Gavin Newsom’s legislative minions just got a lesson in constitutional supremacy

# Why This Matters

California's "No Vigilantes Act," passed in 2020 at the height of Trump administration immigration enforcement tensions, prohibited law enforcement officers from using racial profiling, detention based on perceived immigration status alone, and cooperation with federal immigration agents without a judicial warrant. The law was designed as a direct rebuke to what progressives called indiscriminate ICE raids. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—hardly a conservative stronghold—unanimously ruled the law unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause, which establishes that federal law trumps conflicting state and local statutes. This means Newsom's legislature can't use police power restrictions to functionally obstruct federal immigration enforcement, no matter how aggressively they frame it as civil rights protection.

The specifics matter here. The law didn't just regulate state police departments; it explicitly restricted what information local agencies could share with ICE and imposed civil liability on officers who cooperated with federal immigration enforcement without a warrant. California cities like Los Angeles had already declared themselves "sanctuary jurisdictions," declining to hold detainees beyond their release date for ICE processing. But the No Vigilantes Act went further—it essentially criminalized the voluntary coordination between state and federal law enforcement. The court found this crossed the line from regulating state resources into actively obstructing federal statutory authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act. Governor Newsom, who championed the legislation as protecting immigrant communities from "deportation traps," now faces the reality that states can't legislate their way around federal immigration law, no matter the margin in Sacramento.

What's actually at stake is whether sanctuary policies can work through legal obstruction rather than simple non-cooperation. If a state can't penalize its officers for sharing information with ICE, and can't refuse to hold detainees on federal immigration requests, the entire architecture of California's anti-deportation strategy collapses at the institutional level. Local police chiefs in blue cities have long walked a tightrope—community trust requires appearing to not be an arm of ICE, but they can't openly defy federal law. This ruling tightens that rope considerably. For immigrant advocacy groups, the loss means their primary legislative tool for shielding undocumented residents from deportation—making it legally risky for local officials to cooperate with ICE—no longer works. For ICE, it's an operational win: federal agents can now coordinate with state and local police in California without legal jeopardy to those officers.

The court's reasoning hinges on a straightforward constitutional principle: states can't obstruct federal law execution through their own statutes. The Supremacy Clause has gutted state laws that conflicted with federal authority since *Marbury v. Madison*. But this application is notably direct—the panel didn't carve out special immigration enforcement exceptions or defer to state police powers. They simply said California's law directly conflicted with federal immigration authority and therefore fell. The conservative take here is unambiguous: Newsom and the legislature tried to use state law to nullify federal immigration enforcement, and the courts slapped them down. This isn't states' rights—this is one state trying to obstruct the federal government's explicit statutory responsibility. States can decline to spend their own resources on federal priorities (California doesn't have to fund ICE detention facilities), but they can't legally punish their own officials for cooperating with federal law enforcement. Newsom wanted his cake—appearing immigrant-friendly to his base—while eating it too, by making ICE's job harder through legal harassment. The Ninth Circuit just said no.

California will likely appeal to the full Ninth Circuit or petition for Supreme Court review, though the unanimous three-judge panel and the straightforward Supremacy Clause analysis make reversal unlikely. The real next step is what Newsom does administratively. He can't fix this with new legislation—the constitutional problem is baked in. He could theoretically try to restrict police departments from *volunteering* information to ICE, but the ruling suggests even that might face legal challenge as obstruction. Watch whether California cities start experiencing more visible ICE enforcement in the coming months. With legal barriers removed, federal