* From Gov. Pritzker’s second Q and A of the day…

Q: You’ve said Illinois is a sanctuary state, but counties are passing anti-sanctuary measures. How do you respond?

Pritzker: I don’t think I’ve ever used that language, and you can go back, six years, five and a quarter years in office, and when I ran. But if I have, forgive my, it would be once perhaps.

The truth is that the Trust Act, which is a bill, a law that went into effect before I became governor, signed by the prior governor, is what’s in place in Illinois. And essentially, the idea here is that someone who is living here, who has been undocumented, may have been here for years, getting pulled over because they were speeding, should not be a reason to now pull somebody out of their car, arrest them and send them to ICE, the federal level, and have them deported.

That oftentimes people are living here not just peacefully but productively. And that over time, people have applied for and gotten permanent residency, or citizenship, we should have a system like that - once again, by the way that people can apply for go through a process and it’s not a very good one as it is we need comprehensive immigration reform. But I believe that that’s a law that’s been good for Illinois, the Trust Act.

Now, one other comment that I would make. There’s a lot of hysteria that’s going around about the fact that we have legal asylum seekers, they have papers, they’re here legally in this country while they get a hearing, while they wait for a hearing. And that we’re, you know, trying to provide them, those who don’t have work authorization and we’re trying to get more work authorizations for them because there are jobs available in Illinois for them. But we’re just trying to provide them with some basic humanitarian care. And we’ve done that, I believe.

I’ve seen the hysteria on Facebook and gets promoted sometimes about that. ‘Oh busloads of people are being shipped from Chicago to some other places in Illinois.’ That’s not happening. It hasn’t happened. It’s not going to happen.

We are receiving busloads of people from the state of Texas without any prior notice of their arrival sometimes in the middle of the night. Why do they do that? Because they want to cause chaos. We have managed to rein it in so that it’s not chaos.

And indeed, our goal here is to help people get to their hearings to get determined whether they actually can have legal asylum and stay in the United States or be deported by that hearing. But it’s our job, I believe, to act in a humanitarian fashion. It’s what Illinois, I believe stands for, it’s who we are as Illinoisans. And we will care for them. You know, we believe that comprehensive border security as well as immigration reform will help us manage this in years going forward, but we’re going to do everything we can right now.

Please pardon any transcription errors.