No. of Recommendations: 1
The only way to know if a federal agent is executing their duties when killing an unarmed person is to arrest them for the crime and take them to court. You are suggesting that the very questioning of the act as murder or duty is beyond state adjudication as it has ALREADY been adjudicated under the supremacy clause. You have preempted action by declaring state authority to investigate potentially criminal federal behavior as constitutionally prohibited. Only the Feds can decide to investigate crimes committed by federal agents.
As a lawyer who believes in the wheels of justice, why preemptively preclude those wheels from being put in motion?
I'm not. I think you are conflating the killing of Pretti (which absolutely can be subject to state law enforcement) with my discussion of the truck parked in the middle of the street (which absolutely cannot).
So for Pretti's killing, and probably Good's, there is a colorable argument that the agents were outside of what was necessary to perform the objectives of their federal agencies. Immigration enforcement is not in any way impeded - at all - by not having the ability to shoot an unarmed man lying prone on the ground. Contrast that with the requirement that vehicles have to be parked in a proper space and can't be left in the street, which is something that does make it marginally harder for law enforcement to quickly do what they need to do - which is why police and emergency services and other government folks frequently do park in the street rather than trying to find a space.
State law can be used to punish agents who break it to do things wholly irrelevant to performing their official duties. But because it can only be used for punishing unlawful acts wholly irrelevant to performing their official duties, it obviously won't have any impeding effect on the official duties. You can't use it to resist what ICE is doing - only when the agents are stepping outside of what ICE is doing, and effectively doing their own thing.
That's why it's a waste of resources for the state to try to engage in those futile acts, and its unreasonable for people who want pushback against ICE to look to that as a method for doing so. Not only is it a waste of time and political resources, it's actually self-defeating - because you're basically calling for the state to take actions that it knows it's not allowed to take. States aren't allowed to interfere with federal agencies. They know this, the courts know this, and the political folks on both sides know this. It's not helpful to act as if states have this power, because they don't - and pretending that they do is not only a distraction of resources from things that can be done (like arguing in court that ICE is violating the federal requirements that it has to comply with), but it also plays into the very arguments that conservatives have been making that progressives want to see the law broken.
