Good news for immigrants and sanctuary cities

[redbird]

The Supreme Court just ruled, 7-2, that the states cannot be required to enforce federal law. The case in front of them was about sports betting. That AP story quotes Justice Alito's decision, someone from the ACLU, and someone from the Cato Institute:

“The court ruled definitively that the federal government can’t force states to enforce federal law. In the immigration context, this means it can’t require state or local officials to cooperate with federal immigration authorities,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Comments

[replyhazy]

Wow.

[bibliofile]

Interestingly, the news reports I saw yesterday were all about the sports betting. Go AP for looking at, yanno, implications. Because SCOTUS decisions often have them.

[amaebi]

Small mercies. I'm grateful for them, in this context.

[redbird]

Everything political these days feels like using a spoon to hold back an avalanche. I keep trying. Hope is better than despair.

[amaebi]

At best. Yeah.

Thank you for keeping trying. Me too. Creation being typically slower than destruction, it's important that we keep at it.

[thnidu]

yippee!!!

(Now pray the Orange House and its flunkies in the Two Houses of Congress won't find a way around that.)

[sine_nomine]

This is fascinating because it also means that states can pass laws about e.g., marijuana regardless of what the Feds say about it.

[redbird]

It's not that far-reaching: we (Somerville, or even Massachusetts) don't get to have our own immigration policy. We just don't have to use Massachusetts police or taxes to enforce the federal law.

In this context, the federal government could pass a law directly outlawing that sort of gambling—though one that said "except in Nevada" would be unlikely—and prosecute gamblers. Or, with similar practical effect, they could set the federal income tax on gambling winnings at 99.9%.

(cattitude had heard about the decision in terms of sports gambling, but not the reasoning, and thought it might have been based on a WTO ruling, which might limit what they can do about gambling, but the WTO is unlikely to care about how we enforce immigration law.)

[amaebi]

A possible downstream consequence I'm concerned about is that this may motivate the founding and overfunding of militarized federal police forces.* May it not transpire.

* As a nation we seem willing to fund military and prisons lavishly, while our poundfoolish stinginess about investing in out people and environment is staggering. So I don't count on parsimony to save us.

[sine_nomine]

Perhaps... but it comes down to enforceability and the 10th amendment.

From this cogent summary from Forbes:

To the Supreme Court, even though the substance of the scrutinized statute was about sports gambling, this case is really about the broader principle of whether Congress can pass a law to require states to act in a particular way or, even more broadly, whether the federal government could compel state governments to take particular actions.

Based on the view of commandeering articulated by the Supreme Court on Monday in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, any federal effort to require states to use their police force in any particular way, including rounding up illegal immigrants, now appears to be clearly unconstitutional.

Which is exactly to your point. But I think (keeping in mind that I am not a lawyer) that there is a chance it could also extend to not forcing the states to enforce federal drug laws, and thus allowing them to establish their own.

[stardreamer]

I can't help thinking that this is a double-edged sword. Does it also mean that states can renege on marriage equality, or civil rights in general?

[jbsegal]

Yeah, this.