Pa. Gov. Josh Shapiro mocks Trump administration for yanking sanctuary city list: 'I don't know if ChatGPT wasn't working or what'

Gillian McGoldrick and Katie Bernard, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Jun 4, 2025

Published in Political News

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Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s administration doesn’t “know how to govern,” ragging on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s about-face in posting and then removing its list of so-called sanctuary jurisdictions at risk of losing federal funding, leading to confusion locally and across the country.

Shapiro, while in North Philadelphia to announce a lawsuit against Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture over its withholding of federal funds for food banks to purchase from local farmers, criticized the Trump administration for its bungled release of localities that the federal government identified as being noncompliant with immigration law, threatening to strip their federal funding if they did not comply.

“These guys don’t know how to govern,” Shapiro said Wednesday, describing his own leadership style in Pennsylvania as offering residents “calm” while he said the federal government “injects chaos.”

A spokesperson for the White House on Wednesday pointed to Trump’s decisive win in Pennsylvania in November, adding that Shapiro should “work with the Trump administration to implement the policies Pennsylvanians voted for ... instead of embracing dangerous sanctuary policies that put communities at risk.” (Shapiro’s office contends that Pennsylvania is not a “sanctuary state” and cooperates with ICE.)

Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s first-term Democratic governor, has carefully picked his battles with Trump thus far, usually keeping them constrained to filing lawsuits when the Trump admin withholds federal funds, or speaking out against specific policy critiques.

In recent weeks, he has stepped up some of his public disapproval of Trump and GOP members of Congress, particularly surrounding proposed Medicaid cuts that Shapiro said the state won’t be able to backfill, as Democrats try to find their footing in Trump’s second term. National pundits have highlighted Shapiro’s ability to avoid Trump’s ire as the leader of one of the most politically important battleground states, pushing him up in the rankings as a 2028 presidential frontrunner.

The list, released last week, threatened federal funding for Philadelphia, four other Pennsylvania cities and 11 counties in the Keystone State.

The Trump administration has threatened to cut federal funding to jurisdictions that don’t help enforce federal immigration laws. However, the federal list of jurisdictions in “non-compliance” was quietly removed from a DHS site over the weekend and it’s unclear if or when it will be reposted, if the same localities will be named, and what it means for those listed.

In a statement Monday, DHS said “the list is being constantly reviewed and can be changed at any time and will be updated regularly.”

Despite his critiques of Trump, Shapiro on Wednesday largely refrained from commenting on individual cities’ immigration policies.

“If they’ve got a perspective they want to bring to bear, they should bring that to bear, and they should have a thoughtful conversation with the mayor and with others about their views,” Shapiro added.

“It’s not a shock to me that they put out a list of these so-called sanctuary jurisdictions — which by the way included Adams County, Pa. — and then they had to rip it down because they realized they didn’t do their homework,” he said.

Adams County was one of the three Republican-led rural Pennsylvania counties where Trump won by more than 20 percentage points that ended up on the administration’s sanctuary jurisdiction list, alongside many Democrat-controlled cities and counties that had been more welcoming to undocumented immigrants in recent years. Officials from the two other GOP-led rural counties, Montour and Clarion, said last week that they believed they were put on the administration’s list by mistake.

“I don’t know if Chat GPT wasn’t working that day or what,” Shapiro joked, followed by a boisterous laugh from the crowd. “These guys are like the ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.’”

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