Sidelining the States

Abstract

This chapter considers how federalism has played an important role in immigration enforcement and challenged presidents of both parties, thus helping to structure national debates over the place of immigrants in American society. The cooperation of state and local officials turns out to be critical to the project of locating and deporting immigration violators. Today, local officials work as formal and informal partners to the federal government, serve as sources of information and bureaucratic expertise, and provide personnel essential to federal enforcement efforts. The integration of federal and state officials into a single immigration enforcement bureaucracy has expanded and complicated the President’s power over immigration law. Particularly when immigration federalism has taken a partisan turn, powerful incentives have arisen for the President to co-opt, crush, or otherwise control local initiatives in order to push immigration policy in the administration’s preferred direction. Both the Obama and Trump eras provide vivid examples of this centralizing tendency. Presidential efforts to consolidate power in these circumstances has never been complete, however. Because the Executive Branch cannot escape its bureaucratic reliance on local institutions, the delegation of meaningful power to nonfederal officials remains part of the system whether presidential administrations like it or not.