Judges Reject Washington State’s Effort To Shut down Federal Deportation Flights

A federal appeals court has denied pleas by a Washington state county government that claims it has the right to block ICE deportations of illegal migrants to satisfy its liberal “sanctuary” policies.

On Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled against the “sanctuary” jurisdiction of King County, in Washington state, where county officials tried to prevent U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using a local airport to facilitate deportations.

King County officials insisted that since they were a so-called “sanctuary” county, they could legally stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using King County International Airport as a base to ship illegals out of the country.

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In the decision, the judges ruled that the federal government had Article III standing to sue King County and “had two related concrete and individualized injuries.” One of those injuries is “the inability to conduct the charter flights – which has increased ICE’s operational costs – constituted a de facto injury that affected the United States in a particularized, individual way.”

The court added that the second injury was that it was obvious that if there was no county order, ICE would continue using the airport and that the injury it sustains by the county’s ban of airport use is “likely, as opposed to merely speculative.”

The county’s order violated the intergovernmental immunity doctrine because it “improperly regulated the way in which the federal government transported noncitizen detainees by preventing ICE from using private FBO contractors at Boeing Field, and on its face discriminated against the United States by singling out the federal government and its contractors for unfavorable treatment.”

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