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

[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.