Ever since the Attorney General made it crystal clear that President Trump really wasn’t kidding when he said he would cut off DoJ funding to sanctuary cities, the response has been frantic. More than a dozen cities and counties, along with the state of California, have begun legal action challenging the right of the federal government to determine what the qualifications are to receive such grant money. Most of them will take quite a while to sort out, but the City of Richmond, California was one of the first out of the gate and managed to get their case in front of a federal judge already. It didn’t go well for them at all. (Daily Caller)

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a sanctuary city in California challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order withholding grants from jurisdictions that do not cooperate with federal immigration authorities The city of Richmond, Calif., filed suit in March challenging the constitutionality of the order. U.S. District Judge William Orrick dismissed the case Monday, finding Richmond did not have standing to challenge the law. In his ruling dismissing the case, Orrick explained the city had not demonstrated that it had reason to believe Trump’s order would be enforced against them, and therefore didn’t have standing to bring a case.

So the case was tossed, but if you happen to be a fan of better border control and enforcement of immigration law I wouldn’t start popping the champagne corks just yet. The judge in this case didn’t make any sort of ruling over whether or not the DoJ policy is constitutional, correctly applied or anything else along those lines. All he really said was that the question was moot because Richmond lacked the proper standing to bring the challenge.

In order to have the case heard and decided, Richmond would have had to show some sort of damages, or at least potential damages from the policy. They haven’t refused any ICE detainers or done anything else to cement their sanctuary city status because ICE hasn’t issued them any. And nobody from the DoJ has singled them out for not being in compliance. That makes it pretty tough to show damages.

To figure out why they were attempting this in the first place you should look back to March of this year when the city brought the original suit. At the time they released all manner statements to the media bragging about how they were going to fight Trump’s executive order. Their position dates back to a 1990 “policy” approved by the city council which claimed they didn’t intend to “cooperate” with immigration officials. I’m not sure that Trump’s team even knew about it.

But who knows? Now that they’ve lost a court case, perhaps Jeff Sessions will add their name to the No Grants For You list just to make them feel better.