Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) (Photo: Screen grab from Senate.gov)
North Carolina lawmakers introduced legislation in Congress Wednesday that would allow the victims of felonies committed by undocumented immigrants to sue cities, counties, and states that did not comply with ICE deportation orders.
Entitled the “Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act,” the bill is sponsored in the Senate by North Carolina Republican Senators Thom Tillis and Ted Budd and nine other GOP members. Western North Carolina Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards, who introduced the legislation in the House last year, announced on Thursday that he has reintroduced it.
“For far too long, we have watched local jurisdictions in North Carolina and across the country ignore the lawful notification and detainer requests made by ICE agents and instead release dangerous criminals back into their communities, putting innocent lives at risk,” Tillis said in a news release. “It is time for Congress to step in and hold sanctuary cities accountable.”
“Sanctuary jurisdictions” employ local protocols that restrict or prohibit cooperation with ICE, typically by preventing law enforcement from complying with ICE “detainers” — orders from the agency to hold undocumented immigrants taken into custody until they can be turned over to ICE.
If passed into law, the bill would open up such jurisdictions to civil liability for not complying with ICE detainers for or notifying the agency of the release of undocumented immigrants who go on to commit felonies. The statute of limitations for such claims would be 10 years after the felony or the death of an individual resulting from the felony.
But according to Rick Su, a UNC immigration law professor, states must first waive their “sovereign immunity” to become liable to federal civil lawsuits. Similarly, because of state sovereignty, jurisdictions cannot face federal criminal charges for declining to enforce ICE detainers, which function as requests rather than legal orders.
In an effort to bypass sovereignty immunity, the bill stipulates that recipients of several categories of federal grant programs — centering on economic, community, and housing development — waive that legal immunity for “sanctuary-related civil action,” with an exception for disaster relief grants for housing.
Su said this section of the bill could open it up to constitutional challenges, as federal courts have held that while such requirements are permissible, they cannot be “coercive,” or they may violate the Eleventh Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down a section of the Affordable Care Act that would have required all states to adopt Medicaid expansion or lose all Medicaid funding, for example.
“They have a delicate dance here, right, because they have to make it big enough that essentially everyone will waive,” Su said. “But they might be interested in making it not so big that it will fall for this coercive condition.”
While he declined to predict whether courts would find these conditions coercive should the bill become law, he noted that the funds specified are substantial — covering sweeping grants ranging from public works and research facilities to public housing for low-income families.
It also shields members of law enforcement from legal liability for complying with ICE detainers and classifies them as agents of the Department of Homeland Security — though this does not extend to knowing violations of civil or constitutional rights. Su said cities may find themselves between “a rock and a hard place” under the proposed law because failing to comply with detainers could expose them to liability, but cooperation with ICE could open them up to civil rights lawsuits.
“Sanctuary cities cannot continue to jeopardize Americans’ safety and not be held accountable for their role in the illegal immigrant crime crisis we are facing today,” Edwards said in a news release. “The Justice for Victims of Sanctuary Cities Act will finally hold these communities responsible when their harmful, often illegal, policies result in a crime against an American citizen by allowing the victim to take legal action against counties, cities, or towns for the dangerous policies that directly led to their harm.”
The bill comes as President Donald Trump prepares to carry out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants he repeatedly promised to undertake on the campaign trail. But Trump has already faced early obstacles to his immigration agenda: on Thursday, a federal judge in Washington halted his executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship in the U.S., a tenet of immigration law enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
It also follows the passage of the “Laken Riley Act,” a bill expanding the mandatory detention requirements for undocumented immigrants arrested for petty crimes, with the aim of facilitating the president’s deportation agenda. That bill passed with bipartisan support, with 46 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats joining Republicans in supporting it.
Trump repeatedly sparred with sanctuary jurisdictions during his first term in office, at one point signing an executive order to strip them of all federal funding for resisting his administration’s attempts at immigration enforcement — though this action was struck down as unconstitutional by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
These jurisdictions remained in the political crosshairs of conservatives during the Biden administration, when Republican governors Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas sent migrants to sanctuary cities en masse using chartered buses and planes.
North Carolina state lawmakers enacted legislation targeting sanctuary jurisdictions in November over the veto of then-Governor Roy Cooper. That bill, H.B. 10, requires sheriffs in the state to comply with ICE detainers and shields them from legal liability for holding individuals believed to be subject to detainers for up to 48 hours.
Read the full text of the new Senate bill here:
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