Judge Dropkicks Trump Admin Immigration Suit Against Illinois

No, state officials don't have to become kidnappers, too.

On February 12, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she was “charging” New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James with immigration crimes.

In fact, she’d done no such thing. What she did was file the second in a series of lawsuits against so called “sanctuary cities” to force them to help the Trump administration snatch more bodies to feed to its maniacal deportation machine.

“We did it to Illinois. Strike one. Strike two is New York, and if you're a state not complying with federal law? You're next,” she blustered for the cameras.

But the verdict is in, and they did not, in fact, do it to Illinois. In a methodical opinion, Judge Lindsay Jenkins explained why this lawsuit, like the multiple identical suits filed during the first Trump administration, must fail under the Tenth Amendment. The Supremacy Clause still doesn’t give the president the right to conscript states in his deportation project.

Federalism’s a bitch, man.

This is a stick up

On February 6, the Trump administration sued a grab bag of defendants in the Northern District of Illinois. Governor JB Pritzker! The City of Chicago! Cook County! Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson! The gang’s all here, and none of them wants to become ICE goons.

Luckily, they won’t have to. As a threshold matter, Judge Jenkins dismissed the claims against Pritzker, Johnson, Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart, the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and Board President Toni Preckwinkle, since none of those people are actually responsible for enforcing the challenged statutes.

And the DOJ’s actual legal arguments fared no better.