California’s leaders have treated federal immigration agents like public enemies since ICE surged into Los Angeles in 2025.
Sacramento passed laws to unmask them, tag them, and threaten them with jail. Gavin Newsom signed them.
But three federal judges reached back two centuries for an answer Newsom never saw coming.
Three Federal Judges Gut Sacramento’s Badge Law
On October 14, 2026, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ordered a lower court to block California’s so-called “No Vigilantes Act.” The vote ran 3-0.
The law demanded that any federal officer working out of uniform in California visibly display identification on the job. Agents who refused faced possible criminal prosecution by the state.
Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, wrote the opinion. Judge Daniel Collins, another Trump pick, signed on. And so did Judge Jacqueline Nguyen, whom Barack Obama put on the bench.
That last name matters. California can’t wave this one away as a MAGA court doing MAGA things.
Governor Newsom signed the No Vigilantes Act in September 2025, alongside a companion bill called the “No Secret Police Act” that tried to bar federal agents from covering their faces. The Justice Department sued the state, the Governor, and Attorney General Rob Bonta that November.
A federal district judge froze the mask ban in February 2026, because the law went after federal officers while letting some state officers off the hook. That same judge let the badge requirement stand. The Ninth Circuit hit the brakes on that piece in April 2026, and the October ruling finished the job.
Bonta’s office didn’t go quietly. It fired back that “Transparency and accountability are the foundation of good law enforcement.”
Nice slogan. It still doesn’t outrank Article VI of the Constitution.
A Dead Man on a Railway Platform and a Lesson California Forgot
The Supremacy Clause makes the Constitution and federal law the supreme law of the land. States don’t get a veto over it, no matter how loudly Sacramento complains.
Courts have a name for the part of that clause California tripped over. They call it intergovernmental immunity. In plain English, a state can’t reach in and directly regulate how Washington, DC runs its own operations.
The Supreme Court laid this out way back in 1819 in McCulloch v Maryland. States, the Court held, have no power to “retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress.”
California’s lawyers argued the badge rule didn’t “substantially burden” federal agents. But the panel shot that down in a hurry. Any state law that directly regulates federal conduct falls, the judges held, regardless of how much or how little it actually gets in the way.
But the real gut punch came out of 1890.
In In re Neagle, a US Marshal named David Neagle worked as a bodyguard for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field. At a railway station in the San Joaquin Valley, David Terry, a former chief justice of California’s own supreme court, attacked Field over a grudge tied to an old court ruling in his wife’s earlier divorce. Neagle shot and killed Terry.
And California charged the marshal with murder.
It sounds like the plot of a Saturday afternoon Western. It happened. The Supreme Court threw out the case, ruling that not even a state murder statute could control “the conduct a marshal of the United States acting under and in pursuance of the laws of the United States.”
The Ninth Circuit leaned on that very case. More than 130 years later, Sacramento tried the same stunt on ICE.
Newsom’s “Secret Police” Talk Runs Into a Constitutional Wall
None of this came out of nowhere. Newsom and his allies spent months painting federal immigration officers as the “secret police” of an “authoritarian” government. The badge law and the mask ban simply wrote that rhetoric into the state code.
And the agents on the receiving end live in a very different world. According to Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department lawyer, agents have endured doxxing and harassment, thugs have followed them home, drivers have run them down, and people posing as protesters have shot at them. A face covering looks a lot less sinister when somebody is trying to post your home address online.
Then there’s the bigger picture. California has spent years as the flagship of the sanctuary movement, shielding illegal aliens from federal enforcement even after voters handed President Trump a mandate in 2024 to remove them.
The Justice Department’s attorney told the panel at oral argument that three other federal courts had already lined up behind the Ninth Circuit’s April order. California keeps losing because the Constitution keeps saying the same thing.
New York tried its own version, a ban on ICE agents wearing masks. A federal judge blocked that one too.
Sacramento isn’t finished, though. Scott Wiener, the San Francisco Democrat who wrote both California laws, pushed a follow-up bill, SB 1004, through the Legislature in August 2026. It stretches the mask ban to state police as well, aimed squarely at the “discrimination” flaw that sank the first version.
On paper, that looks like a clever patch. But read the Ninth Circuit’s logic closely. The judges said a state law that directly regulates federal agents dies no matter how lightly it touches them, so dragging state cops into the mask ban might not save it at all. Then again, the mask fight runs on its own legal track, and the courts will sort that out on their own schedule. Nobody should pop the champagne before that ruling lands.
What comes next isn’t hard to guess. California could ask the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case or take its chances at the Supreme Court. And with Newsom’s 2028 ambitions an open secret, a courtroom brawl with ICE likely plays better with Democrat primary voters than a quiet retreat ever would.
But the law is the law. A state can pass every bill it wants. It can’t put federal officers on a leash.
The Supreme Court said so in 1819. It said so again in 1890 over a dead man on a railway platform. And three judges said it one more time in October 2026.
Sources:
Fox News, “Gavin Newsom’s legislative minions just got a lesson in constitutional supremacy,” Hans A von Spakovsky
Bloomberg Law, “California’s Federal Agent ID Law Halted by Ninth Circuit”
Courthouse News Service, “Ninth Circuit strikes down California No Vigilantes Act as unconstitutional”
Courthouse News Service, “California faces uphill battle to keep No Vigilantes Act intact”
NBC Los Angeles, “California mask ban appeals court”
Liebert Cassidy Whitmore, “Special Bulletin Re: United States of America v State of California et al”
UnoTV, “California pierde en corte: agentes de ICE podran seguir operando sin identificarse ni mostrar la cara”
