'Unconstitutional': Trump's 'judicial hero' said to have rejected President's new policy

A Supreme Court Justice dubbed by the New York Times as Donald Trump's "judicial hero" once rejected a plan similar to the one put forth by Trump on immigration, an ex-prosecutor said.

It began with the Justice Department’s new management issuing a legal memorandum "directing prosecutors to investigate, and even prosecute, what they perceive as state or local efforts to obstruct immigration enforcement," according to former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance.

Vance characterized the memo as "an injection of poison into the bloodstream of democracy."

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"Trump is threatening to prosecute those who don’t go along with his plans—legal or not, consistent with state policy or not, part of their job or not. The message is, bend your will to the leader or else. That’s autocracy," she wrote on Thursday.

She added that "the DOJ memo claims that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution requires state and local officials to comply."

"But that’s wrong—state officials can’t be compelled to enforce federal law," she added, pointing to Trump "judicial hero" Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's findings.

"Just ask Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in Printz v. U.S. The issue in that case was whether state and local law enforcement officers could be required to enforce interim provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, for instance, by conducting background checks on prospective handgun purchasers. Justice Scalia held that the federal government could not require states to enforce or enact federal regulatory programs. Doing so would violate the states’ sovereignty," Vance wrote, adding, "In other words, what’s happening here is unconstitutional according to a widely venerated conservative Justice. Presumably, even an acting official at the Justice Department is capable of reading the law and knowing that what they’re ordering Justice Department employees across the country to do is contrary to well-established law."

Read the essay here.