The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday (9) upheld a lower court’s decision that blocked part of a Florida law making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to enter the state. The statute imposed several mandatory prison sentences for violations of the law.
The Supreme Court’s action came in a one-sentence order, without any elaboration and with no dissents recorded.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the state legislation in February, and just two months later, the law made national headlines when the Florida Highway Patrol arrested Juan Carlos Lopez-Garcia, a U.S.-born American citizen, for entering the state from Georgia. Lopez-Garcia was detained for 24 hours before being released.
Immigrants’ rights organizations and undocumented immigrants filed lawsuits, arguing that the new Florida law conflicted with federal immigration law and, according to long-standing Supreme Court precedents, states must yield to federal law in such conflicts.
Florida, however, argued that the state legislation is necessary to curb the “harmful effects of immigration” and that the state law works in tandem with federal law. So far, however, the Supreme Court has held that federal law occupies the field of immigration in cases of conflict.
Florida is not the first state to pass a law criminalizing illegal immigration, only to have it blocked by federal courts. In recent years, federal judges have blocked similar state initiatives in Oklahoma, Iowa, and Idaho — always ruling that a state law criminalizing illegal immigration would conflict with existing national laws. In 2024, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Texas’s efforts to enforce a similar law.
Although the Supreme Court’s order on Wednesday (9) blocked parts of the Florida law championed by DeSantis, immigration remains a winning issue for the governor. In May, he announced that, in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Florida led an “unprecedented statewide operation,” arresting more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants in less than a week.
Source: npr.org by Nina Totenberg