In January, the state of California and its largest county will ban law enforcement officers from covering their faces, with a few exceptions, putting local and state police at odds with masked immigration agents.
In January, the state of California and its largest county will ban law enforcement officers from covering their faces, with a few exceptions, putting local and state police at odds with masked immigration agents.
I’m genuinely curious but are there ways for state law to supersede federal law here? It happens with other types of issues like minimum wage, but this is targeting federal agents and their safety directly.
It’s quite complicated. Basically state law can never contradict federal law. So the question will come down to whether this masking is a legitimate exercise of federal law. While I think it obviously isn’t because there’s no law requiring ICE agents to mask, I’m sure they will make the argument that it’s part of federal discretion in how they choose to execute laws that do exist. Again, it’s hard to make any reasonable argument that masking materially helps them in executing their duties, but the courts have traditionally given a pretty absurd amount of leeway to the Feds when it comes to this kind of thing. This will probably give the SC just enough wiggle room to expand federal dominance over state law and strike this down.
But who knows, that’s just my slightly educated prediction. I’m not a lawyer or anything.