Sanctuary cities? What are they? I never heard of them. They must be phantoms.
Such was the feigned ignorance of Democrat vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine on CNN's New Day on Thursday. It was so embarrassing in its pretense that even host Chris Cuomo had to call Kaine out on it as you can see:
TIM KAINE: Look, I was a mayor and I was a governor. I trust the voters of communities to hold their mayors and their police departments responsible. When Donald Trump kind of goes after these phantom sanctuary cities and talks about how bad they are, basically what he's going after is police chiefs. And I trust police chiefs in terms of knowing what should be done to keep their communities safer and police departments and mayors a lot more than I trust Donald Trump.
This was too much for Cuomo who pointed out that yes, Tim, there actually are something known far and wide as sanctuary cities.
CHRIS CUOMO: But why do you say "phantom"? You know that there are places that refuse to cooperate with ICE, and they have their assembly of different reasons for why they do it, but sanctuary cities are real. They exist. They're not phantom. And a lot of people believe that, you know, you have those people being rewarded for not working hand in hand with ICE.
Having been called out on this, Kaine then goes on to describe how he supports something that sounds exactly like sanctuary cities whose name he seems to want to avoid since it is toxic in this election season.
KAINE: Let me give you an example from when I was governor. There was a program back then where some cities were joining in a program with ICE to essentially be deputized to do the work on the immigration service. My law enforcement officials, who are tough law enforcement people, came to me and said do not do this, because if the immigrant community starts to sees us as immigration, they won't call and complain about crimes in their neighborhood, they won't be witnesses in cases. Instead what you need to do is work with the community to protect and serve them and let ICE do their job. And so, we also had a rule that when somebody was in prison or jail and their sentence was coming up, we would let ICE know about them if they weren't a citizen. ICE could make the decision about whether or not they would want to take action. But the notion that you turn police departments against immigrant communities actually -- in the eyes of most police officials makes the police less able to do their job to prevent crime.
Exit question: Who is better at conveniently feigning ignorance for political reasons---Tim Kaine or Hillary Clinton?
