A federal judge has blocked enforcement of key components of a 2019 Florida law that required state and local government agencies to cooperate with federal immigration officials and not to enact sanctuary policies.
Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida ruled in favor of the City of South Miami on Sept. 21, concluding that the sanctuary section of Senate Bill 168 violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. Another section of the 2019 law, which gave law enforcement agencies wide discretion in using their “best efforts” to support the application of U.S. immigration laws, is unconstitutional because it was found to likely encourage racial profiling, Bloom concluded.
“In sum, when the evidence is taken as a whole, the court concludes that (the) plaintiffs have established that the Best Efforts Provision and the Sanctuary Prohibition are unconstitutional because they violate the equal protection clause,” she said in the opinion.
The law allows the state attorney general to take actions against agencies that violate the law. Those agencies could be subject to financial penalties as well as private lawsuits if a local sanctuary policy were found to have caused an injury or death.
“This ruling removes an enormous financial burden that the statute placed on municipalities and dramatically enhances their ability to do community policing by reducing the community's fear of deportation at the hand of municipal law enforcement officers,” the City of South Miami’s city attorney, Thomas Pepe, told the Florida Record in an email.
Pepe also expressed confidence that the city would carry the day with its legal arguments during an appeal.
“The city would not have committed itself to being a named plaintiff if it did not feel that it would prevail and if it did not believe that such a ruling would withstand appellate review,” Pepe said.
Bloom’s 111-page opinion also concluded that the 2019 legislation was passed in an environment where “impermissible discriminatory motives” were apparent.
“Specifically, the Sanctuary Prohibition was enacted based on biased and unreliable data generated by anti-immigrant hate groups (the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies), despite the chilling effect and disparate impact that this provision would have on immigrant communities,” she said.
Supporters of the law characterized it as a way to better ensure local cooperation with federal immigration officials on multiple issues, including compliance with federal agencies’ efforts to detain people suspected of immigration violations. And sanctuary policies encourage illegal immigration, supporters say.