U.S. Mayor Assures Mexican Consul His “Sanctuary City” Will Provide Safe Spaces for Illegal Aliens

Shortly after Donald Trump got elected president, a California mayor arranged a meeting with the Consul General of Mexico to assure the diplomat that his “sanctuary city” will continue providing safe spaces for illegal immigrants, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch. The documents show that Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin’s top aide, Stefan Elgstrand, sent an electronic mail to the Mexican Consul General in San Francisco, Gemi Jose Gonzalez Lopez, stating the following: “The recent events around Trump’s executive order reminded me to reach out to you. We are a sanctuary city and will continue to be. I imagine you are very busy dealing with the concerns and fears of many residents in the Bay Area, and we want to assist in providing safe spaces for them.”

Judicial Watch obtained the files as part of a California Public Records Act request for information surrounding riots by the radical leftist Antifa movement against President Trump and conservative personalities scheduled to speak at the University of California Berkeley. Media reported that fires were set, fences and windows broken, firebombs launched and commercial-grade fireworks thrown at police. A renowned, San Francisco-based pop culture magazine wrote that the uprising raised some big questions about the future of the free speech movement. Judicial Watch requested the files to shed light into how city, police and university officials handled the lawlessness, which received global news coverage. The request asked for records of communications between officials in the Berkeley mayor’s office and the Berkeley Police Department as well as records of communications between the mayor’s office and officials at UC Berkeley, one of the nation’s top public research universities.

The documents show a coordinated effort between Democratic city officials nationwide to “build the movement to resist Trump.” The operation is being financed by leftwing billionaire philanthropist George Soros through one of his groups called Center of Popular Democracy. Earlier this year Judicial Watch uncovered a scandal in which the U.S. government quietly gave millions of taxpayer dollars to destabilize the democratically elected, center-right government in Macedonia by colluding with Soros’ Open Society Foundation. The U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia, Jess L. Baily, worked behind the scenes with Open Society Foundation to funnel large sums of American dollars for the cause, constituting an interference of the U.S. Ambassador in domestic political affairs in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The cash flowed through the State Department and the famously corrupt U.S. Agency of International Development (USAID) and Judicial Watch sued both agencies for records related to funding and political activities of the Open Society Foundation in Macedonia.

The Soros-backed, northern California movement includes a taxpayer-salaried physics professor at UC Berkeley who advises Mayor Arreguin on how to handle conservative protestors at a spring rally. The professor, James McFadden, tells the mayor in an electronic mail obtained by Judicial Watch to “create a corral” and ask the Trump supporters to “get in the corral.” He describes Trump supporters as “delusional and paranoid about the world around them” and says they’re “willing to use violence to impose that order on us, especially when they have the blessing of a narcissistic authoritarian president.” A professor at another California public university tells the Berkeley mayor that the arrest of Antifa leader/middle school teacher Yvette Felarca for assaulting a political opponent (captured on video) at a Sacramento rally, in which seven people were stabbed, was a “McCarthyist political persecution” and he condemned Felarca’s arrest and teaching suspension “in the strongest possible terms.”

Ironically, Berkeley’s official government website brags about being a bastion of the free speech movement. “In Alameda County alone, Berkeley is ranked fourth in population behind Oakland, Fremont, and Hayward,” the website states. “And yet, we are famous around the globe as a center for academic achievement, scientific exploration, free speech and the arts.” Indeed, Berkeley is renowned as the birthplace of the free speech movement in in the 1960s. An opinion piece in a California newspaper points out that the city’s free speech movement has gone full circle, however. “Nowadays, Berkeley is rapidly becoming famed as one of the least tolerant cities in the country — where any challenge to left-wing orthodoxy is met with terrorist threats and mob violence.”