CofC Professor Examines the Fight Over New Immigration Laws

Claire Wofford, associate professor of political science at the College of Charleston, has published an article for The Conversation concerning how the United States will handle immigration.

Wofford says the Trump administration is reshaping the federal government’s approach toward migrants. She says they are ordering state and local officials to comply with all federal immigration laws and warned that if those officials refuse, the government may criminally prosecute them.

“The specter of a federal prosecutor putting a city’s mayor or a state’s governor in jail will raise what may be the greatest source of conflict in the U.S. Constitution,” says Wofford. “That conflict is how much power the federal government can wield over the states, a long-standing and unresolved dispute that will move again to the front and center of American politics and, in all likelihood, into American courtrooms.”

She says many legal scholars are waiting to see whether the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court will favor state sovereignty in this battle.

Read the complete article on The Conversation.