Do you not remember
Arizona v. the United States, where the feds weren’t enforcing imm. policy, or were only selectively enforcing it. So AZ set up their state bill that was a duplicate of federal law, to allow their state LEOs to do ICE’s job that wasn’t been done. And everyone yelled “You’re racist, AZ!” and it went to court. The state’s argument was that states ought to have the authority to concurrently enforce current federal imm. laws. The fed’s argument was that states don’t have the authority to adopt local imm. laws, even if they merely duplicate the laws at the federal level.
Texas, Florida, Alabama, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and some other states filed amicus briefs to support Arizona. (Interestingly, neither California nor New Mexico did. CA, I understand-- but I didn’t catch what’s up in NM.) Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Nicaragua, and a few other South American/Central American countries all filed amicus briefs in support of the United States. (Surprise!)
It went all the way to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, they struck down three of the four components of the bill. Kennedy wrote for the majority (Roberts/Ginsburg/Sotomayor/Breyer).
Scalia dissented because he thought that it was an exercise in states’ sovereignty-- AZ was allowed to exclude anyone from their state who wasn’t allowed by the Constitution or by Congress. He cited a few early immigration Supreme Court cases to support his argument-- Mayor of New York v Miln, for example, which was where the Court considered a statute that required ships coming into port to disclose the name/birthplace/former home/age/occupation of all passengers who had the intention of coming into New York. And the SC at that time said, yeah, NY was able to pass this law at the Founding, so just because they joined the US doesn’t mean they lost their own power over their own territory within the US; and even if the law hadn’t been in place at the Founding, doesn’t mean that they lost that power just because they joined.
Thomas dissented, but on the ground that the law didn’t contradict anything in fed law, so we didn’t have to worry about preemption doctrine coming into play.
Alito joined with the majority on part (registration provisions), but dissented in part (citing De Canas v Bica as an example of the SC upholding state interests/authority in employment regs).
However— although it seemed like another fed power overreach, it was actually kind of funny, because here CA is recently, trying to exercise all of its state sovereignty in how it wants to deal with immigration… and the administration has changed, and has a different approach to immigration than the last one. And by being political, the SC went ahead and set a very recent precedent that basically tells California, “Sorry, CA, you’re out of luck… you gotta cooperate with fed law, because, you know, border regulation and imm. law is a federal thing, not something the states need to interfere with. You just need to do what you’re told and let us do our job…”
