California’s bid to force ICE agents into visible IDs or face state charges collapsed in the Ninth Circuit, a win for constitutional supremacy over Newsom’s immigration pushback.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit on October 14 enjoined California’s “No Vigilantes Act,” the state law that tried to make non-uniformed federal officers display identification while doing their jobs or risk criminal prosecution by Sacramento.
In U.S. v. California, the court held that the measure directly regulates the federal government and cannot stand under the Supremacy Clause. The ruling lands as Governor Gavin Newsom and state officials have publicly attacked federal immigration agents and worked to restrict how those agents operate inside California.
The law required any non-uniformed “federal law enforcement officer” working in the state to “visibly display identification” while carrying out federal duties. Fail that rule, and California could bring criminal charges. The panel rejected the state’s claim that the statute did not “substantially burden” federal enforcement. Direct regulation of U.S. conduct is void, the court said, no matter how light the interference looks on paper.
The panel, Judges Bennett, Nguyen, and Collins, found Section 10 of the No Vigilantes Act unconstitutional as applied to federal officers. Breitbart reported the court concluded the federal government is certain to prevail and imposed a preliminary injunction.
Judge Mark Bennett put the principle in plain terms.
"The measure attempts to directly regulate the federal government as it performs its own functions, something a state cannot do without authorization from Congress."
A related California statute, the “No Secret Police Act,” already drew a lower-court injunction. That law made it a crime for federal agents to wear “a facial covering that conceals or obscures their facial identity.” Same constitutional problem. Same result.
The Justice Department sued to block both the ID rule and the mask ban. The appellate court has now fully nixed the identification scheme. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli called the outcome what it is.
"Huge win for the Supremacy Clause. California continues to violate the U.S. Constitution, and we will continue to hold them accountable."
The New York Post noted the decision may undercut other California efforts to hem in federal immigration enforcement. Bennett’s opinion left little room for salvage.
"As before, we conclude... the No Vigilantes Act attempts to directly regulate the United States in its performance of governmental functions. No set of circumstances exist under which the Act would be valid."
Senior legal fellow Hans von Spakovsky, writing at Fox News, framed the ruling as a straightforward application of constitutional text and long-settled case law. Article VI makes the Constitution and federal laws “the Supreme Law of the Land.” States may not directly regulate the federal government’s operations or property.
The Supreme Court said as much in McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819. The opinion still reads like a warning label for statehouses that want to slow-walk federal power.
"It is the very essence of Supremacy to remove all obstacles to its action within its own sphere, and so to modify every power vested in subordinate governments, as to exempt its own operations from their own influence."
And again:
"States have no power... to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into execution the powers vested in the General Government."
The Ninth Circuit has applied the same rule in modern cases, including Blackburn v. U.S. in 1996. Any state law that tries to regulate “the conduct of the United States” is void. It does not matter whether the regulated activity is “essential” to federal functions. It does not matter how much or how little the state law interferes. Direct regulation fails.
The Supreme Court’s 1890 decision in In re Neagle should have been enough of a roadmap. U.S. Marshal David Neagle was bodyguarding Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field at a railway station in the San Joaquin Valley when he shot and killed David Terry, a former California chief justice with a violent temper and a grudge tied to a prior divorce case. California tried to prosecute Neagle for murder. The high court blocked it.
The justices held that even the “most unquestionable and most universally applicable of state laws, such as those concerning murder, will not be allowed to control the conduct [of] a marshal of the United States acting under and in pursuance of the laws of the United States.”
That principle travels. California cannot now criminally prosecute federal agents who are “acting under and in pursuance of the [immigration] laws of the United States.” The U.S. Marshals Service still protects justices. ICE still enforces federal immigration statutes. State prosecutors do not get a veto.
Newsom has painted himself as a “disrupter” in a Vanity Fair piece while speculation swirls around 2028. He has also likened federal agents to the “secret police” of an “authoritarian” state, rhetoric that tracks the branding of the “No Secret Police Act” and the “No Vigilantes Act.”
The statutes were not neutral transparency rules. They were tools to expose, identify, and threaten federal officers carrying out immigration enforcement that California’s leadership opposes. The Ninth Circuit refused to treat political disagreement as a license to revise the chain of command between Washington and Sacramento.
California argued the ID mandate was mild. The panel answered that mildness is irrelevant when the state is regulating the federal government itself. Intergovernmental immunity does not run a balancing test for states that dislike federal priorities. Congress can authorize state involvement. California did not have that authorization.
Taxpayers and lawful residents live with the results of open-border chaos and selective enforcement. Frontline agents get the hostile rhetoric and the legal tripwires. Courts keep having to restate basics that should not be controversial in a constitutional republic: federal law is supreme in its proper field, and states do not get to criminalize the people who carry it out.
Sacramento can pass all the branding bills it wants. It still does not outrank the Constitution.
