Passed by the Florida legislature earlier this year, the law makes it a misdemeanor for illegal immigrants to enter the state.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a motion on April 30 asking federal courts to allow the state to enforce a new law that makes it a misdemeanor for illegal immigrants to enter Florida by skirting immigration officials.
In his motion to stay, Uthmeier asked U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami to pause her injunction blocking Florida from enforcing the law while he appeals to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
“That law does nothing more than exercise Florida’s inherent sovereign authority to protect its citizens by aiding the enforcement of federal immigration law,” the attorney general wrote in his court filing.
In her Tuesday preliminary injunction, Williams said there is a “substantial likelihood” that the law, SB4-C, is unconstitutional.
The judge said her ruling applies to all Florida local law enforcement agencies, as well as any “officers, agents, employees, attorneys, and any persons who are in active concert or participation” with state law enforcement.
Uthmeier had sent a letter on April 23 to Florida law enforcement agencies advising them that “no lawful, legitimate order currently impedes [their] agencies from continuing to enforce” the law.
Williams set a deadline and hearing in May for the state attorney general to show why he should not be held in contempt for sending the letter.
“Defendants must be prepared to discuss why sanctions should not be imposed for AG Uthmeier’s failure to comply with a court order,” the judge wrote.
The law makes it a first-degree misdemeanor for an illegal immigrant over 18 years old to knowingly enter or attempt to enter Florida after eluding federal immigration authorities. The crime comes with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of nine months if convicted.
Subsequent convictions become third-degree felonies, with a minimum mandatory imprisonment of one year and one day, and two years following two or more additional convictions.
The Florida Immigrant Coalition, the Farmworker Association of Florida, and two individual plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit against the state in early April, accusing Florida of creating its “own immigration crimes, completely outside the federal immigration system.”
“State police will arrest noncitizens for these entry and re-entry crimes; state prosecutors will bring charges in state courts; and state judges will determine guilt and impose sentences. The federal government has no control over, nor any role at all in, these arrests and prosecutions,” the plaintiffs wrote.
On April 4, the judge issued a 14-day temporary restraining order, just days after the plaintiffs filed the suit. After learning the Florida Highway Patrol had arrested more than a dozen people in conjunction with the law, including a U.S. citizen, she extended her order for an additional 11 days.
Uthmeier first sent an April 18 memo to state and local law enforcement officers telling them to pause enforcing the law despite his disagreements with the judge’s injunction. Five days later, he sent another letter to officials telling them the judge was legally wrong and that he couldn’t stop them from enforcing the law, which triggered the May hearing from Williams.
In his Wednesday filing, Uthmeier argued that his office was likely to succeed in defending the law because it is consistent with federal statutes and because he believes the plaintiffs lack legal standing.
The plaintiffs argued in their lawsuit that Florida’s law violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by overstepping federal authority for immigration enforcement.