The Ninth Circuit has long been the left-most federal appellate court in the United States. However, the day after Thanksgiving, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision that must have made President-elect Donald Trump very happy: It concluded that the Supremacy Clause means what it says, namely, that when it comes to the border, local political bodies cannot use regulations governing private parties to override the federal government’s supremacy on immigration matters.
United States v. King County revolved around Boeing Field, an airport in King County, Washington (i.e., the Seattle area). In 1941, King County conveyed the field to the U.S. government for wartime purposes. In 1948, the government reconveyed the field to King County. However, one contingency of the Instrument of Transfer was that the U.S. retained full access to Boeing Field.
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Beginning in 2012, ICE began to use Boeing Field to deport illegal aliens. To this end, ICE leased charter services for planes and personnel. However, in 2018, King County officials took umbrage at this practice. So, in 2019, they issued an executive order mandating that when the airport entered into leases with fixed base operations (FBOs)—that is, private businesses providing essential services such as fueling and stairs—those leases prohibit the FBOs from servicing ICE charter flights.
The County’s explicit purpose was to block the federal government’s ability to deport illegal aliens, and the plan worked. FBOs immediately stopped providing services to ICE because it would have destroyed their businesses had they continued to do so. ICE relocated its flights to Yakima, Washington, which increased their costs—and, of course, increased the federal debt.
The Trump administration sued in 2020 and, much to my surprise, the Biden administration has pursued the case in the ensuing years. Just as surprisingly, the District Court ruled in the government’s favor, and, most surprisingly of all, the Ninth Circuit has just affirmed that decision.
Having dealt with some silly procedural issues that King County raised and addressed questions about whether the U.S. had retained rights in Boeing Field (it had), the Court got to the serious substantive issue. That was whether a local government could indirectly block the federal government’s ability to act within its sphere of power—a sphere that entirely encompasses immigration enforcement. The Ninth Circuit concluded that local governments cannot do that.
These two sentences say it all:
It is of course true that “[p]rivate contractors do not stand on the same footing as the federal government, so states can impose many laws on federal contractors that they could not apply to the federal government itself.” [snip] That said, “any state regulation that purports to override the federal government’s decisions about who will carry out federal functions runs afoul of the Supremacy Clause.”
In other words, just as the federal government cannot use private businesses (such as social media companies) to do indirectly that which the federal government cannot do directly (such as censor speech), local governments cannot use private businesses (such as airport service providers) to do indirectly that which the governments cannot do directly (such as hamstringing the federal government’s completely supremacy on immigration matters).
This should be a warning to Democrat localities all over America. If even the Ninth Circuit doesn’t support your immigration war on the federal government, you have preemptively lost, so don’t even try.
