President Trump's trial balloon of sending migrants surging across our border to sanctuary cities has been derided by Democrats as 'cynicism and cruelty' as well as 'a new low' by Trump, but it has a precedent: President Obama.

Back in 2014, when the migrant surge of that year brought tens of thousands of "unaccompanied children" and "moms and kids," into the Rio Grande Valley, overwhelming the Texas processing facilities, President Obama inexplicably targeted small and mid-sized cities (same as the Trump officials' emails) as their next destination of choice.  And instead of talking about it, they really did try to bus the unvetted migrants into small cities such as Murietta, California; Yuma, Arizona; and a conservative area of New Mexico, bringing crime, disease, and a high need for social services, without consulting those communities.

The residents protested, and the Obama administration declared them 'racist' in a bid to scare them into line.

I was on the ground at Murietta during those protests when I was an editorial writer at Investor's Business Daily, and I spoke to the citizens of that city, who were not only far from racist, but actually multiracial themselves.  They told me this:

Asked why the rebellion was centered in Murrieta and not elsewhere, the residents all had one answer: they were Reagan Country, and it was on their soil that the Reagan revolution was lit in 1978.

Breitbart's reporters went to the scene, too, as I did, and quite unlike the mainstream media, also asked and listened to the residents as to what they thought was going on:

Henry, and many of the protesters joining him, believe their town was unfairly targeted as a destination for the migrants.  Some believe the busloads are being sent to small, largely conservative towns, like Murrieta to send a political message.

"The administration thinks that if it floods our streets, in small town america, they can force us into immigration reform," Henry said.  "These immigrants should not be here. The only reason that they are coming here is for political reasons."

There are no known FOIA documents to prove it (though it's a fine area for inquiry these days) that I have been able to find, but circumstantially, it appears to be a correct reading of the situation.  The several hundred illegals being dumped off in Murietta were going to a small city with just five holding cells, given that it's a nearly crime-free city of homeowners.  That's inexplicable, unless the idea was to unleash them onto the conservatives unvetted for other purposes.

The Los Angeles Times reported that it made no sense to dump the migrants into Murietta, because the much larger metropolis of San Diego, sixty miles south, had plenty of beds and holding cells for illegal entrants, and ones that could cater to migrant families.  The migrants eventually were sent there, but not before Democrats could demonize the town as brimming with racists, leaving its officials (Latino ones, no less) sputtering their defense that they were not.

It's pretty obvious the whole thing was a political gambit to not only impose high costs from illegal migration on specially targeted conservative cities, its second aim was to force America's conservatives into submission out of fear of being called racists.

They rebelled instead, in what was an early bellwether of the rise of President Trump. Now Trump is giving back what Obama pioneered — the use of illegal migrants as a political football — and this time putting Democrats on their back foot.

Image credit: Screen shot from KCAL 9 / CBS News, via shareable YouTube.