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

# Why This Matters

California's "No Vigilantes Act," passed in 2018 with overwhelming Democratic support, explicitly barred state and local law enforcement from providing assistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents—even preventing them from detaining people solely on ICE requests. The law was born from sanctuary city politics, designed to make California's police forces essentially useless to federal immigration authorities. Last week, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—hardly a conservative court—unanimously struck it down, ruling that California cannot use its police power to nullify federal immigration law enforcement. This was a clean loss: no dissent, no nuance, just the Supremacy Clause doing its constitutional job.

The mechanics matter here. Under the law, if an ICE agent called a local cop asking for help arresting someone, that cop was forbidden from cooperating unless there was an independent state criminal charge. Local jails couldn't hold people on immigration detainers alone. Police couldn't even relay basic information to ICE. The intent was transparent—make federal immigration enforcement so friction-filled that it becomes operationally crippled in the state. It worked for five years.

This precedent cuts deeper than immigration politics. Newsom's administration, along with other blue-state governors, has explicitly adopted a theory of selective enforcement—the idea that states can essentially opt out of federal law by starving the relevant agencies of cooperation. That approach worked in overdrive during the COVID vaccine mandate fights, sanctuary city movements, and marijuana legalization. But constitutional law has a ceiling. The Ninth Circuit's decision affirmed that while states can't be forced to deputize federal agents, they also can't affirmatively sabotage them. There's a crucial difference between "we won't help" and "we will prevent this from happening."

The conservative reading here is straightforward: Democrats spent four years lamenting Trump's "lawlessness" on immigration while simultaneously passing laws designed to make federal immigration law unenforceable within their borders. California's law was raw political defiance dressed up in progressive language about civil liberties and stopping "vigilantism." The court's decision—especially its unanimity—shows that constitutional limits apply to Democratic legislatures too. You can't simply declare a federal law dead in your state because you disagree with it. That's what the Supremacy Clause prevents. If California gets to nullify ICE operations, Texas gets to nullify EPA inspections. That's not federalism; that's dissolution.

What happens next is the immediate question. California hasn't signaled whether it will appeal to the full Ninth Circuit or accept the panel ruling. More significantly, other blue states copied this model—New York passed similar restrictions—so this decision potentially invalidates a entire Democratic legislative strategy. The Biden administration, despite sanctuary city sympathies, didn't defend California's law in court, which tells you Justice Department lawyers knew it was indefensible. Watch whether Newsom attempts legislative workarounds or accepts the loss and moves to other enforcement mechanisms. The court gave him no real options.