Florida asks Supreme Court to let it enforce controversial immigration law
WASHINGTON − Florida wants the Supreme Court's permission to enforce a controversial new law targeting undocumented immigrants entering Florida, a move that aims to help carry out President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
The state filed an emergency petition on June 23 asking the justices to lift a hold that was placed on the law while it's being challenged.
The law, which made it a felony for certain immigrants to enter Florida, is needed to protect residents from "the deluge of illegal immigration," Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier told the Supreme Court.
"If a State's police powers are powers at all, they allow a State to criminalize harms destructive to the community," he wrote in the appeal.
A federal judge this month found Uthmeier in civil contempt because of a letter he sent in April to police after the law was paused.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said Uthmeier violated a directive to notify police agencies that a court order barred them from enforcing the law.
Uthmeier has argued that the order should only apply to him and local state attorneys because they were the named defendants in the underlying legal challenge.
The Florida Immigrant Coalition, the Farmworker Association of Florida and two individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit in April, contending, in part, that the law violates what is known as the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution because immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility.
"It is time for States to get the message: State immigration laws are unconstitutional," Cody Wofsy, a lawyer with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project has said about the case.
In pausing enforcement, Williams said the law likely is preempted by federal immigration authority. Among other things, she pointed to the law requiring that violators go to jail.
The Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed her order.
Uthmeier said the Supreme Court should lift the order or at least say it doesn't apply to all of Florida's law enforcement officers.
Contributing: Jim Saunders, News Service of Florida.