Annapolis, MD—Larry Hogan refuses to return tainted Trump cash that is helping to finance his campaign for re-election. The Maryland Republican Party’s most recent fundraising report shows that despite calls for Hogan to donate the $100,000 Donald Trump raised for him this cycle, his campaign is still being funded by tainted Trump cash.
Larry Hogan’s campaign staff, from senior leadership to organizers, is on the state party’s payroll. Hogan’s fundraising report came as news broke that Donald Trump is rounding up Hispanic American citizens at the border and placing them in detention centers under dubious accusations of possessing false birth certificates.
In June, Democrats called on Hogan to donate the $100,000 Trump raised for the Maryland GOP to the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a nonprofit helping to reunite families that have been ripped apart by Trump’s cold-hearted family separation policy at the border. Despite a court ruling ordering Trump to reunite all the families he ripped apart, more than 500 children are still waiting to be reunited with their families.
Ripping apart families is one of many issues where Hogan has not sufficiently distanced himself from Trump. Here’s a list of other Trump Initiatives where the governor should have broken his cash ties:
- Donald Trump’s cap on guest-worker visas is crippling the Eastern Shore economy and the Maryland crabbing industry.
- Donald Trump is rounding up Hispanic American citizens and placing them in detention centers.
- Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen has been indicted on several felonies.
- Donald Trump embarrassed the United States on the world stage at the #TreasonSummit.
- Donald Trump cancelled a years-long effort to build a new headquarters for the FBI, which could have brought thousands of high-paying jobs to Maryland. A General Services Administration inspector general report revealed that Trump administration officials also misled Congress about the White House’s efforts to cancel the project.
“Donald Trump’s hateful immigration policies have been tearing families apart and stripping millions of dollars from Maryland’s economy, and Larry Hogan should be doing more to show his outrage” said Maryland Democratic Party Chair Kathleen Matthews. “The Governor brags about how much money he has raised in his permanent campaign for re-election, so he should have no problem returning the $100,000 Trump raised for him this cycle. Donating the Tainted Trump Cash is the right thing to do.”
One week after Donald Trump delivered a hate-filled anti-immigrant speech to launch his presidential campaign, he was the keynote speaker at the Maryland Republican Party’s annual gala. The event was described as a “great success” attended by hundreds of Maryland Republicans—the largest turnout in at least a decade. Trump himself bragged during his speech that “this was some great event, with some great amount of money raised.”
As president, Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has become anti-immigrant policies, and Hogan has supported many of them:
- This week, Hogan revealed that he secretly deployed four Maryland National Guard servicemembers to the U.S.-Mexico border, even though MDNG denied it had received “any request for assistance” when Trump announced his plan to deploy the National Guard to the border in April.
- Last year, The Baltimore Sun discovered Hogan was secretly helping the Trump administration enforce its immigration policies. Despite Hogan’s claims that Maryland was not detaining immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Sun reported that Baltimore Central Booking—which is operated by the state—received and honored dozens of detention requests from ICE. The investigation also found that many of the requests were for low-level crimes and misdemeanors, not serious or violent crimes.
- While Republican Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner has refused to honor ICE’s immigrant detention requests, Hogan said not honoring the requests would be “absurd,” and promised that state police will “detain people for 48 hours so that ICE has the ability to come in and do whatever action they want to take.”
- When Marylanders flooded Hogan’s Facebook page requesting he join them at airports to protest Trump’s Muslim Ban, Hogan deleted their comments and banned them from his page, and then refused to grant Attorney General Brian Frosh authority to fight the ban in court.