IN MIAMI — On Tuesday, a federal judge told lawyers for the state of Florida that an order to stop enforcing a new state immigration law did apply to all of the state’s local law enforcement agencies, even though the state’s attorney general had recently written that it did not.
At a meeting in Miami, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said she was going to issue a preliminary injunction against a state law that makes it a misdemeanour for undocumented immigrants to sneak into Florida by avoiding immigration officials.
The bill was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in February as part of President Donald Trump’s plan to crack down on illegal immigration. However, many of Trump’s efforts to enforce immigration laws are currently in court fights with federal judges.
On April 4, not long after the lawsuit was filed by the Florida Immigrant Coalition and other groups with help from the American Civil Liberties Union, the judge granted a temporary restraining order that would last for 14 days. After finding that the Florida Highway Patrol had arrested more than a dozen people, including a U.S. citizen, she gave them an extra 11 days. It is said in the lawsuit that the new law goes against the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by interfering with federal responsibilities.
At the meeting on Tuesday, Williams asked Jeffrey DeSousa, who works for the Florida Office of the Attorney General, why Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier told police last week that they didn’t have to follow her order.
DeSousa said that the view of his office is that a judge’s order can only affect the people who are named in the lawsuit. Williams asked what the point of letting police arrest people without a good reason would be if attorneys couldn’t bring charges against them. DeSousa didn’t directly answer.
DeSousa also said that the immigrant groups that hired lawyers to file the case could have named all 20 state attorneys general, the statewide prosecutor, and the Florida attorney general in their complaint.
A lawyer for the ACLU named Oscar Sarabia Roman said it wouldn’t have been possible to name all 373 of the state’s police departments by name in their lawsuit. He also said that the judge’s order should be able to stop the local cops from enforcing the new law.
Uthmeier told state and local police not to enforce the law, even though he didn’t agree with them, in a memo after Williams gave her order to extend the deadline to April 18. But after five days, he sent another memo saying that the judge was wrong legally and that he couldn’t stop the police and cops in the area from following the law. Since Uthmeier’s second letter, there have been no more reports of arrests.