SPRINGFIELD — In an expected move, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit last week seeking to nullify a new state law that allows Illinois residents to sue federal immigration agents who arrest them in or near courthouses or if they believe their constitutional rights were violated.
The suit was filed by the Department of Justice in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. It alleges that the law, passed by the Democrat-led state legislature in October and signed by Pritzker, violates the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution and increases the likelihood that officers face threats and harassment.
“Threatening officers with ruinous liability and even punitive damages for executing federal law and for simply protecting their identities and their families also chills the enforcement of federal law and compromises sensitive law enforcement operations,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
The complaint names Gov. JB Pritzker and Attorney General Kwame Raoul as defendants.
A spokesperson for Pritzker said in a statement to Capitol News Illinois that “the Trump Administration’s masked agents are not targeting the ‘worst of the worst’ — they are harassing and detaining law-abiding U.S. citizens and Black and Brown people at daycares, hospitals, and courthouses.”
“This new law reflects our belief that no one is above the law, regardless of their position or authority,” the spokesperson said. “Unlike the Trump Administration, Illinois is protecting constitutional rights in our state.”
Response to blitz
Pritzker signed the law in the aftermath of “Operation Midway Blitz,” a federal immigration enforcement campaign that targeted the Chicago region starting in September.
The Department of Homeland Security said that the operation resulted in the arrest of more than 4,500 immigrants who were living in Chicago and its suburbs without legal permission. But the raids often led to violent confrontations between masked federal agents and protestors during various operations in the city and suburbs, including near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing facility in suburban Broadview. Many of these skirmishes resulted in the deployment of tear gas and other chemical agents.
Leading Illinois Democrats viewed the new law as a comprehensive legislative response to the blitz that provides safeguards to people in their interactions with immigration agents. It also places new requirements on public colleges and universities, hospitals and child care facilities and mostly prohibits them from disclosing the immigration status of students, patients, parents and children.
But the reach of the law is limited. Not included in the package is an outright ban on law enforcement officers wearing face masks while on duty, for instance.
Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, acknowledged before the bill passed that the state was “playing with a stacked deck” versus a federal government with the “upper hand” and that the law would likely be challenged.
Courthouse, private right of action provisions targeted
In its 22-page filing, the federal government specifically challenged the provisions relating to immigration agents’ actions in and around state courthouses as well as the private right of action that it created, arguing that “states have no power to ‘in any manner control the operations of’ the federal government.”
Under the law, all people attending court are considered “privileged from civil arrest” inside state courthouses and within a 1,000-foot buffer zone outside of the buildings.
Though there had long been a de facto understanding that such facilities were off-limits for immigration enforcement, they have increasingly been the site of apprehensions over the past year. Those who violate the act could be liable for statutory damages of $10,000.
The law also allows residents to sue immigration agents for violating their constitutional right to due process and protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
They would be able to collect punitive damages that can increase if the agents are wearing masks, concealing their identities, failing to wear body cameras or using a vehicle with a non-Illinois or obscured license plate.
“That is a policy choice for Congress, not each individual state, to make,” Justice Department lawyers wrote in their filing, predicting that the law will “inevitably become a vehicle to threaten and harass federal officers.”
Latest state-federal immigration clash
It is not the first time the state and federal government have been entangled in litigation relating to immigration policy.
The Trump administration earlier this year filed a lawsuit seeking to invalidate, under the supremacy clause, a state law and Chicago and Cook County ordinances that limit state and local law enforcement’s cooperation with civil immigration enforcement. A federal judge dismissed the suit in July.
And Illinois and Chicago sued the Trump administration in October to block the planned deployment of National Guard Troops to the nation’s third largest city. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency appeal from the Trump administration seeking to lift a temporary restraining order put in place by a lower court that prevents the deployment of troops while the underlying case works through the courts.
This latest case has been assigned to Judge David W. Dugan, a Trump appointee. Raoul’s office, which is engaged in more than three-dozen legal cases with the federal government, has until Jan. 13 to respond to the complaint.