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LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said this week that he had no intention of enforcing a new law that bans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from wearing masks in the state.
The law, SB 627, was drafted by Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, who comes up with almost every bad idea in Sacramento. (He’s now running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in Congress.)
Governor Gavin Newsom signed the law last September, though he had to know it was unconstitutional. The Supremacy Clause makes clear that states have no power to regulate federal law enforcement.
Chief McDonnell gave an even better reason for not enforcing it: having one armed police force confront another armed police force was an incredibly stupid idea.
“The reality of one armed agency approaching another armed agency to create conflict over something that would be a misdemeanor at best or an infraction, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not a good public policy decision and it wasn’t well thought out in my opinion,” he said.
Put bluntly: the LAPD isn’t about to start a civil war.
McDonnell made clear that his department does not support ICE operations. But he isn’t interested in a law that would require him to trigger a violent clash with federal officers.
Democrats called SB 627 the “No Secret Police Act.” But there is good reason to protect the identities of ICE agents.
Radical activists have been stalking and targeting ICE agents — and people they wrongly believe to be ICE agents, like the air marshals that a mob trapped in a restaurant in Lynwood this week.
And the bad behavior isn’t confined to the fringes of politics.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner vowed this week to “hunt” ICE agents down, calling them “wannabe Nazis.”
Effectively, he put a target on their backs — and not just for prosecution, but for vigilantism.
Governor Newsom has done the same. He admitted, in a podcast with conservative Ben Shapiro, that it was wrong to call ICE agents “terrorists,” as his own press office had done.
The very next day, he claimed that ICE was “terrorizing our communities.”
Clearly, ICE agents would be in danger if they were forced to reveal their identities.
And local police would be forced to defend them.
Wiener’s legislation was always terrible policy, and put law enforcement officers — local and federal — in danger. It is just the latest example of bad law, passed for symbolic or ideological reasons, or for short-term political expediency.
In 2024, Newsom boasted that he had signed a law banning so-called “deep fake” parodies of politicians on social media.
The following year, a federal judge threw out the law as a violation of the First Amendment.
Newsom must have known that would happen — but he signed the law anyway, because he wanted to be seen defending then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris from mockery by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk.
California has enough real problems for legislators to deal with, rather than passing pointless and even dangerous laws.
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