A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked an Iowa law that allowed law enforcement in the state to file criminal charges against people with outstanding deportation orders or who previously had been denied entry to the U.S.
U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher issued a preliminary injunction because he said the U.S. Department of Justice and civil rights groups who filed suit against the state were likely to succeed in their argument that federal immigration law preempted the law approved this spring by Iowa lawmakers.
“As a matter of politics, the new legislation might be defensible,” Locher wrote in his decision. “As a matter of constitutional law, it is not.”
SCOTUS keeps punting because of the politics, but pretty soon here they’re going to have to take these immigration cases on the merits. For a million very practical reasons, foreign affairs among them, immigration is a federal issue, and the states are obligated to deal with anyone that the Feds let in or decline to remove. Some of the “gotcha” bullshit technicalities in the border states (i.e. trespassing charges) might hold up, but in even this court isn’t gonna let fuckin’ IOWA, 400 miles from Canada and 800 from Mexico, explicitly take up immigration enforcement with no legal fiction that they’re doing anything else. While they are partisan in a way that’s more obvious than ever, they aren’t quite Aileen Cannon level hacks (Thomas possibly excepted, who was basically a joke as a jurist when I was in law school, unlike someone like Scalia) who can’t follow a thread of caselaw and see how it will eventually affect their pet causes.