids

Published

8 years ago

March 19, 2018

Oakland residents and others demonstrate March 7 when Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke in Sacrament. Protesters said: “Sessions go home. We won’t be bullied.” Photo courtesy of Jean Quan on Facebook.

Local residents and community leaders are responding with redoubled determination after Mayor Libby Schaaf and the city have come under attack by President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and ICE Director Thomas Homan for opposing local ICE deportation raids and defending Oakland as a sanctuary city.

“Who would ever have thought we would see the day the president of the United States would be attacking institutions,” like the City of Oakland, the State of California and even the FBI and the CIA, said community activist Jose Dorado.

“It’s a real showdown,” he said. “There are certainly a number of sanctuary cities, and California is a sanctuary state, but we have made our sanctuary city resolution one of the strongest, if not the strongest, in the nation.”

Oakland’s resolution forbids the City of Oakland and the Oakland Police Department from cooperating or collaborating with ICE and also provides funding to support a rapid response legal team to go to locations where ICE raids are in progress.

The sanctuary city policy was adopted by the City Council with major community backing and the leadership of Councilmembers Rebecca Kaplan, Desley Brooks and Noel Gallo.

A resolution passed last year was ignored by the Oakland Police Department in August when it provided support for an ICE raid. Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick and Mayor Schaaf defended the collaboration with ICE.

In response, the council passed a stronger and more clearly worded resolution prohibiting OPD from collaborating with ICE, including providing traffic control or logistical support for raids.

Retaliating against the strong council resolution and the intense criticism of the mayor and police chief for collaborating with ICE, some members of the council unsuccessfully attempted to remove Councilmember Brooks as head of the Public Safety Committee.

The Trump administration’s attacks on Mayor Schaaf began after she sent out a tweet Saturday, Feb. 27, warning the community of impending ICE raids.

“As Mayor of Oakland,” she wrote, “I am sharing this information publicly not to panic our residents, but to protect them.”

ICE Director Homan blasted Schaaf, saying her tweet enabled over 800 “criminals” to avoid capture.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech in Sacramento criticizing California, singling out Oakland’s mayor.

“So, here’s my message for Mayor Schaaf: how dare you. How dare you needlessly endanger the lives of our law enforcement officers to promote a radical open borders agenda,” he said.

Escalating the attack and threatening reprisals, President Trump called Schaaf “a disgrace.”

“They had close to 1,000 people ready to be gotten, ready to be taken off the streets… they say 85 percent of them are criminals and had criminal records. And the mayor of Oakland went and warned them, scattered, so instead of taking in a thousand, they took a fraction of that.

“And it’s certainly something we are looking at with respect to her individually.”

Schaaf told the media she would be willing to go to jail to help protect Oakland residents against ICE raids.

The White House’s accusations against Schaaf and Oakland lost steam this week when a Northern California ICE spokesman resigned, saying he was not willing to parrot the false allegations.

“I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts,” James Schwab told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time, and I quit.”

In Oakland, the attacks are backfiring. Like many other community members and activists, Dorado stands with Schaaf on this issue and defends her against the “Trumpists.”

“I don’t always agree with Libby Schaaf, but a whole lot of people are giving her a lot of props for (taking this stand),” he said.

Expressing mixed feelings, Claudine Tong wrote on Facebook that Schaaf “is getting so much good publicity from (this).”

“Too bad it won’t keep her from letting developers and gentrifiers take our homes or having Public Works destroy homeless people’s belongings and shelters while not providing the city services they are entitled to,” she wrote.

In a statement issued this week, Kaplan denounced the “lies” of the head of ICE, Sessions and Trump.

“They are not targeting dangerous criminals,” she said. “The administration is using an ancient tool of tyrants and bigots throughout history who seek to create fear of ‘the other’ in order to justify mistreatment of minority communities.”

“They are not upset about the ‘leaks,’” she said. “The feds pretend to be angry about the leak of internal confidential ICE information. However, in all their angry comments, they have not expressed any intention to or plan to find the leak.” Instead, they denounce “the person who received the leak, rather than whomever committed the leaking.”

Further, they gave their raids the name “Keep Safe,” said Kaplan, “but they are not about keeping people safe.”

Looking to the immediate future, School Board member Roseanne Torres told the Oakland Post the Oakland Unified School District is a sanctuary district, but more steps must be taken to protect Oakland parents and children who are living in fear that their families could be torn apart.

“Families are afraid,” she said. “We have to be very clear about how to get our children to school” when raids are threatened.

“We’re going this year to another level, “she said. Principals and school staff are asking parents how they will get their children to and from school if the parents are afraid to leave the house.

Parents have to face the question, she said: “Who is going to take care of your kids if you get picked up?”

“We’re living in a police state,” Torres continued. “There is no place to hide. We’re an example of what is coming in a lot of places.”

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Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

20 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

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Oakland Post: Week of February 25 – March 3, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of – February 25 – March 3, 2026

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2 days ago

March 1, 2026

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Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

Published

4 days ago

February 27, 2026

Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke