A road in California near the border with Mexico
As reported by BBC, the federal Justice Department is asking a court to declare three new California laws protecting illegal immigrants unconstitutional. The laws, which have drawn objections from the Justice Department and its head Jeff Sessions, prohibit California police from asking detainees about their immigration status and from turning over illegal immigrants to border patrol or the immigration enforcement agency ICE.
Employers are prohibited from cooperating with ICE, for example, by providing federal authorities with documentation on their workers without a court warrant. Violators of the ban are fined up to $10,000. Employers are also required to warn their workers of an impending raid 72 hours in advance.
The Justice Department argues that these laws violate the Constitution and federal law, which takes precedence over local law. Supporters of these laws argue that if local police help federal authorities, illegal immigrants will stop reporting criminals and providing information about them. Federal authorities and their supporters counter that these concerns are not supported by empirical experience or scientific research, and say that defenders of illegal immigrants are guided by an open-borders ideology and a desire to increase the electorate of the Democratic Party, for which the majority of Latinos in the U.S. vote. Latinos make up the overwhelming majority of illegal immigrants.
The lawsuit, whose consideration could drag on for months or even years, was filed in the California capital of Sacramento, whose federal court is considered more conservative than the courts of Los Angeles and San Francisco. This apparently explains why Sessions chose Sacramento. On the other hand, the losing side will appeal the trial court's decision to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considered the most liberal in the country. On the third hand, the overwhelming majority of this appellate court's decisions are later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Justice Department's complaint is accompanied by a memo from Rodney Scott, who commands border patrols in the San Diego sector. The memo says that California not only refuses to help federal authorities but actively sabotages their activities.
Scott, for example, recounts how his men stopped a car, suspecting the driver had no residency permit in the U.S. The suspicions were not confirmed, but it turned out the driver was drunk. The border guards called local police, who refused to take the detainee because he was stopped on the highway as part of an anti-illegal immigration operation. The patrol officers had nowhere to take him, so they released him, even though he was clearly drunk.
Or a police officer once stopped a van with fake license plates on the highway, which contained 77 illegal immigrants. A subordinate of Scott was passing by and stopped to help the police officer. As Scott writes to the court, if the border guard had driven past, the California policeman would have simply released the driver and his human cargo. The border guard detained them. The highway patrol later complained about the incident because they did not want to get in trouble with their superiors for complicity in detaining illegal immigrants.
According to Scott, border guards and ICE no longer transfer illegal immigrants they have detained to local authorities to serve time for past crimes: federal authorities fear that after serving their sentences, they will not be returned for deportation.
California Governor Brown, who signed the laws last year that sparked Sessions' protests, dismissively calls him simply Jeff and a "boy from Alabama," which Sessions formerly represented in the U.S. Senate. Brown says Sessions filed a lawsuit against him to "curry favor" with Trump, who cannot forgive the attorney general for recusing himself from "Russiagate" and therefore cannot rein in special prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating the scandal.
Speaking at a press conference, Brown said he had not heard of the incidents mentioned in the lawsuit and denied that the new California laws complicate the fight against crime. "That's not true!" the governor snapped. "We know that the Trump administration is full of liars. They've already confessed to the special prosecutor."
One of the main complaints of federal authorities is that the administration of California detention facilities does not warn them in advance about the release of illegal immigrants at the end of their sentences, or warns them only a few minutes in advance. Therefore, they do not have time to intercept the illegal immigrant at the prison gates and are forced to chase them around the city and detain them at risk to life—both their own and that of the surrounding population. At least, that is what Sessions claims.
According to Brown, California laws do not prevent federal authorities from coming to prisons, which do not hide documentation on inmate releases from them. "What Jeff Sessions said is simply not true, and I call on him to apologize to Californians," the governor said. As the New York Times writes, Brown and Attorney General Becerra, who are ardent opponents of Trump and Sessions' hardline stance on immigration, "vowed to uphold the progressive values that they believe California embodies."
The U.S. Justice Department has sued individual states before. The Barack Obama administration, for example, sued North Carolina over its dispute over separate bathrooms for transgender people. After becoming head of the Justice Department, Sessions withdrew that lawsuit.
Tensions between Californians and federal authorities escalated further the other day when Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf publicly and in advance warned local illegal immigrants of an impending raid. ICE Director Thomas Homan likened the mayor to "a gang lookout who yells 'Police!'" According to him, because of this warning, federal authorities detained only 200 illegal immigrants in Oakland instead of the expected thousand.
Legal scholars assess the prospects of Sessions' lawsuit differently. Most say that Washington, under the constitution, has no right to force state law enforcement agencies to obey federal authorities. The ban on private businesses helping ICE hunt for illegal immigrants, on the other hand, is unlikely to be upheld by courts, lawyers believe.