Late last week, a Federal Judge in San Francisco who has previously ruled against the Administration regarding its efforts to punish cities and localities that decline to cooperate with Federal immigration officials in rounding up undocumented immigrants:
SAN FRANCISCO — A U.S. judge in California struck down an immigration law Friday that the Trump administration has used to go after cities and states that limit cooperation with immigration officials.
The ruling by Judge William Orrick also directed the U.S. Department of Justice to give California $28 million that was withheld over the state’s immigration policies.
It was at least the third decision by a U.S. district court judge in recent months declaring the immigration law unconstitutional.
However, none of the three rulings immediately invalidated enforcement of the law nationwide. The law at issue forbids states and cities from blocking officials from reporting people’s immigration status to U.S. authorities.
Orrick’s ruling Friday in lawsuits by California and San Francisco may be the most significant yet because it applies to a major target of the administration’s opposition to sanctuary jurisdictions. Orrick forbid Attorney General Jeff Sessions from enforcing the immigration law against California or any of its cities or counties.
DOJ spokesman Devin O’Malley declined comment.
The Trump administration says sanctuary cities and states allow dangerous criminals back on the street.
San Francisco and other sanctuary cities counter that turning local police into immigration officers erodes the trust needed to get people to report local crimes.
Orrick said the immigration law “undermines existing state and local policies and strips local policy makers of the power to decide for themselves whether to communicate with” immigration officials. It also shifts a portion of immigration enforcement costs onto states, he said.
“California expresses the legitimate concern that entanglement with federal immigration enforcement erodes the trust that Latino and undocumented immigrant communities have in local law enforcement,” the judge said.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the ruling was a victory.
“We will continue to stand up to the Trump administration’s attempts to force our law enforcement into changing its policies and practices in ways that that would make us less safe,” he said in a statement.
The administration cited the law in litigation filed against California in March that sought to block three state laws.
One of the laws prevents police from providing release dates and personal information of jail inmates — information administration officials say they need to safely remove dangerous people who are in the country illegally.
U.S. Judge John Mendez in Sacramento has allowed California to continue enforcing that law.
California could use Orrick’s ruling to ask Mendez to reject the administration’s claim that the state is violating the 1996 law, said David Levine, an expert in federal court procedure at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
More from the San Francisco Chronicle:
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge struck down an immigration law Friday that the Trump administration has used against cities and states that limit cooperation with immigration officials.
The ruling by Judge William Orrick also directed the U.S. Department of Justice to give California $28 million that was withheld over the state’s immigration policies.
It was at least the third decision by a U.S. district court judge in recent months declaring the immigration law unconstitutional.
The law at issue forbids states and cities from blocking officials from reporting people’s immigration status to U.S. authorities.
Orrick’s ruling Friday in lawsuits by California and San Francisco may be the most significant yet because it applies to a major target of the administration’s opposition to sanctuary jurisdictions. Orrick forbade Attorney General Jeff Sessions from enforcing the immigration law against California or any of its cities or counties.
DOJ spokesman Devin O’Malley declined comment.
The Trump administration says sanctuary cities and states allow dangerous criminals back on the street.
San Francisco and other sanctuary cities counter that turning local police into immigration officers erodes the trust needed to get people to report local crimes.
Orrick said the immigration law “undermines existing state and local policies and strips local policy makers of the power to decide for themselves whether to communicate with” immigration officials. It also shifts a portion of immigration enforcement costs onto states, he said.
“California expresses the legitimate concern that entanglement with federal immigration enforcement erodes the trust that Latino and undocumented immigrant communities have in local law enforcement,” the judge said.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said the ruling was a victory.
“We will continue to stand up to the Trump administration’s attempts to force our law enforcement into changing its policies and practices in ways that that would make us less safe,” he said in a statement.
This ruling is just the latest in a series of setbacks that the Trump Administration has suffered regarding its efforts to punish American cities, counties, and states that have refused to comply with Federal policies. Among the first of those rulings came from the same Judge who issued this most recent ruling, Federal District Court Judge William Orrick, an Obama appointee who had previously struck down a different Trump Administration effort to punish so-called ‘sanctuary cities.’ That case dealt with an Executive Order signed by President Trump that sought to deny funding for certain Federal funding for cities and localities that had adopted so-called ‘sanctuary city’ policies. That ruling granted the Plaintiffs, which included San Francisco as well as the nearby county of Santa Clara, a temporary injunction against enforcement of the Executive Order. Late last year, Judge Orrick put that injunction in a final form in a ruling that was harshly critical of the Administration’s efforts to force localities to comply with Federal law. Several months later, another Federal Judge in Illinois, ruling in a case that had been filed by the City of Chicago, issued a ruling that was largely identical to that issued by Judge Orrick. That ruling was subsequently upheld by the three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. More recently, a Federal Judge in Pennsylvania ruled that the Trump Administration policy was unconstitutional and a Federal Judge in Sacramento largely rejected a Justice Department challenge to a series of new California laws that seek to protect the sanctuary city policies of the state’s localities by enshrining them in state law and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Administration in the appeal of Judge Orrick’s rulings from last year.
At issue in Judge Orrick’s ruling, last week was a series of policies announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in July of 2017 that purported to cut off law enforcement related aid to cities and other localities unless they agreed to cooperate with Federal immigration authorities seeking to detain people alleged to be undocumented immigrants. In his order, Sessions stated that the Justice Department would cut off aid to any locality that failed to (1) comply with a Federal law barring localities from restricting communications between the Department of Homeland Security and ICE regarding targeted individuals, (2) that failed to allow DHS officials access to detention facilities to check the immigration status of any inmate, and (3) failed to give DHS two days notice before releasing anyone who has been the subject of a DHS detention request.
As Ilya Somin explains, Judge Orrick found all three of these conditions to be unconstitutional:
In a ruling on a lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco and the state of California, Judge Orrick’s opinionconcludes that all three of these conditions are unconstitutional because only Congress, not the executive, has the power to impose conditions on federal grants to state governments. The executive cannot make up its own grant conditions after the fact, which is exactly what happened here. In addition, Orrick concludes that Section 1373 is in itself unconstitutional, because it violates the “anti-commandeering” requirements of the Tenth Amendment, which bar the federal government from conscripting state and local officials in efforts to enforce federal law.
As Judge Orrick explains, his conclusions are very similar to those of other federal judges who have rule on the same policy, in cases filed by the cities of Chicago and Philadelphia. Judge Orrick also follows these and otherfederal court decisions in ruling that Section 1373 is unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Murphy v. NCAA, which invalidated a federal law barring states from “authorizing” sports gambling under state law. I explained in greater detail how the Murphy decision undermines Section 1373 and otherwise helps sanctuary cities here, here, and here.
Importantly, the Sessions policy and Section 1373 been repeatedly struck down by both Republican and Democratic-appointed federal judges. That is a sign of a growing bipartisan judicial consensus.
Judge Orrick previously issued a ruling striking down President Trump’s January 2017 executive order, which seeks to deny a much wider range of federal grants to sanctuary cities that fail to comply with Section 1373. His decision was recently largely upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
As Somin goes on to note, the Administration did win a small victory before Judge Orrick in that he held back on issuing a nationwide injunction in the case pending the resolution of the question of whether or not District Courts have the authority to issue such injunctions. While this has been a common practice in recent years, and most especially since the Trump Administration came to power and Courts were asked to rule on issues such as the travel ban, the military’s policy regarding transgender soldiers, and the Sanctuary Cities issues, it has also become something of a legally contentious issue for reasons that have nothing to do with the Trump Administration. Ordinarily, injunctions are generally limited to the parties actually before the Court, which follows from the general proposition that Courts generally only have jurisdiction over the parties before them. In recent years, it’s become more and more common for Federal Courts to issue injunctions that have a nationwide reach and, while there’s an argument to make in favor of this practice in appropriate cases, one which Somin himself makes, whether such injunctions are legitimate as a general issue is still unresolved at the appellate level. Other than this small victory, though, this was yet another loss for the Trump Administration on a controversial issue in the courts. I’m sure Donald doesn’t like that.
Given the recent confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the likely shift of the Supreme Court in at least somewhat of a more rightward direction, the obvious question is what fate all these rulings might face if and when they make their way to the Supreme Court. While many might assume that a conservative majority would side that with the Federal Government, that may not end up being how things turn out. Defense of federalism and the powers of the states pursuant to the Tenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution. Given that, it is worth remembering that, in the years since conservative dominance on the Court has grown, the Justices have become more skeptical of Federal efforts to impose conditions on the states. As a general rule, the extent to which the Federal government can compel states to comply with the Federal law has been shaped, and limited, by a series of cases that stretch back more than thirty years. These cases include the 1987 Supreme Court ruling called South Dakota v. Dole and a series of cases that followed that that have made it harder for Congress and the Executive Branch to use the power of the purse and other powers to impose conditions on the states, as I’ve explained in the past:
In Dole, the Court dealt with a challenge by South Dakota and other states challenging a Federal law that withheld 5% of allocated Federal highway funds from states that declined to raise their drinking age, arguing that the statute was not a valid use of Congressional authority that interfered with state powers reserved by the Tenth Amendment. The Court ruled in favor of the Federal Government but also set forth a series of criteria that the Federal Government must meet in order to avoid violating the Tenth Amendment and other protections of the rights and powers of the states when using this method to force action by the states. New York v. United States, which was decided about five years after Dole, dealt with a Federal law governing the disposal of low levels of radioactive waste. One of the provisions of that law required states to “take title” to such waste and made them primarily responsible for its disposal, a provision which the Court found to be beyond the boundaries of both the Commerce Clause and the Tenth Amendment. Finally, about five years after New York, the Court issued a ruling in Printz v. United States that has stood for twenty years as the definitive ruling on the extent to which Federal law can be used to compel states to act. Printz dealt with provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the so-called “Brady Bill.” One part of that bill required state and local law enforcement to conduct background checks for all gun purchases within their borders for an interim period until a Federal database that would conduct those checks on a more-or-less instant basis could be built, tested, and put into operation. The Supreme Court struck that provision down as unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment in a decision written by Justice Scalia that relied heavily on both the criteria set forth in Dole for the criteria the Federal Government must meet to compel state’s to perform certain acts or pass certain laws and the holding in New York that more fully developed the limits on the Federal Government’s ability to force the states to act. One other decision, which Judge Orrick cites in his opinion is National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the 2011 case in which the Supreme Court largely upheld the Constitutional arguments against the Affordable Care Act. In one part of that decision, though, the Court struck down one provision of the PPACA that purported to use Federal power to force the states to expand Medicaid by threatening to withhold all of a state’s Medicaid funding if it declined to expand coverage as permitted under the PPACA. While there was not a solid majority supporting the reasoning for a decision in that part of the case, there was a majority in agreement with the result that the requirement that states expand the program or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars or more in Medcaid funding was not permissible under either Article I or the Tenth Amendment.
What these cases stand for generally is the idea that, while there are some circumstances in which the Federal Government can use the power of the purse to compel state action in a given policy area, those areas are limited and there must be some conceivable nexus between the “punishment” being enacted by the Federal government for failure to comply and the policy that the Federal government is trying to force the states to adopt. In this cases and the others like it, the Courts have invariably found that the nexus here simply does not exist and that the Federal Government cannot withhold funding generally available to states and localities to do anything the Federal Government wants. This is especially true in an area such as this where local law enforcement is under no legal obligation to enforce Federal immigration laws,
Whether the Supreme Court follows these precedents remains to be seen, of course, but as I said it is worth remembering that this is one area where a more conservative Supreme Court could come back to bite the President.
Here’s the opinion:
San Francisco Et Al v. Sess… by on Scribd
