The Supreme Court declined Wednesday to let Florida enforce a state law criminalizing illegal immigration.
The unsigned order included no reasons or noted dissents.
Florida’s law, which was passed in February, makes it a crime to “knowingly enter or attempt to enter” the state after illegally entering the U.S., subject to nine months in prison for the first offense.
The state asked the Supreme Court in June to halt a district court judge’s injunction preventing the law from taking effect.
“Illegal immigration continues to wreak havoc in the State while that law cannot be enforced,” Florida Attorney General James argued in the state’s application. “And without this Court’s intervention, Florida and its citizens will remain disabled from combatting the serious harms of illegal immigration for years as this litigation proceeds through the lower courts.”
Florida’s law was intended to respond to murders committed by an illegal migrant, along with “reports of rampant fentanyl trafficking and other devastating harms killing Florida’s citizens and destroying their communities,” Uthmeier noted in the states’s petition.
Seventeen state attorneys general filed a brief backing Florida, arguing states “retain immigration-related police powers.”
“Florida’s law does not conflict with federal law, so it is not obstacle preempted,” the states, led by Iowa Attorney General Eric Wessan, wrote. “It is a complementary enactment.”
President Donald Trump appeared July 1 alongside DeSantis for the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a facility built in the Everglades to detain illegal migrants following Uthmeier’s proposal.
“We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation and a lot of the people are self-deporting back to their country where they came from,” Trump said during the press conference. “We took the FEMA money that Joe Biden allocated to pay for the luxury hotel rooms where he was paying hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City and we used it to build this project.”
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