On today's episode, Sagaar talked about a "neo-confederate" idea that states arent cooperating with federal agents to enforce immigration law. He doesnt seem to understand how the division of power works under our constitutional law.

1) The Supreme Court (conservative and liberal justices alike) have consistently held that immigration enforcement is the sole province of the federal government. Which makes sense. If each state could set its own immigration laws, we would have serious issues as a nation (interestingly, this is essentially how we did immigration before the 1860s, but once the feds started acting, the states lost the power to do anything.)

2) Despite immigration enforcement being fed based, they cannot compel state legislatures or executives to assist federal agents in doing their job. This is based on the 10th amendment principle known as anti commendering. The people responsible for the strong anti commendering laws we have are conservative justices on the Supreme Court!

3) Now, why don't local governments want to help? As Krystal points out, local governments have finite resources. Their law enforcement functions and priorities are wildly different than ICE's or the feds more generally. When Colorado first implemented its sanctuary laws, all lf the sheriff's across the state supported it! Why? Because they had a finite amount of jail space, and could not afford to hold people for ICE. They saw that people stopped showing up to court when ICE was present. There were real impacts to community safety in a way I think Sagaar cares about as a result of ICE being around.

4) Even when places do try and comply, local governments damn near go bankrupt doing it. Local governments can enter into 287(g) agreements with the feds to cooperate with ICE, but when Sheriff Joe Arpio of Maricopa County did that, the county damn near went broke and he had to stop! Now the Trump administration has said he will increase reimbursement for these agreements, but does it seem like any blue city could trust that?

5) ICE agents (as well as federal agents) can't be sued for violating a person's constitutional rights, but local law enforcement can. Seeing how ICE is acting, do you, a city who can be sued, want to open yourself up to liability because you worked with these lawless ICE officers?

6) Finally, Sagaar makes a false comparison to the south during the Civil Rights era. In that case, the state governments were actively denying people equal protection under the law (and a whole host of other rights) and failing to comply with Supreme Court rullings. In those instances the federal government went in to protect the individual rights of people against the state, and importantly THE LOCAL GOVERNMENTS DID NOT HELP THE FEDS. Unfortunately for Sagaar, no one has a right to not have immigrants in their community. No one has a right to have laws enforce against people (see Castle Rock v Gonzalez). So the two are not comparable.