Promising a lawsuit against New York’s policies on immigrants, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has come up with far less, suing Gov. Hochul, state AG Tish James and state DMV Commissioner Mark Schroeder over the so-called Green Light Law of 2019, which allows undocumented immigrants to receive driver’s licenses and limited data-sharing with federal immigration authorities. It’s a bait and switch over a narrow issue and we hope the courts tell Bondi to get lost.
The relevant law here isn’t even particularly complex. Versions of the anti-commandeering doctrine, which says among other things that the federal government cannot compel the states to carry out federal regulatory functions or commandeer state agencies for their purposes, have existed since the genesis of the country. Bondi’s lawsuit should be tossed.
All this gets caught up in relatively broad and esoteric debates about immigration as a virtue and levels of enforcement, but at brass tacks, this is a practical issue. There are hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants in this state. These people are here and they are driving. So should they only drive having passed the road test and meeting insurance requirements and vehicle inspection standards, making for safer roads for everyone. Or should they drive off the books, not knowing the rules of the road, not having insurance, not having properly working vehicles?
The answer is obvious, or it should be: It is far better to have every driver in the system.
To hear Bondi describe it, the state’s DMV data is completely off-limits to the federal government, but that’s just not true. As with so much of the administration’s immigration griping, this comes down to them not wanting to or not being able to get judicial warrants for enforcement. If they want the data, or they want entry to specific municipal sites, private homes or businesses, all the enforcement agents have to do is go to a judge and prove that the request serves the public interest. All the bellyaching and spurious litigation is about the fact that they so often cannot.
We’ll repeat once more that this type of federalism is something that self-described conservatives have long professed to want. If you were to have asked then-Florida Attorney General Bondi plainly whether she would agree that a state should have to side against its own constituents with a federal police force to carry out civil — not even criminal — enforcement priorities, she would have balked at the idea. But because we’re talking about immigration, the federal police force is ICE and Bondi is now part of President Trump’s administration, she is gung-ho for crushing states’ self-determination and imposing a federal police mandate.
We suspect Bondi may come to realize she’s overplayed her hand here when the federal judges rule against her and clarify much more explicitly that the federal government is constrained in its ability to try to compel states to participate in its expansive enforcement operations. When the dust settles on all this, she might find that state protections are stronger than they were before. In the meantime, we suggest she turn her focus to some egregious crimes happening closer to home.