An appeals court has overturned a New Jersey sanctuary law that attempted to ban state and local agencies, as well as private contractors, from partnering with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain illegal aliens in detention centers.
On Tuesday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that New Jersey’s law, known as AB 5207, “interferes with the federal government’s core power to enforce immigration laws” by banning state and local agencies and private contractors from working with ICE to operate detention centers for illegal aliens.
“New Jersey is on the wrong side of that line. It dislikes some of the federal government’s immigration tools, so it passed a law with the “intent” to forbid new contracts for civil immigration detention,” the decision states:
“[T]he National Government is, and must be, controlled by the people without collateral interference by the States.” Because New Jersey knew that it could not openly bar the federal government from contracting to detain immigrants, it instead eliminated everyone with whom the federal government might contract within its borders. It asks us not to notice the federal elephant in the room. Yet we can see the law for what it really is, “claiming the authority to dictate the manner in which the federal [immigration] function is carried out.” Letting states do that would “chang[e] totally the character of” our federal system by “transfer[ring] the supremacy, in fact, to the states.” The U.S. Constitution is supreme, and intergovernmental immunity protects that supremacy. New Jersey’s law directly regulates the federal government, so it is unconstitutional as applied to CoreCivic. We will affirm. [Emphasis added]
The ruling affirms a district court ruling that similarly found New Jersey’s ban on private detention of illegal aliens to be unconstitutional.
New Jersey Democrats passed the ban in 2023 in an attempt to prevent CoreCivic, a longtime private detention contractor, from having its ICE contract in Elizabeth, New Jersey, renewed. As the appeals court states, though, ICE relies on state and local agencies as well as private contractors to operate such detention of illegal aliens.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not build its own lockups, and it does not operate them alone. Instead, it contracts with private companies or local governments to help run them,” the decision states. “This approach gives ICE the flexibility it needs to increase or decrease capacity as the number of deportable aliens fluctuates.”
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), which had filed a brief in the case, celebrated the decision as a blow to anti-ICE activists and their attempts to prevent ICE from detaining illegal aliens.
“With this ban, New Jersey aimed to cripple our nation’s immigration law enforcement, which relies so heavily on federal contractors to house detainees,” IRLI’s Christopher J. Hajec said in a statement. “The problem is, the very purpose of New Jersey’s law is what makes it unconstitutional. We are pleased the court saw just that, and struck down this ban as an infringement on federalism and the Constitution.”
The case is CoreCivic v. Governor of New Jersey, No. 23-2598 in the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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