Intentionally misstating New York City’s sanctuary immigration policy as thwarting the prosecution of violent criminals, the Trump administration continued its war on local government by filing suit in federal court last week, one of a number of similar lawsuits across the country that conflate civil noncooperation with active criminal interference and attempt to conscript local officials into Donald Trump’s destructive crackdown.
This should prove to Mayor Adams and other state and city leaders that no amount of appeasement is going forestall the the targeting from Trump. Adams met multiple times with immigration coordinator Tom Homan, insisting that the two men had “the same goal” making concessions like signing off on the opening up of an ICE office on Rikers Island years after a city sanctuary law had kicked them out.
It’s clear that Trump and Homan were not and probably could not be placated to the extent that they would leave Adams and New York City alone. The reality is that this is a totalizing project; Stephen Miller and the rest of the White House want to rid the country almost entirely of immigrants, with or without legal status, and regardless of where they are or what effect that will have on our economy and society. They’ve been routinely violating the law to do so.
It’s worth noting once more that Trump’s is a political movement that often proclaimed itself a defender of state rights and local control, but apparently that only extended to allowing local officials to detain immigrants, pull books from school shelves, limit access to abortion, curb labor and environmental protections and drive LGBTQ people from public life.
When it comes to a refusal to participate in federal operations that have so far involved masked and unidentified agents shoving people into unmarked vehicles — just the sort of thing that we would call authoritarianism and tyranny anywhere else — then states and localities get no say beyond being extensions of a central government.
We’re not particularly worried that any competent judge would accept these nonsensical claims. A day after the New York case was filed, a federal judge in Chicago dismissed the Trump lawsuit against that city’s sanctuary immigration policy.
We just want to remind readers that sanctuary is not immunity from prosecution, especially prosecution for violent crimes. What it is however is that when someone is treated at a city health clinic for TB or enrolls a child in school or reports a crime to the police as a victim or a witness, the person’s civil immigration status is irrelevant. We want everyone in the city to get treated when sick, we want all children to be in school, we want all crime victims and witnesses to come forward to the cops.
The idea of anti-commandeering — the notion that the federal government can’t force state and local governments to carry out its own agenda and enforcement functions — has been foundational from the genesis of our country’s federalized system. The right of jurisdictions to enact sanctuary provisions that block the use of local resources for this federal function has been litigated over and over again, and always found to be on solid legal footing.
We are, however, more worried about the U.S. Supreme Court, which has in the past several months taken it upon itself to sign off on Trump‘s expansive power grabs. It has allowed among other things Trump to fire federal employees and independent agency members in direct contravention of statute, allowed the limiting of a nationwide order blocking Trump‘s attempt to overturn the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provisions and allowed parents to impose religious beliefs on whole school curricula.
If these questions get up to that high court level, we hope that the justices will exercise some of their independent power, as they did on other absolutely egregious instances like Trump‘s efforts to remove people without due process under the Alien Enemies Act proclamation. Anything else will destroy the trust of people in their own local officials and governments and strike at the very foundation of this country’s system of government.
