Please watch the embedded video in this article that is today's headline story in the Santa Fe New Mexican, at the end, with Mayor Gonzales being interview by Megyn Kelly, and also the interview on CNN.
I am proud of my Mayor, because he is articulate, forceful, polite, and accessible. Imagine having coffee with your Mayor once a week at Starbucks.
Santa Feans are the kind of people who would band together, roll up our sleeves, and have a mega-series of bake sales and art auctions to make up the difference, in defense of our immigrants. Santa Fe's history goes back before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, and our local newspaper was the first newspaper in the West.
Here is the article from the New Mexican newspaper by Daniel Chacon:
Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales emerged as a national spokesman for sanctuary cities during appearances to discuss immigration issues Tuesday on Fox News with Megyn Kelly and Wednesday with CNN's Brooke Baldwin and National Public Radio's All Things Considered.
Gonzales gave passionate defenses of municipal policies against targeting undocumented immigrants and fought back against what he called false claims that such policies lead to increases in crime.
Like some other mayors of cities where police don't focus on immigration status when dealing with members of the public, Gonzales has discounted President-elect Donald Trump's promise to cut off federal funds to sanctuary cities on his first day in office.
Gonzales said the threat is a matter of concern for Santa Fe, which expects to receive about $6 million in federal funds in the current fiscal year. Interim Finance Director Adam Johnson says that equals about 2 percent of the city's total budget.
However, the mayor of New Mexico's capital city, which adopted its immigrant-friendly policy in 1999, said of the threatened funding cutoff: "It's a long way before that actually happens."
Gonzales' outspokenness on the issue immediately generated a variety of responses on social media, including backlash on Twitter, where commenters using such names as "Deplorable Wendy" and "The Seattle Redneck" hammered the mayor with nasty and sometimes racist tweets. The mayor also received an outpouring of support for his comments.
The back and forth underscores deep divisions exposed by the recent presidential election campaigns and the victory by Trump, who has made clamping down on illegal immigration a central campaign message since he first announced his intention to run for president.
While acknowledging during his CNN interview that a potential loss of federal funding is a concern, Gonzales said, "We're going to do everything we can to encourage the new president and the Congress to pass federal immigration reforms so that we don't have to worry about this at the local level.
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