"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
LOS ANGELES — The Justice Department cannot require that local police departments help immigration agents in order to receive federal funding, a federal judge has ruled. The ruling is a significant victory for local governments that have opposed the Trump administration’s stance on immigration and vowed to stay out of enforcement efforts.
United States District Judge Manuel Real in Los Angeles issued a permanent, national injunction against the federal funding rules, giving the city an important win in a long-running legal battle with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the White House.
The ruling is “a complete victory,” Mike Feuer, the Los Angeles city attorney, said Thursday. “This is yet another dagger in the heart of the administration’s efforts to use federal funds as a weapon to make local jurisdictions complicit in its civil immigration enforcement policies.”
A Justice Department spokesman, Devin M. O’Malley, suggested an appeal was likely.
The federal government is legally entitled to give priority in its grant funding to local governments “that prioritize the safety of their communities and their law enforcement officers when they promise to cooperate with federal immigration authorities seeking information about illegal aliens who have committed crimes,” he said in a statement.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “the court not only rejected this common-sense conclusion, but it chose to issue a permanent nationwide injunction that is overbroad and inconsistent with the rule of law. We look forward to continuing the strong defense of our position.”
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Los Angeles has received millions of dollars under a federal program to promote community policing.CreditMonica Almeida/The New York Times
The ruling handed down Wednesday came in one of several lawsuitsthat state and city officials in California have filed against the federal government arguing that it has overreached in trying to force local officers to help with immigration enforcement.
“The Trump administration cannot manipulate federal grant fund requirements to pressure states, counties or municipalities to enforce federal immigration laws,” Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, said last year when the state filed a lawsuit against the administration for denying funding to so-called sanctuary cities.
Last month, a federal district judge declined to issue a preliminary injunction against the federal government in that case, saying that the courts in other parts of the country had reached different conclusions and that “issues in this case will benefit from further development.”
After that ruling, the Trump administration filed its own lawsuit against California over its own “sanctuary state” law, which prevents the police in many cases from holding people at the request of federal immigration agents, and limits the sharing of information about the release of some county jail inmates who are in the country illegally. In its suit, the federal government argues that the law makes it impossible for immigration officers to do their jobs. A hearing in the case is scheduled for late June.
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Read the complete article at the link.
The losses just keep piling up for Gonzo & Co. And, not surprisingly, the inability of Gonzo to provide anything approaching a rational basis for his actions is a continuing problem.
He’s a guy whose career has been based on bias and racism. And, when that’s the only unstated rationale for a program, many Federal Courts are seeing right through the ruse. No, terrorizing communities and destroying relationships that have taken decades or more to build is not about effective law enforcement! It’s all about racism and bias.
Here’s a link to Judge Real’s decision in City of Los Angeles v. Sessions
