
The Supreme Court May Criminalize Immigrant Advocacy - bryanrasmussen
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/11/supreme-court-criminalize-immigration-advocacy-sineneng-smith.html
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deogeo
While "encouraging to reside in the United States" definitely seems like over-
broad wording that's ripe for a 1st amendment takedown, I would hardly
classify "sanctuary city officials who refuse to cooperate with immigration
enforcement" as speech. "Abdication of duty" is a more apt description.

They don't get to decide immigration policy for the entire US - but by
refusing to enforce federal law in that area, that's exactly what they're
doing.

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wahern
> "Abdication of duty" is a more apt description.

The legality of sanctuary cities has nothing to do with free speech. It has to
do with separation of powers and the 10th Amendment. Long-standing
constitutional jurisprudence is that the Federal government cannot
"commandeer" states to enact Federal policies. See, e.g.,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printz_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printz_v._United_States)

Rather, the Federal government can only, effectively, bribe them, but even
then there are limitations--limitations added by many of the same conservative
justices currently sitting. Indeed, one of the major conservative arguments
against the ACA was that Medicare funding conditions were unconstitutional for
this very reason.

Free speech is implicated only because the DoJ has apparently threatened to
use this "encouragement" prohibition against state officials. That would be a
curious end-run around federalism jurisprudence and I seriously doubt it would
work regardless of the free speech angle.

There's one very practical reason for refusing to cooperate with ICE: if an
ICE hold request turns out to be _illegal_ (i.e. not backed by sufficient
evidence, which is not uncommon considering the false positive rate for
name+DoB matching), guess who's liable for potentially millions in a civil
rights law suit? It's the municipality, not ICE. That's why some
municipalities even in the South have an unstated policy of using their own
best judgment wrt hold requests. The people in charge won't admit this in
public, of course, because the partisan discourse has ensured voters lack any
capacity for understanding the issues. Instead what happens is that whenever
they get an ICE request they release the person and then claim it was
accidental or that they were released before the request was processed.

