Washington, D.C. (January 23, 2025)—Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, issued the following statement in response to a
memorandum sent by Acting Deputy Attorney General and former personal criminal defense attorney to President Donald Trump, Emil Bove, to all Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors directing them to investigate state and local government officials who “fail to comply with lawful immigration-related commands and requests”—a blatant threat to constitutionally protected state sovereignty:
“The federal government doesn’t own the states. But this DOJ directive, coming from President Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney turned acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, threatens state and local officials with potential criminal prosecution if they refuse to comply with presidential ‘commands and requests’ to use state and local resources to carry out the Trump Administration’s extreme immigration policy of mass raids, mass detention, and mass deportation.
“Without citing any Supreme Court precedent or other legal authority, Acting Deputy Attorney General Bove simply asserts that ‘[t]he Supremacy Clause and other authorities require state and local actors to comply with the Executive Branch’s immigration enforcement initiatives.’
“This is plainly wrong. Bove’s failure to cite any authority for this proposition is predictable because the Constitution and Supreme Court precedents make clear that the Tenth Amendment and constitutional federalism protect state and local government and their officials from being ‘commandeered’ by the federal government as instrumentalities to carry out its policies.
“As Justice Scalia wrote in Printz v. United States (1997), which struck down a federal law requiring local sheriffs to conduct the federal government’s firearm background checks, ‘[t]he Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States' officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policymaking is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.’
“The Trump Administration may want to boss around state and local officials by demanding that local taxpayer dollars and government resources be diverted to assist with federal raids, arrests, and deportations against families who have lived in the United States for decades, who own homes and pay taxes here, and who are our coworkers, neighbors, fellow parishioners, and classmates. But the Constitution preserves state and local officials’ decision-making authority over the state-based question of how to use their own finite and self-raised resources to protect public safety in their communities.
“The only tangible result of this policy will be to sour relations between state and federal partners—a partnership, which, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, has succeeded in reducing violent crime below its levels at the end of the first Trump Administration. Local law enforcement knows what is needed to keep communities safe—and subjecting them to top-down-one-size-fits-all straitjacket federal presidential mandates makes a mockery of local control and the structural federalism established in our Constitution that my Republican friends love to invoke. It’s laughable that the party that once prided themselves on being champions of state and local government are now trampling state and local authority by commandeering state and local governments to serve a federal agenda.
“This policy will lead to chaos, division and protracted litigation that will unnecessarily cost both state and federal taxpayers huge amounts of money that could be used to keep America safe. The federal government does not own or control the state governments.”
