Texas Judge Strikes Down Harsh Sanctuary Cities Ban (Audio)

and federal immigration law. Garcia bill Clinton appoint He said the provisions will erode public trust and make many communities in neighborhoods less safe. The state's largest cities, including Houston, were among the challengers, and Texas has vowed to appeal. Our guests to sort this out and explain its significance. Are Rick Sue He's a professor at the University of Buffalo Buffalo School of Law. And Leon Fresco, a partner

at Holland and Night. Rick. Welcome to you both, Rick, Uh, Let's start at kind of at a general level here, because there are a lot of specific provisions, and we'll we'll get into some of the specifics. But why did Texas pass this measure? What did it say it was trying to accomplish? Um. More specifically, it's trying to go

after a so called sanctuary cities. And of course this issue of sanctuary cities, though not necessarily knew, has really sort of taken on front stage and the immigration debates in recent years. UM. What precipitated directly was the actions in the policies passed by Travis County, which is compasses Austin, which really raised the ire of the governor and many

of the state legislatures. And as the court case notes, UH much of us before was directed towards attacking particular local officials UH and with with with certain number of penalties for not participating in immigration enforcements. Leon. The law was so divisive that one Democratic legislator even pushed a Republican legislator on the final day of the session. So how much of a blow is this to Texas Republicans and the Trump administration that backed it. Well, I would

say this is a commendous setback. The standpoint that all across the country the issue of local law enforcements being litigated in various different flora, whether it's removing d o J grant money from localities that don't want to create immigration enforce someone who enactim in grace and enforcement policies to UM to this case in Texas, which is a state driven initiative, to other cases where the cities themselves are challenging provisions of the of the of what the

federal government is trying to do. So all of the all of the different litigation that's happening across the country can take this signal about the restraints that the courts are now saying are going to be placed on any effort to deputize from buying either the federal government or now the state government to deputize localities to engine immigration enforcement. Rick, Let's talk a little bit about the specifics of this ruling.

What would you say is the most important part of it. Uh, What's vital to recognize is the degree to which the court really called out uh S before, which is the state law that we're talking about in this case, for how extraordinary it actually is, and there are various components that I think really made it a strong case, at

least in the eyes of the judge in this case. UH. The degree to which this particular penalty goes after individual policymakers and lawmakers and these jurisdictions with civil penalties, criminal penalties, and removal from office, along with the fact that UH it really removes a lot of discretion and gets us back into the debate of whether or not the local and state governments have the power to enforce civil immigration laws, especially in light of the fact that many of the

requests made by the federal government lack um UH probably cause to issue a warrant, which is traditionally the constitution requirement for local law enforcement to arrest and then detain someone in custody. LEON talk specific about detain a requests

and how they work and what cities are doing with them. Sure, so the in the ideal world of how this administration would want to run immigration enforcement, what they would want is whenever any human being in the United States is a resid that individual's fingerprints are taken, those fingerprints are set to an FBI database, and p I actually shares those fingerprints with ICE as part of an arrangement that

the FBI has with Immigration Customs Enforcements. And so from that fingerprint sharing, I determine that there are individuals with fingerprints they're receiving that they want to go and try to find when they get released from these facilities. But what happens is ICE isn't in all the thousands of counties across America, and so they need time to get

to the facilities before individuals are released. And so what I want to do is to be able to tell all of these local jails to leave hold onto these individuals. That's what a detainer is. That the piece of paper that says, please all about to these individuals for forty eight more hours than what you would ordinarily hold on to them for to give us time to get them

and place them into immigration custody. We're talking about a ruling by a federal judge in San Antonio on Wednesday that at least temporarily blocked much of a Texas law that would crack down on so called sanctuary cities. And our guests are Leon Fresco of Holland Knight and Rick

Seu of the University of Buffalo School of Law. Rick a moment ago Leone was talking about this notion of of detaining UH undocumented immigrants and and sort of explaining that what ICE wants federal immigration authorities, what they want sometimes is, because they can't be everywhere, is for local authorities to hang on to somebody for maybe forty eight hours, so that federal officials have time to get there and

detain the person. UH. This law that was blocked would have required local officials to do more to cooperate with ICE. What did the judge find was wrong with that provision? So with regards to the particular detainer issue, it it gets back to a bigger issue that's been litigating lots of courts. As was mentioned before, it has to do with whether or not the local lawforcement agencies actually had the power to detain these particular individuals passed the time

in which UH any local cause to detain them has expired. UM, and there actually has been in many lawsuits that have risen out of this UH precisely because the detainer requests itself doesn't require probable cause or that actually the individual

is an a document immigrant. And the reason why many counties pulled away from following federal detainer requests was because of a number of lawsuits in which United States citizens who have been detained because of incorrect information from the federal government ended up suing the counties themselves UH, and the counties were held liable because the court said it was your decision to follow the detainers. The detainer was inappropriate and in this case it is your liability to

pay for those damages. Leon Latino and civil rights groups called this is show me your Papers law that echoes the one that was enacted by Arizona. In George Garcia partially upheld that. Tell us what he ruled right, Well, the judge sort of split it up and he said that the part that the Supreme Court allowed in Arizona, he's also allowed in Texas, which is the requirement that local officials not be banned from sharing information with ICE.

A usure of sharing information has continued to be an area where courts have not wanted to restrict UH the ability of people of local law enforcement to share information with ICE. And so the court said that that provision as before is fine. The one that required the UH that that that banned locality from saying you can't share information.

So that's part continued. But the part where the local officials are prevented to be deputized to actually engage in immigration enforcement was viewed by the judge as excessive and violence is both preempted by the Immigration and Nationality Act because there is a provision for how you get decide local law enforcement and also potentially violated of the process. So that's part where they're sort of an active immigration

enforcement component by the localities. That part was actually banned. Rick. One other provision I want to ask you about, I think you alluded to it earlier. Are these penalties that could have been imposed both civil and criminal, on local officials who didn't comply with parts of the law. Tell me a little bit about that. Is that a novel requirement that Texas was trying to impose? And what did Judge Garcia say about them? Yeah, so the penalties are

relatively novel. There has been other cases with regard to politicize issues like gun control, where state legislations are moving to individually penalize officials who are involved in this, but

none go as far or as extreme as this particular law. Um, the penalties themselves were part of a broader ruling, and what the court essentially said is because of the standard of conduct that the law requires is so broad and vague, you can endorse a policy and maybe speak out on behalf of a policy that might limit in immigration enforcement, uh materially limit pattern practice that to have such a strong penalty attached to vague prohibitions would restrict in many ways, uh,

most under, on the one hand, the First Amendment rights of these individuals to advocate for certain policies. UH. And also another concern was just that they were vague, that the individuals were not unnoticed with regard to what they should or should not do, and it may have a chilling effect on what local policymakers do. Both of these are really novel that they're often not seen in state efforts to let's say, mandate a uniform policy in a state. UH.

These seem to be directly attacking individual policymakers themselves. And the court noted that Rick, and we just about have a minute left. Tell us what you think about the chances for appeal. The state Attorney General says they're going to appeal it to the Fifth Circuit, which is known as a conservative circuit. Yeah. So it's slightly different in this case because it has to deal with the state

involved in an immigration enforcement UH. And it's the previous precedents, I've mostly talked about federal power, and in this case this is a slightly different. I do think that some of the things that George Garcia noted, and like I said before, the extremity and the unprecedented nature of this particular law itself may raise the ire of the Fifth Circuit as well. Uh, They're just very unique, even if

you take out the immigration politics of it all. Uh, they're very unique and what they're trying to do and does raise constitutional concerns well. At case almost certainly will go up on appeal to the Fifth Circuit, which is based in New Orleans. Attorney General Ken Paxton has said that he intends to appeal. He's also said that one of his issues with this ruling, interestingly was that, uh

it was decided in San Antonio instead of Austin. Austin, ken Paxton said in a statement, is where the people's representatives passed the law. State business is conducted in Austin. The plaintiffs have no reason to litigate this case in San Antonio, So that may also be one of the issues that goes up to the Fourth to the Fifth

Circuit when, as expected, the state appeals. I want to thank our guests, Rick SU's, professor at the University of Buffalo School of Law, and Leon Fresco, a partner at Holland and Knight, talking to US about the new ruling out of a federal district judge on Texas sanctuary city law.