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The Justice Department is threatening to sue four Democratic-led states for denying undercover license plates to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, opening a new constitutional front in the immigration fight.
At issue is whether the blue states are simply refusing to help ICE carry out civil immigration enforcement, or whether withholding confidential plates interferes with the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law.
Charles “Cully” Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the states are playing a “dangerous game” by refusing to help protect ICE agents, but he also questioned whether DOJ’s Supremacy Clause argument is as straightforward as the department suggests.
“Federal law preempts state law when state law conflicts with a supreme federal law. And when it does, the state law is preempted, meaning that the state law cannot be given legal effect in those instances of conflict,” Stimson told Fox News Digital. “There is no law in my mind that is conflicting with federal law. You simply have state actors refusing to issue these types of license plates.”
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Stimson said DOJ’s challenge is establishing that the states are doing more than just refusing to help ICE. The department would likely need to show that the plate restrictions conflict with a specific federal law.
“So as much as I think that the DOJ is putting forth a plausible argument, I don’t think there’s a lot of ‘there’ there in this argument,” he continued.
DOJ Civil Division Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate warned on May 12 that the governors of Maine, Massachusetts, Washington and Oregon that they were running afoul of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which makes federal law supreme over conflicting state laws, by refusing to provide immigration enforcement officers with license plates that conceal their identities as federal agents.
“By refusing to issue standard and undercover registrations and plates to federal agencies, including federal law enforcement agencies, while continuing to issue them to similarly-situated state and local agencies without restriction, Oregon’s DMV has directly run afoul of the Supremacy Clause by discriminating against the federal government,” Shumate wrote to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek.
He used similar language in his letters to the three other Democratic governors.
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An official in the Massachusetts governor’s office told Fox News Digital that the commonwealth does issue undercover plates to federal agents, but only when they are investigating criminal offenses. Immigration enforcement typically involves civil infractions.
The official added that state and local law enforcement are also barred from receiving undercover plates if they’re investigating civil offenses. They also claimed that fears of “doxing” of ICE officers, which were mentioned by Shumate, are unfounded, as non-confidential plates offered by the state to ICE only disclose that the agency owns the car, not the name of the individual agent.
ICE claimed in January 2026 that agents and their families have experienced an 8,000% increase in death threats.
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“Massachusetts is not going to allow state resources to be used to help ICE operate in secret while they are violating people’s rights and making us all less safe,” a spokesman for the governor’s office told Fox News Digital. “Any federal, state or local agency engaging in legitimate criminal law enforcement work can receive a confidential plate. We all know that’s not what ICE is doing. This is an agency that can’t and won’t even tell us who they are arresting and why. We are not going to enable their tactics.”
Oregon and Maine, however, appear to have issued broader suspensions of the issuance of undercover plates to federal agencies. The governor’s offices of Oregon, Maine and Washington did not respond to requests for comment when reached by Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
Stimson explained that there is an underlying assumption that, by virtue of being in the union and as implied under the Constitution’s separation of powers, states will help the federal government enforce laws.
“Every one of these states is part of the union. It is assumed that when the federal government is enforcing federal law, the states are going to play ball,” Stimson said. “And it’s assumed when the states are enforcing state law, and it bumps up against federal agents, that the feds are going to cooperate with the states.”
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Stimson did also question the motivations of the states in not issuing undercover plates.
“On immigration, because they don’t like Trump and they don’t like ICE, even though apparently they loved ICE in the Obama administration, they are playing this very dangerous game. And it’s despicable, by the way, because it puts lives in danger, not only of the people they’re trying to pick up, but the agents themselves,” he told Fox News Digital.
Tony Pham, former ICE director and current senior fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, believes the DOJ is well within its rights to compel the four states into issuing undercover plates using the Supremacy Clause.
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“The Justice Department’s position is firmly grounded in the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits individual states from discriminating against the federal government or interfering with lawful federal operations,” Pham, who is also a lawyer, told Fox News Digital.
“The State of Washington and Commonwealth of Massachusetts admit to the legitimate safety and operational needs for confidential license plates when issuing them to their respective state and local law enforcement agencies,” Pham continued. “When their policies openly discriminate against the federal government, by denying federal law enforcement agents the same protections, this creates an unequal standard that directly undermines federal officers carrying out congressionally authorized law enforcement duties.”
Shumate made similar arguments in his letters to the governors. When reached for comment on Thursday, the DOJ referred Fox News Digital to the letters posted by the assistant attorney general.
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Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the right-of-center Manhattan Institute who holds a law degree, questioned the distinction between civil and criminal enforcement drawn by the blue states.
“These states can try to draw distinctions between criminal and civil enforcement to obfuscate basic realities; but they know full well that many of the individuals who would be subjected to civil immigration enforcement actions also pose real criminal threats in their communities,” he said. “This reality is illustrated all too often by the stories of sometimes heinous offenses committed by those unlawfully present in the United States. Making it easier to track and identify law enforcement vehicles will expose federal agents on the ground in those jurisdictions to the kind of harassment we saw in jurisdictions like Minneapolis and Chicago, which makes all involved less safe.”
“Federal agencies such as ICE and CBP are enforcing immigration laws that have been on the books for decades and enforced by both Republican and Democratic administrations,” he added.
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Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, was unimpressed with both sides of the debate, remarking it’s not a “slam dunk for one side or the other.”
“I think this is the type of case where you have one side that says we’re obviously right, and the other side that says we’re obviously right, and I think the answer is actually that they’re both wrong,” he told Fox News Digital.
Fox said in cases where “the state’s imposing conditions on how federal law enforcement officers operate,” such as the attempted ban on masked federal agents in California, that “pretty clearly violates the Supremacy Clause.” Congress, he said, could and should mandate that agents identify themselves, but that such a rule-change is out of bounds for state legislatures.
“This, though, is different, and the reason I think this is different is because the state issues license plates, right?” Fox continued. ” It’s not like the state is only issuing license plates to ICE and are withholding them. They issue license plates to you and to me and to everyone else, and it’s also the case that most federal law enforcement, if they’re not operating, you know, undercover, they have U.S. government license plates.”
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“There’s nothing barring ICE from using vehicles with federal license plates,” he added.
