Appeals court blocks California ban for-profit prisons

 The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals again blocked on Monday a larger panel of California’s first-in-the-nation ban on for-profit private prisons and immigration detention facilities, finding that it is trumped by the federal government.

By 2028 last year in California a three-judge appellate panel rejected the 2019 state law that would have phased out privately run immigration jails. A key piece of the nation’s detention system for immigrants the law would have undermined.

To reconsider a ruling General Rob Bonta, California Attorney, had asked the larger appellate panel.

The law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom on immigration enforcement was one of many efforts to limit California’s cooperation with the federal government as then-President Donald Trump imposed hardline policies. But the Biden administration continued on constitutional grounds the U.S. government’s opposition to the law.

Under the U.S. Constitution’s “supremacy clause” by the federal government the 11-member appellate panel said the state law is pre-empted. To the trial court for a decision on other legal arguments it sent the case back.

To block the law, the Geo Group Inc., which operates two such facilities in California, sued. On the ruling neither Geo nor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement immediately commented.

“AB 32 would prevent ICE’s contractors from continuing to run detention facilities, requiring ICE to entirely transform its approach to detention in the state or else abandon its California facilities”, for the panel’s eight-member majority Circuit Judge Jacqueline Nguyen wrote. “Over the federal government’s detention operations California cannot exert this level of control”. 

Judge Mary Murguia, an appointee of President Barack Obama, dissented while Judge Bridget Bade, also a Trump appointee, joined Lee in granting the appeal.

When the federal government and the GEO Group, Inc., a Florida-based private prison company that owns two immigrant centres, filed an appeal, California’s ban on privately owned immigrant detention centres was quickly met with opposition but went into effect just last year. They argued that the state’s mandate went against federal law.

The state would likely appeal the court’s decision California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who wrote the state’s mandate when he was an assemblyman, said.

“We will continue the fight in California to ensure the dignities and rights of everyone are protected”, Bonta said in a statement. “This fight is personal to me, as a Filipino American who was brought to this country as an infant. We will keep pushing forward while the road ahead may feel a little longer today, our work continues”. 

In California are run by private companies in Adelanto five of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s eight immigration detention centres, Bakersfield, Calexico, McFarland, and San Diego, KTLA reports. Currently, ICE is holding about 24,000 in custody.

When he was in the state Assembly Bonta wrote the law. By the decision it is still reviewing the decision but is “deeply disappointed”, his office said. To protect the health and welfare of Californians the law “was enacted and recognized the federal government’s own documented concerns with for-profit, private prisons and detention facilities,” his office said in a statement.

With Nguyen, two of the eight judges agreed on only part of the majority’s ruling.

“because it neither directly regulates nor discriminates against the federal government”, Mary Murguia, With Chief Judge, holding that the law is valid, and three of the panel’s 11 members dissented from the majority ruling. 

Both she and Nguyen are appointees of President Barack Obama.

For the lawsuit “another grim marker of the administration’s descent into Trumpian immigration policy” the Dignity not Detention Coalition in a statement called the Biden administration’s support, which sought the California law. To not only end the contracts but to entirely end funding for immigration detention it urged the administration and Congress.

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