A California judge has dismissed the federal government’s challenge to Los Angeles’s sanctuary city status.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin of the Central District of California ruled that the federal government failed to adequately support its claim that the city’s policy violates intergovernmental immunity.
“[P]laintiff’s allegations are insufficient to establish that the Ordinance violates the intergovernmental immunity doctrine,” the judge wrote. “The Ordinance does not directly regulate the federal government. Rather, it ‘controls the actions of [the City’s] own agents and agencies.'”
According to the judge, the city’s ordinance “merely restricts a City employee from inquiring into or collecting information about a person’s citizenship or immigration status” and “says nothing about the City’s ability to maintain or share such information.”
Hydee Feldstein Soto, Los Angeles City Attorney, said in a statement that the order “reinforces the well-established principle that local governments have the authority to decide how to use their personnel and resources.”
“The goal of this ordinance, and of LAPD’s immigration-related policies – which date back to Special Order 40 in the 1970s – is to encourage victims of and witnesses to crime to feel safe coming forward to seek help from LAPD regardless of their immigration status,” Feldstein Soto said. “It does not obstruct or impede lawful federal immigration enforcement operations.”
Last year, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles, California; its mayor, Karen Bass; and its city council over policies impeding federal immigration enforcement.
According to the filing, the purpose of the sanctuary city law is to “thwart” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from “carrying out their statutory obligations as directed by Congress. The council members who passed the bill have publicly declared as much.”
The city’s policies are not only illegal, the DOJ argued, but are “designed to and in fact do interfere with and discriminate against the Federal Government’s enforcement of federal immigration law in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.”
