From the Jails to the Streets, Courthouses and Worksites: California Takes on the Federal Immigration Police

By: Angelo A. Paparelli, Past ABIL President
Nation of Immigrators

The familiar lines were drawn.  Combatants clashed in a war of words, competing governance philosophies, conflicting laws, and judicial challenges – all in an age-old constitutional battle of federal power versus states’ rights.

This time around, however, the roles were reversed.  Version 2018 is unlike the 1960s when extreme-right southern conservatives, claiming to champion states’ rights, defied but ultimately failed to stop federal efforts to protect civil rights.  This time, the state of California passed three statutes under its police powers with the avowed purpose of promoting public safety and protecting undocumented state residents against a determined army of newly-unshackled federal immigration enforcement officers. And this time, the state mostly won.

​By enacting three new California laws – Assembly Bills, AB 103 and AB 450, and Senate Bill (SB) 54 – state legislators responded to aggressive federal immigration enforcement activities in the Golden State that they viewed as serious threats to community policing, public safety, and the state’s sizzling, low-unemployment economy.

AB 103 – effective June 27, 2017 – added  California Government Code § 12532, directing the state Attorney General to conduct a review and report on county, local, or private locked detention facilities housing noncitizens within the state for civil violations of federal immigration laws. The AG must review and issue a report to the California legislature, Governor and the public by March 1, 2019, and must address conditions of confinement at each facility, due process and care provided to detainees, and the circumstances leading to their apprehension and placement in the facility. To permit this review, AB 103 mandates that the AG be provided with access to each facility, detainees, officials, personnel, and records.

AB 450 – effective January 1, 2018 – the “Immigrant Worker Protection Act” (IWPA), as I wrote in an earlier blog post, “AB 450: California’s Law of Unintended Immigration Consequences” – prohibits California employers (on pain of civil fines) from voluntarily cooperating with federal immigration enforcement agents at the worksite unless cooperation is required by federal immigration law.  Specifically, IWPA prohibits California-based employers from:

• voluntarily granting immigration enforcement agents access to any non-public areas of a worksite unless the agents present a judicial warrant.
• voluntarily allowing immigration enforcement agents to access, review, or obtain any employee records unless the agents present a Notice of Inspection (NOI) of Forms I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verifications), an administrative or judicial subpoena, or a judicial warrant requiring compliance.
• reverifying the employment eligibility of any current employee unless required by federal law.

IWPA also requires employers served with an I-9 NOI to give notice in writing within 72 hours to each current employee at the worksite and any authorized labor union that an I-9 inspection has begun, and notify any affected employee or authorized union rep – again within 72 hours of receiving any subsequent I-9 related federal notices –  “of the obligations of the employer and the affected employee arising from the results of the inspection of I-9 . . . forms or other employment records” (the AB 450 Notice requirements).

Senate Bill (SB) 54 – enacted October 05, 2017, and popularly titled the “California Sanctuary State Law”  – is a comprehensive statute which, among other things, prohibits California law enforcement authorities from sharing a wide variety of information on persons in state custody, including the release date of a detained noncitizen, and from transferring the individual to federal authorities unless he or she has been convicted of certain crimes or unless authorized by a judicial warrant or a judicial probable-cause determination.

Predictably, U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III threw down the gauntlet.  The U.S. Justice Department filed a federal complaint in the Eastern District of California, requested a preliminary injunction, offered supporting declarations of senior officials in the State Department (Carl S. Risch) and DHS (Thomas D. Homan, Todd Hoffman and Rodney S. Scott).  DOJ attorneys argued to Federal Judge John A. Mendez that these new California laws unconstitutionally usurp federal supremacy and sovereignty over control of the nation’s borders. Not shrinking from the fight, California AG Becerra filed a formal opposition to the request for preliminary injunction, a motion to dismiss the suit, and a legal brief.

Ironically, on Independence Day, Judge Mendez issued his momentous, carefully considered decision (a 60-page whopper), ruling that:

• No preliminary injunction would issue against AB 103, SB 54, and the AB 450 Notice requirements, requirements because they do not trench upon federal authority over immigration.
• As for rest of AB 450, California authorities are preliminarily enjoined from:
  • fining employers or otherwise enforcing the bans on reverifying the employment eligibility of current employees,
  • voluntarily giving immigration enforcement agents access to nonpublic areas of the worksite, or
  • allowing them to access, review, or obtain employee records 

​Sounding a note of somber exasperation, Judge Mendez implored the two political branches to act:

This Court has gone to great lengths to explain the legal grounds for its opinion. This Order hopefully will not be viewed through a political lens and this Court expresses no views on the soundness of the policies or statutes involved in this lawsuit. There is no place for politics in our judicial system and this one opinion will neither define nor solve the complicated immigration issues currently facing our Nation.

As noted in the Introduction to this Order, this case is about the proper application of constitutional principles to a specific factual situation. The Court reached its decision only after a careful and considered application of legal precedent. The Court did so without concern for any possible political consequences. It is a luxury, of course, that members of the other two branches of government do not share. But if there is going to be a long-term solution to the problems our country faces with respect to immigration policy. it can only come from our legislative and executive branches. It cannot and will not come from piecemeal opinions issued by the judicial branch. Accordingly, this Court joins the ever-growing chorus of Federal Judges in urging our elected officials to set aside the partisan and polarizing politics dominating the current immigration debate and work in a cooperative and bi-partisan fashion toward drafting and passing legislation that addresses this critical political issue. Our Nation deserves it. Our Constitution demands it.

​U.S. v. California, Judge Mendez’s case, will continue to final judgment and injunctive orders.  Meantime, however, the federal/California square-off over immigration enforcement is only in the early rounds.  California has just shot additional volleys.

• The latest California law, SB 785 – enacted with immediate effect on May 17, 2018 – prohibits the disclosure of an individual’s immigration status in open court, unless the party seeking to introduce it first persuades a judge in a private, in camerahearing, that such evidence is relevant and otherwise admissible. SB 785 was enacted in response to recent ICE arrests of immigrants in California courthouses, despite the March 2017 admonition of California Chief Justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, AG Sessions and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, reminding them that:

Our courthouses serve as a vital forum for ensuring access to justice and protecting public safety. Courthouses should not be used as bait in the necessary enforcement of our country’s immigration laws.

• In State of California, ex rel, Xavier Becerra v. Jefferson B.  Sessions, et al., the state filed a July 9, 2018 motion for summary judgment and legal brief, supported by 13 declarations, requesting a nationwide injunction against imposition of immigration enforcement conditions on federal grants for state and local law enforcement.  In a contemporaneous press release, AG Becerra’s office asserted that:

​[The U.S. Justice Department has] unlawfully withheld California’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant funds, which the State uses to support a task force that combats large-scale drug trafficking. California’s motion seeks to have the court enjoin the federal government’s unlawful conditions for all jurisdictions and compel the issuance of JAG funding to all eligible jurisdictions in the United States that have yet to receive it, as well as to restore COPS funding to California.

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​Although Congress apparently has no stomach for comprehensive immigration reform, despite the overwhelming popular view that reform is necessary, the judicial battle between the world’s first and fifth largest economies continues unabated.