Supreme Court blocks part of Florida’s immigration law

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday left in place a lower court decision that blocked part of a Florida law making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to cross into the state. The statute imposed various mandatory prison terms for violating the law.

The high court’s action came in a one sentence order, without any elaboration and without any noted dissents.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the state legislation into law in February, and just two months later the law made national headlines when Florida’s Highway Patrol arrested Juan Carlos Lopez-Garcia, an American-born U.S. citizen, for crossing into the state from Georgia. Lopez-Garcia was detained for 24 hours before his release.

Immigrant rights organizations and undocumented immigrants sued, arguing that the new Florida law conflicted with federal immigration law, and under longstanding Supreme Court precedent, states must bow to federal law in the event of such conflicts.

Florida, however, maintained that state legislation is necessary to curb the “evil effects of immigration,” and that state law works in tandem with federal law. Until now, however, the Supreme Court has held that federal law occupies the immigration field if there is a conflict.

Florida is not the first state to pass a law to criminalize illegal immigration, only to be blocked by the federal courts. In recent years, federal judges have blocked similar state efforts in Oklahoma, Iowa, and Idaho—each time deciding that a state law criminalizing illegal immigration would conflict with existing national laws. In 2024, the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Texas’s efforts to enforce a similar law.

While Wednesday’s Supreme Court order blocked parts of the Florida law championed by DeSantis, the immigration issue remains a winning proposition for the governor. In May, he announced that in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Florida led a “first-of-its-kind statewide operation” arresting more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants in less than a week.