Both the Donald Trump Administration and California’s senior politicians are anxiously awaiting a determination by Federal Judge Christina A. Snyder and Magistrate Judge A. Joel Richlin with regard to the lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice in November which seeks to block the enforcement of two state laws restricting federal agents from hiding their identities during immigration law enforcement operations.
In September, the California legislature passed and Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 627, known as the California No Secret Police Act, and Senate Bill 805, the No Vigilantes Act. Set to take effect January 1, 2026, the No Secret Police Act prohibits law enforcement officers in California, with the exception of the California Highway Patrol/California State Police from wearing masks or facial coverings that hide or obscure their identity while on duty. The act is intended to promote accountability, and grew out of concern over masked federal agents enforcing immigration law. Assembly Bill 627 makes it a crime for most local and federal law enforcement officers to wear concealing masks or facial garb such as ski masks while on duty with exceptions for those engaged in special weapons and tactics [SWAT] operations or undercover work and for medically-related purposes.
Senate Bill 805, the No Vigilantes Act, is set to go into effect on January 1, 2026 as well. It requires law enforcement officers, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Boarder Patrol agents in the state to visibly display clear identification, including their name and badge when not I uniform to prevent impersonation and enhance public trust. It further bans bounty hunters from participating in immigration enforcement operations.
In November, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit against California, Governor Gavin Newsom, and Attorney General Robert Bonta challenging both the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act, saying they constituted unconstitutional attempts to regulate federal law enforcement officers.
“Both laws violate long-settled principles of the Supremacy Clause, under which states have no power to ‘in any manner control[] the operations of’ the federal government,” the lawsuit states, citing the Supreme Court’s 1819 decision in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland as well as the 1943 case of Mayo v. United States as precedent case on the matter.
Asserting the Supreme Court’s landmark language in the McCulloch case that “[T]he activities of the Federal Government are free from regulation by any state,” the lawsuit states, echoing the U.S. Supreme Court plurality opinion expressed in the 1990 North Dakota v. United States case that “The intergovernmental immunity doctrine is an outgrowth of this principle, and a state law violates intergovernmental immunity if it ‘regulates the United States directly or discriminates against the federal government or those with whom it deals.’ The No Secret Police Act and No Vigilantes Act directly regulate the federal government by dictating permissible uniforms for federal agents and forcing federal agencies to adopt specified policies. But the federal government, not California, has authority to control its own agents and activities.”
According to the U.S. Justice Department, “Not only are the laws illegal attempts to discriminate against and regulate the federal government, but, as alleged in the complaint, the laws threaten the safety of federal officers who have faced an unprecedented wave of harassment, doxxing, and even violence. Threatening officers with prosecution for simply protecting their identities and their families also chills the enforcement of federal law and compromises sensitive law enforcement operations. The danger is acute.”
According to Attorney General Pamela Bondi, “Law enforcement officers risk their lives every day to keep Americans safe, and they do not deserve to be doxed or harassed simply for carrying out their duties. California’s anti-law enforcement policies discriminate against the federal government and are designed to create risk for our agents. These laws cannot stand.”
“The Department of Justice will steadfastly protect the privacy and safety of law enforcement from unconstitutional state laws like California’s,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
“Assaults against federal agents have exploded over the last few months, thanks in part to recklessness political rhetoric aiming to delegitimize our brave agents,” said First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli of the Central District of California. “Unconstitutional laws such as this one further endanger our brave men and women protecting our community. Our immigration enforcement will continue unabated and unhindered by unconstitutional state laws enacted by irresponsible politicians.”
On her first day in office following President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Bondi, anticipating resistance from state governments around the country, most notably in California, instructed the Justice Department’s Civil Division to identify state and local laws, policies, and practices that facilitate violations of federal laws or impede lawful federal operations. The lawsuit challenging the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act filed in the Central District of California in November was a manifestation of the effort begun in January at the federal level and the controversy that erupted when in April the federal government initiated operation Alta California, the federal government’s undertaking to make good on President Trump’s commitment and that of his immigration czar, Tom Homan, to identify, find, apprehend and process for deportation the 2.2 million illegal aliens they say were present in the Golden State in January 2025.
The issue of immigration law enforcement has exposed a wide philosophical divide among Americans, with two major camps having formed. One of those is President Trump’s supporters, which included a substantial number of the nation’s Republicans, a significant number of independent voters unaffiliated with any party and a smattering of citizens who identify as Democrats or members of the country’s more obscure political parties. They are generally of the opinion that any foreigners who engage in a violation of the nation’s immigration law is by definition a criminal. Most further presume that a substantial number, perhaps even a majority of the undocumented in the country are making use of social benefits to which they are not entitled, detracting from those available to American citizens. They hold that those disobeying U.S. immigration law are unwelcome in the country and that under the law, they can be and should be deported.
The vast majority of the president’s political opponents, consisting primarily of Democrats and liberal unaligned voters and some members of the country’s more obscure political parties, either do not consider the failure of foreign nationals to register their presence in the United States to be a crime or believe it to be a de minimus offense that does not merit an enforcement effort. They are adamantly opposed to the federal government’s enforcement of immigration law against anyone who does not qualify as a “violent offender.”
Several California’s cities, including its larger ones such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Oakland, and Sacramento have actively resisted the Trump Administration’s immigration policies by filing lawsuits challenging federal action with regard to immigration law enforcement. They have declared themselves “sanctuary jurisdictions,” passed local protective ordinances and organized, allowed and encouraged large-scale protests against immigration raids to take place. In addition, some of the state’s major political leaders, including Governor Gavin Newsom, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have led, inspired or sponsored administrative, legislative and legal efforts to shield residents from aggressive federal enforcement action. The California legislature, during the first Trump Administration, passed Senate Bill ???, the California Values Act, which prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies from assisting federal authorities in enforcing immigration law.
At present in California, all of the constitutional state offices from governor to lieutenant governor to attorney general to secretary of state to superintendent of public instruction to insurance commissioner to state controller in California are occupied by Democrats. In the state’s lower legislative house, the California Assembly, 75 percent of its members – 60 of 80 – are Democrats. In the upper house, the California Senate, likewise 75 percent of its membership – 30 of 40 senators – are Democrats. In California’s Congressional Delegation, both Senators are Democrats and of the state’s 52 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 43 are Democrats and nine are Republicans. In this way, California’s political establishment is solidly at odds with the Republican president and his administration. While during the first Trump Administration there was an unmistakable degree of tension between Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, during the second Trump Administration there is a constant spectacle of federal law being at odds with California law.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta – California’s highest ranking law enforcement official – has repeatedly characterized the action of federal law enforcement officers and immigration officials in their efforts to enforce federal law as crossing the line into illegality and unconstitutionality, threatening in some cases to have some federal agents arrested and prosecuted under state and his prosecutorial authority.
With regard to the need for both the California No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act, “Bonta is on record as having said, “It’s problematic when Californians can’t tell the difference between a law enforcement officer who is charged with protecting them and a criminal who is attempting to cause them harm. The FBI itself has warned that the practice of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents obscuring their identity has led to a rise in copycats committing crimes, threatening public safety and eroding trust in law enforcement.”
Even though Bonta speaks and acts as the face of state law and the People of California while overseeing a staff of 138 lawyers and a full complement of support staff including paralegals, secretaries and investigators, his primary bailiwick is the Superior Court of California. The federal court system is not one he is unfamiliar with or, necessarily, intimidated by either, but the federal court system remains the principal prosecutorial province of the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. For those entities, steeped in functioning within the realm of criminal law and statutes, they are no slouches when it comes to civil law, in particular federal civil procedure.
Those representing the U.S. Justice Department in the lawsuit filed in U.S. Federal Court in Los Angeles challenging the California No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act include Assistant U.S. Attorney General Brett A. Shumate, who oversees the office’s civil division;
Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Yaakov M. Roth, who supervises the civil division; Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton, who is assigned to the Los Angeles office’s civil division; Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Tiberius Davis Sean Skedzielewski; First Assistant U.S. Attorney General for the Central District of California Bilal A. Essayli; Alexander K. Hass, the director of the U.S. Attorney’s Central District of California office; Jacqueline Coleman Snead, the assistant director of the U.S. Attorney’s Central District of California office; and both Elizabeth J. Neylan and Cristen C. Handley, trial attorneys in the civil divisions federal programs branch.
Assigned to make a determination of the issues raised in the lawsuit, including whether the California No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act are indeed, as the federal government maintains unconstitutional and contrary to basic law and federal law are Judge Christina A. Snyder and Magistrate Judge A. Joel Richlin. Since November, they have been fully briefed as to the substance of Senate Bill 627 and Senate Bill 805, and all applicable rulings relating to state laws in conflict with federal law and federal administrative authority throughout American history going back to the late 18th Century, as well as the state and federal standards that attend the operational and security/safety protocols for law enforcement officers.
An early expectation was that a decision would be rendered before January 1, 2026, when the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act were originally due to go into effect. Judge Snyder and Magistrate Judge Richlin are by no means required to meet that deadline, however, and they are at liberty to make as full of an analysis of the circumstance, law and legal precedent as they deem necessary to make a correct and binding determination.
As is commonly the case, while policies and laws are under legal challenge, as in this instance Senate Bill 627 and Senate Bill 805, their implementation is held in abeyance until a legal determination is made. As such, the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act will not be enforced until and unless Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin make their determination that they in fact pass constitutional muster.
It is of some note that both Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin are Democrats. It is equally noteworthy that in an earlier case that came before the Federal Court in California, other judges considered to fall or fall primarily in or within the liberal/progressive/Democratic camp – U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong at the U.S. District Courthouse in Los Angeles and a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit consisting of Justices Marsha S. Berzon, Jennifer Sung and Ronald M. Gould who were tasked with determining whether the tactics used by the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol in carrying out immigration enforcement in California and Southern California in particular were in keeping with the provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
After the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Counsel took up the cause of three immigrants, a single U.S. citizen and a dual U.S./Mexican citizen who had been taken into custody by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this year, Judge Frimpong in July 2025 concluded that “masked” federal agents had erred and violated the constitutional rights of those they had arrested by utilizing their place of work, their presence in a particular place, their ethnicity or race, the type of work they were engaged in and their language or accent as the basis of probable cause to detain, question them and ultimately take them into custody. Judge Frimpong ruled that blanket detentions and/or arrests are illegal and that laws relating to specific crimes, such as violating immigration statutes, cannot be applied broadly but must be applied against each defendant specifically, with a credible recitation of the crimes alleged to have been committed by the arrestee and the grounds for making the stop and the arrest. Judge Frimpong opined that the federal agents were engaging, essentially, in racial profiling by questioning those who were speaking a language other than English, engaging in “roving patrols” in areas where those government agents believed undocumented aliens might be present, patrolling places such as big box hardware store parking lots where day laborers congregated or raiding businesses where in the past undocumented foreigners were known to have been employed. She ordered that the federal officers desist in making the arrests based upon the criteria they were using.
Penultimately, when the Trump Administration appealed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the panel consisting of Justices Berzon, Sung and Gould upheld Judge Frimpong.
Ultimately, however, the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal ruled 6-to-3 rejected that federal officials were engaged in a “racist deportation scheme,” accepting the Trump Administration’s assertion that federal agents working in Southern California, where 71 percent of the illegal immigrants originated in Latin America, were not engaging in discriminatory behavior by considering the use of Spanish to be a criteria distinguishing undocumented aliens from the native population or concentrating their patrols in or around businesses which have a demonstrated prior history of employing or attracting individuals in the country illegally.
With Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson dissenting, the balance of the Supreme Court rejected Judge Frimpong’s conclusion that any consideration of race or ethnicity in the evaluation of what constituted reasonable suspicion with regard to the commission of a crime, in this case a violation of U.S. Immigration Law, was unreasonable and unconstitutional. The Supreme Court majority held that a suspect’s race or ethnicity could be a factor when considering it within the context of other factors.
Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled that roving patrols by the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement are neither a violation of the Constitution nor racist and that they should be allowed to resume.
Given the trend and guidance inherent in the Supreme Court’s September ruling relating to immigration enforcement standards in California, Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin are slightly less likely than Judge Frimpong and Justices Berzon, Sung and Gould to hew to the conclusions favored by the politicians in Sacramento. Whatever determination Judge Snyder and Magistrate Richlin reach, either before, on or after January 1, it is anticipated it will be appealed to 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the U.S. Supreme Court, meaning the No Secret Police Act and the No Vigilantes Act will not be implemented until well into 2026, if at all.