The Trump Administration won a small victory Friday when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled they can withhold federal grants from sanctuary cities:
The ruling, a split 2-1 decision, said the Department of Justice (DOJ) was within its rights to withhold Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grants from sanctuary cities and states over their refusal to work with federal immigration enforcement authorities and instead prioritize agencies that focused on unauthorized immigration and agreed to give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) access to jail records and immigrants in custody.
The city of Los Angeles first sued the administration after it was denied a $3 million grant on the grounds that it did not receive the money because it did not focus on immigration for its community policing grant application. The decision reversed a district court’s ruling.
“The panel rejected Los Angeles’s argument that DOJ’s practice of giving additional consideration to applicants that choose to further the two specified federal goals violated the Constitution’s Spending Clause,” wrote Judge Sandra Ikuta, joined by Judge Jay Bybee.
Ikuta and Bybee are both George W. Bush appointees. Judge Kim Wardlaw, who dissented, is a Clinton appointee.
The Ninth Circuit, of course, was the most notoriously liberal of the circuit courts, though Trump appointees have been slowly changing the balance of the court. It is possible that a majority of active circuit judges could grant a petition to order an en banc rehearing of the ruling before an eleven judge panel, but “en banc hearing or rehearing is not favored and ordinarily will not be ordered.” Though one of the exceptions is for cases of “exceptional importance,” so who knows? Neither an en banc rehearing nor a Supreme Court appeal would be a slam-dunk to overturn the decision.
Slowly but surely, the Trump Administration is making headway in actually enforcing federal border control laws.