Huntington Beach sues state of California over sanctuary law
Having been unsuccessful in its first attempt nearly seven years ago, Huntington Beach has again filed a lawsuit against the state of California and its sanctuary state law.
City leaders announced the federal lawsuit filed in the Central District on Tuesday morning. In it, they argue that the law, which limits local police from working with federal immigration officials, is unconstitutional and should not apply, as it violates the Supremacy and Naturalization clauses of the U.S. Constitution.
The complaint lists the city itself, City Council, police department and police chief as plaintiffs.
Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates said in an interview that the sanctuary state law also “runs complete interference for good law enforcement practices.”
“The sanctuary state law by its own terms violates federal immigration law,” Gates said. “Harboring of illegal aliens is a crime, and the sanctuary state law literally directs local officials to engage in violations of federal immigration law.”
Huntington Beach Mayor Pat Burns said in a statement that the sanctuary state law, also known as SB 54 or the California Values Act, obstructs the city’s ability to fully enforce the law and keep its citizens safe.
“When the stakes are currently so high, with reports of increases in human trafficking, increases in foreign gangs taking over apartment buildings in the U.S., killing, raping and committing other violent crimes against our citizens, we need every possible resource available to fight crime, including federal resources,” Burns stated. “Huntington Beach will not sit idly by and allow the obstructionist sanctuary state law to put our 200,000 residents at risk of harm from those who seek to commit violent crimes on U.S. soil.”
With Donald Trump set to begin his second term as president later this month, unlawful immigration has been a hot topic across the nation. The president-elect has tapped one of his political advisers, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller, to serve as deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser. Miller’s nonprofit, America First Legal, recently sent hundreds of letters to states and cities with sanctuary policies warning them of consequences for interfering with illegal immigration enforcement.
During his first term in office, Trump’s administration tried to fight three California immigration laws, including SB 54, which went into effect in 2017.
But a three-judge U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel rejected the attempt to derail the law in a 2019 decision.
“That decision says federal law and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution do not prevent California from enacting this law,” said UC Irvine law professor Annie Lai, who specializes in immigration law and is co-director of the school’s Immigrant Rights Clinic. “It’s within California’s traditional police powers as a state to enact a law. Moreover, it can’t really conflict with federal law because California has a 10th Amendment right not to have its resources co-opted by the federal government.”
Huntington Beach in April 2018 filed suit against then-California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra seeking exemption from the sanctuary state law due to its charter city status. An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled in Surf City’s favor that year, but that ruling was overturned in 2020 by the state’s 4th District Court of Appeal.
The California Supreme Court declined to hear the case later that year.
Lai said she thought the lawsuit filed by Huntington Beach this week “might be rhetorically attractive, but it’s legally pretty weak. These questions have basically already been decided by appellate courts.
“Unless there’s some kind of dramatic change in the law, which I’m not anticipating, but I can’t predict the future, I think the result is going to be the same,” Lai continued. “So, for the city to be bringing this lawsuit, to expend resources on this lawsuit, seems to me to be a political decision. Maybe they think they can get some kind of political traction, not a legal decision to challenge some open question of law.”
Niels Frenzen, an immigration law specialist at USC, is the director of the Gould School of Law Immigration Clinic. He said the sanctuary law sends a message that state and local governments are not out to arrest people for simply being undocumented immigrants living and trying to survive within the state of California.
“We want people to cooperate with police when they’re witnesses, we want people to cooperate with police when they’re victims of crime,” Frenzen said. “We want people to get vaccinated, we want people to send their kids to school, all of these things that are important to society. If people are fearful of having those in their household being arrested, they’ll become even more embedded in the so-called shadow population. That is just not good for citizens, let alone good for immigrants.”
In the complaint, however, Gates cites previous state attorneys general publishing opinions in 1984 and 1992, stating that they believed local sanctuary policies were illegal and a violation of the U.S. Constitution and federal immigration law.
“We’re basically throwing the California attorney general’s own opinions back in the face of [current] Atty. Gen. [Rob] Bonta,” Gates said. “It’s a really, really good lawsuit, actually. We included a bunch of legal authorities in there in addition to the opinions.”
Frenzen said he did not see a clear argument that the city has been injured by SB 54, especially in light of the 4th District Court of Appeal decision from 2020.
“That’s a threshold question that will have to be addressed by the federal court,” he said.
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