No. of Recommendations: 3
Says you. One, that ICE operation would be halted for the day. Two, the names of ICE officers involved would be part of the public record. Three, failure to appear could result in the agent’s license being revoked. Four, agents would learn that failure to obey state and local law impedes their ability to meet quotas. Five, state and local law enforcement would do more to improve community relations and standing than decades of efforts have achieved.
Why would any of that happen? Ticketing the vehicle doesn't cause the ICE operation to be halted for the day. It doesn't make the ICE officers part of the public record - they would just ignore the ticket. Failure to appear wouldn't cause the driver's license to be revoked. Etc. Because they're probably allowed to do this!
Here's the key thing about that video. It's something critical that the incensed person in the video didn't raise, and neither did you. Which is this - the obscuring of the license plate in that vehicle is the least significant violation of Illinois' motor vehicle regulations. The far more significant violation? The truck is parked in the middle of the center lane of the street!.
Think about it. That is also a major violation of Illinois law. It's a far more serious one. It's the violation that would get a normal person's car towed, and one that theoretically might even get someone arrested. You can't park your car in the middle of the center lane of traffic.
But the video maker didn't even think to complain about it. Didn't mention it. Why? I think because he knows, implicitly, that state laws can't force a federal agent to drive around the block looking for a parking space in order to go and arrest or detain someone.
Under the Supremacy Clause, state laws generally can't limit federal officials in the way they choose to go about doing their duties. The states simply can't regulate that. I run into that from time to time in my zoning and land use practice when dealing with federal buildings. They're allowed to simply ignore state zoning laws, building codes, fire codes - whatever they want to ignore. If they want to build a post office garage in the middle of a residential neighborhood, they can.
That applies to traffic laws as well. They're allowed to ignore traffic laws in the conduct of their duty. That's why post office vehicles don't have license plates at all. That's why the truck was able to park in the middle of the street without being towed. And it's probably why they're allowed to obscure the license plates. One of the stated reasons why the ICE monitors do what they do is not merely to make ICE accountable, but to try to make performance of their job a little more difficult by giving warnings and alerts in advance of ICE folks getting to an area. That's legal for the protestors to do. But it also provides ICE a pretty unshakeable argument that measures that they take to make their agents harder to identify and track will help them perform their jobs.
So, no. There's no conceivable scenario in which placing a traffic ticket on that vehicle for having obscured plates will have any impact on ICE, any more than if they put a ticket on it for illegally parking in the middle of the street. ICE would just ignore it. If the country tried to enforce it, ICE would continue to ignore it. If the county escalated it to any point beyond traffic court, ICE would go to federal court and the court would tell the county to knock it off, because under the Supremacy Clause ICE doesn't have to follow routine traffic rules in conducting it's operations.
