California is ready to take on the Justice Department. That’s according to San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who was responding to a lawsuit against the state brought by Attorney General Jeff Sessions over immigration laws. “I find it very disingenuous that you have people that for generations talk about state rights and all of a sudden their talking about federal supremacy,” he said in a Cheddar interview Wednesday. The Justice Department and immigration agencies this week sued California over its “sanctuary” laws, which prohibit local and state authorities, as well as private employers, from cooperating with federal immigration officers. Sessions, who filed the suit Wednesday, said California’s policy threatens national safety. Gascón, though, said the state doesn’t prevent immigration officials from going into California and doing their jobs. It’s simply not actively cooperating. He argued that immigrants are important to California’s social fabric and provide a “major economic engine.” “I think that this is an administration that is failing on so many fronts, and what they’re trying to do is create another diversion,” he told Cheddar. “All of this is really a political stunt that is driven by very racist attitude and has nothing to do with public safety.” For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/inside-the-sanctuary-city-legal-battle).

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End To Mask Mandates Spurs Question Of COVID Endemic
As more and more states end mask mandates and ease other COVID restrictions, discussions about the endemic phase of the pandemic have been growing. For weeks, scientists have warned about how contagious the omicron variant is, but now it seems the tone has shifted and governors are rolling back policies they've had in place for months. Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, epidemiologist and senior fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, joined Cheddar's Opening Bell to discuss what the next phase of the pandemic might look like, how to act now that mask mandates are ending, and if we should be worried about another variant emerging.
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