A federal appeals court overturned a law in New Jersey on Tuesday that banned private contractors from running immigration detention centers for the federal government.
The divided 2-1 ruling allows CoreCivic to continue running a private immigration detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which the company has held a federal contract to operate since 1996.
"Just as the federal government cannot control a state, so too a state cannot control the federal government," Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, wrote in the court's opinion. "But sometimes their authorities overlap. In such cases, some state rules may legitimately burden the federal government....Sometimes, though, a state goes further, interfering directly with federal policy or 'destroy[ing]' it through 'hostile legislation.'...And when it crosses that line, it violates the Constitution.
"New Jersey is on the wrong side of that line," the judge continued. "It dislikes some of the federal government's immigration tools, so it passed a law with the 'intent' to forbid new contracts for civil immigration detention....That law interferes with the federal government's core power to enforce immigration laws. Its construction is admittedly clever: It seeks to sidestep the usual two-prong test that courts use to enforce the 'bedrock principle' that states may not regulate their federal counterpart....Still, we see the law for what 'it really is': a direct regulation on the federal government.
"Because New Jersey's law violates intergovernmental immunity, we will affirm the District Court's summary judgment for the contractor," Bibas added.
Joining Bibas in the majority opinion was Judge Cheryl Ann Krause, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama. Judge Thomas Ambro, a Clinton appointee, dissented from the majority.
The Hill reported that CoreCivic is fighting a similar legal battle in Kansas after Leavenworth County Judge John Bryant issued a temporary restraining order in June blocking the company from housing detainees in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at its shuttered facility, which is reportedly located 10 miles from Kansas City International Airport.
Back in New Jersey, federal immigration officials were able to reopen the 1,000-bed Delaney Hall facility in Newark after signing a $1 billion contract with private global lender GEO Group.
"The location near an international airport streamlines logistics, and helps facilitate the timely processing of individuals in our custody as we pursue President Trump's mandate to arrest, detain and remove illegal aliens from our communities," then-acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello said in a statement.
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