DREAM Act Portal Forum - A SCOTUS Obamacare Ruling May Doom Trump's Sanctuary Cities Crackdown

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The Trump administration announced this week that it will make good on its January threat to claw back funding from so-called sanctuary cities that limit information-sharing with federal immigration officials. Yet hundreds of legal experts say the move would itself be illegal—in part due to a court ruling Republicans cheered just a few years ago.

In 2012, the Supreme Court forced the Obama administration to make Medicaid expansion voluntary for states instead of mandatory, ruling that when the federal government “threatens to terminate other significant independent grants as a means of pressuring the States to accept” a federal policy, it is unconstitutionally coercive.

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Stripping the cities and counties of this funding, however, is easier said than done. Doing so could violate the 10th Amendment, which protects states' rights against federal intrusion, and a number of Supreme Court cases, including the 2012 case that struck down Obamacare's mandatory Medicaid expansion, legal experts warn.

"It may be unconstitutional on several grounds," said George Washington University Law School professor John Banzhaf III.

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In the 1987 decision South Dakota v. Dole — which concerned a government attempt to cut highway funding to states that tried to lower the federal drinking age — the Court said the federal government can only cut grants related to the policy they are trying to enforce. Though the federal government's argument trumped the state's in that case, the ruling significantly narrowed the kind of funding the federal government can withhold when attempting to incentivize local governments to carry out a certain policy.

"So the DOJ is extremely limited here in what kind of money they can even touch," explained Grisel Ruiz, a staff attorney at San Francisco's Immigrant Legal Resource Center. "They can't take funding that is completely unrelated." The Court went even further in 1997, ruling in Printz v. United States that “the Federal Government may not compel the States to enact or administer a federal regulatory program.”

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/sanc...doj-california