The Trump administration has sued the City of Los Angeles for discriminating against federal immigration officers.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit Monday against Los Angeles, its mayor Karen Bass, and the Los Angeles City Council for “illegal” sanctuary city policies that it says “deliberately impede federal immigration officers’ ability to carry out their responsibilities.”
This move comes weeks after the city erupted in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. These protests quickly turned violent following Trump’s decision to deploy thousands of California National Guard troops to Los Angeles without notifying California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Bass.
The lawsuit claimed that Los Angeles’ refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities resulted in “lawlessness, rioting, looting, and vandalism,” causing the situation to become “so dire” that the California National Guard and U.S. Marines had to be deployed to the city.
“A direct confrontation with federal immigration authorities was the inevitable outcome of the Sanctuary City law,” the suit stated.
Yet a lawsuit filed over a week ago accusing Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of being violent towards peaceful protestors claimed that the administration “used the violent spectacle created by DHS as a reason to commandeer the National Guard and send the United States Marines into California, which in turn has generated more widespread protests.”
This did not stop Attorney General Pam Bondi from blaming sanctuary city policies for the violence.
“Sanctuary policies were the driving cause of the violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently witnessed in Los Angeles,” Bondi said in a DOJ press release Monday.
“Jurisdictions like Los Angeles that flout federal law by prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens are undermining law enforcement at every level—it ends under President Trump,” she added.
In its suit, the DOJ said the City of Los Angeles was violating the supremacy clause, which says that state judges are bound to the federal law of the land.
It noted that the supremacy clause “prohibits the City of Los Angeles and its officials from singling out the Federal Government for adverse treatment—as the challenged law and policies do—thereby discriminating against the Federal Government.”
Some examples listed of how these policies “intentionally” discriminate against federal immigration agents were: restricting access to property and individual detainees, forbidding contractors and sub-contractors from providing information to agents, and “disfavoring federal criminal laws that the City of Los Angeles has decided not to comply with.”
The suit said that the Los Angeles Ordinance and other policies “intentionally obstruct the sharing of information envisioned by Congress, thereby impairing federal apprehension and detention of removable aliens, including dangerous criminals, as required by federal law.”
It also said that these “obstructionist Sanctuary City laws” prevent Los Angeles law enforcement from helping federal immigration to take “removable aliens” into custody.
“The preferences of the City of Los Angeles notwithstanding, Congress made an explicit policy choice that such removals can be effectuated by civil arrest warrants for immigration enforcement,” it said.
U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California said that “the United States Constitution’s Supremacy Clause prohibits the City from picking and choosing which federal laws will be enforced and which will not.”
“By assisting removable aliens in evading federal law enforcement, the City’s unlawful and discriminatory ordinance has contributed to a lawless and unsafe environment that this lawsuit will help end,” he said.
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