Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
The United States sued the City of Los Angeles — along with Mayor Karen Bass, the Los Angeles City Council, and Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson — over the City’s 2024 ordinance, the “Prohibition of the Use of City Resources for Federal Immigration Enforcement” (L.A. Admin. Code §§ 19.190–19.192). The ordinance bars the City from using its own personnel, property, and resources to assist federal immigration enforcement, and from collecting or sharing immigration-status information unless required by federal or state law.
The government contended the ordinance is unconstitutional under the intergovernmental-immunity doctrine and is preempted by federal law, principally 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373 and 1357(g)(10). The City moved to dismiss, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) filed an amicus brief.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Olguin granted the motion to dismiss and dismissed the complaint with leave to amend. On preemption, the court held that 8 U.S.C. § 1357(g)(10) “does not set forth any requirements,” and that § 1373 is narrow — reaching only immigration-status information (what a person’s status is), not data such as release dates or addresses — citing City & County of San Francisco v. Garland, United States v. California, and City & County of San Francisco v. Barr. The court found that § 19.191(a) merely restricts City employees from inquiring into or collecting status information and says nothing about maintaining or sharing it, and that § 19.192 contains a savings clause expressly requiring compliance with § 1373 — so the government had not plausibly alleged a conflict.
On intergovernmental immunity, the court held the ordinance does not directly regulate the federal government but instead “controls the actions of [the City’s] own agents and agencies,” and that the government had not plausibly alleged the ordinance discriminates against it. The court separately dismissed the individual and legislative defendants (Mayor Bass, the City Council, and the Council President) with prejudice as redundant of the City — a point the government did not oppose — leaving the City as the sole defendant.
Key Takeaways
- The challenge to Los Angeles’s immigration-resources ordinance was dismissed at the pleading stage, but with leave to amend: the government may file a First Amended Complaint, or a notice of intent to stand on its original complaint, by July 3, 2026.
- The court applied existing Ninth Circuit authority (California, Garland, Barr) reading 8 U.S.C. § 1373 narrowly and giving effect to the ordinance’s savings clause.
- The individual and legislative defendants were dismissed with prejudice as redundant of the City.
- The order addresses only the sufficiency of the pleadings; it is not a final merits judgment, and the government may attempt to cure the identified deficiencies.
Why It Matters
The order is a district-court application of the Ninth Circuit’s sanctuary-jurisdiction framework to a municipal ordinance limiting local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. By dismissing with leave to amend rather than with prejudice, the court left the dispute open for further pleading, while indicating that the government’s preemption and intergovernmental-immunity theories, as pleaded, did not state a claim under current circuit precedent.