A federal judge in Rhode Island has declared that President Donald Trump's policy of requiring states to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a condition of receiving disaster relief from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is illegal and unconstitutional.
Then he went out of his way to throw a broadside at the Supreme Court in anticipation of it arbitrarily blocking the ruling.
In a lengthy ruling issued on Wednesday, U.S. Senior District Judge William E. Smith rejected the Trump administration's motion to toss the lawsuit, brought by the state of Illinois, and ruled in favor of the plaintiff.
The case centered on an executive order Trump signed shortly after taking office, "Protecting the American People Against Invasion," which directed the Department of Homeland Security to cut off federal funds from any state with "sanctuary" policies or a restriction on local law enforcement from assisting federal agents in immigration enforcement.
Many such states and cities have this policy, which is legal according to decades of court precedent so long as state and local authorities don't go out of their way to obstruct the federal government from enforcement activities.
In his ruling, Smith found that Trump's order violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal law prohibiting regulatory changes that are "arbitrary and capricious," as well as the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution, for withholding money appropriated by Congress for an unauthorized reason.
But Trump wasn't the only target of frustration in the ruling. On page 25, Smith all but said that he worries the Supreme Court will, as it has on several other occasions when lower courts applied precedent and facts to rule against the president, issue an emergency "shadow docket" ruling overturning him — and not give any explanation as to why.
"The Court is ... mindful of the uncertainty created by the Supreme Court’s recent emergency docket rulings addressing jurisdiction over grant-termination disputes," wrote Smith. "To state the obvious, this Court must follow the precedent of the Supreme Court and the First Circuit."
Smith cited as precedent a recent concurrence on federal employment disputes written by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The Supreme Court has increasingly become a target of frustration by lower court judges over its constant use of "shadow docket" rulings to overturn lower court orders against Trump without any stated reasoning, with one of the most controversial being a recent decision allowing Trump to fire a Democratic Federal Trade Commission member, possibly queuing up the summary reversal of a 90-year-old ruling that limits presidential ability to take over congressionally-designated independent agencies.
