The Daily Fuckup

The Justice Department filed suit on June 30 against the City of Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council, challenging the city’s sanctuary policies and the limits they place on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The complaint says those rules unlawfully block federal officers and violate the Constitution’s supremacy principle.

The filing also tries to connect the city’s policies to unrest that followed immigration operations in June. According to the complaint, Los Angeles’ refusal to cooperate with federal authorities helped create the conditions for that unrest. That is the government’s claim in the case, not a settled finding.

Los Angeles has defended its sanctuary rules as a way to protect residents and preserve trust between immigrant communities and local government. The city has long limited how local resources can be used in immigration enforcement, and the new lawsuit puts those limits directly at issue in federal court.

The case is likely to ripple beyond Los Angeles because it tests how far the administration wants to push sanctuary-policy challenges against local governments. For now, though, the only facts that matter are narrow ones: the lawsuit was filed June 30, it targets city officials as well as the city itself, and its theory of the case rests in part on allegations about the fallout from the June immigration actions.