Court Benchslaps ICE's ONE WEIRD TRICK To Get Around 10th Amendment

Quit stealing FEMA money, Kristi Noem!

Tina Fey as Noem, Amy Poehler as Bondi on SNL

Donald Trump has declared war on so-called “sanctuary jurisdictions.” That war is taking place in the streets, as masked goons snatch up every non-white person they can get their hands on and tear gas anyone who complains about it. At the same time, he’s trying to use both the courts and the budget to coerce cities into enacting his immigration regime.

Thus far, he’s had fairly limited success. And this week yet another “old bull,” Senior Judge William Smith, a 2002 George W. Bush appointee to the federal court in Rhode Island, became the latest to whack Trump on the nose and call him a very bad dog. Because, thanks to the Tenth Amendment, the Department of Homeland Security cannot force local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE’s goons. And it can’t extort local governments into doing it by threatening to withhold disaster relief funds either.

Bondi at bat

In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had “filed charges against the state of New York, Kathy Hochul, Letitia James, and Mark Schroeder.”

She hadn’t. What she’d done was sue the state of New York for failing to honor ice detainers without a warrant. That case appears to have stalled out this summer. (Hello, Albany? Anyone home?) But a judge in Illinois made short work of a similar case against Illinois, dismissing it in July.

“Because the Tenth Amendment protects Defendants’ Sanctuary Policies, those Policies cannot be found to discriminate against or regulate the federal government,” Judge Lindsey Jenkins wrote.

In one of his many executive orders, President Trump purported to ban sanctuary cities by claiming that they “use their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.” In fact, he tried something similar the last time he was in the White House, and got benchslapped into oblivion.