On Friday, Attorney General Brenna Bird dropped her lawsuit over a February Facebook post by Winneshiek County Sheriff Dan Marx. Bird had been seeking to strip Winneshiek County of all state funds, unless Marx publicly disowned his Facebook post and declared his support for ICE enforcement actions, using language provided by the AG’s office.
Bird filed the lawsuit against Winneshiek County after Gov. Kim Reynolds filed a complaint about Marx’s Feb. 4 post, in which the sheriff told county residents he shared their concerns about “three letter agencies including ICE,” and said he and his deputies would not assist ICE if they were asked to do something Marx considered unconstitutional. In her complaint, Reynolds said Marx had violated Iowa Code section 27A, which requires every “local entity” to cooperate with ICE, keep anyone for whom the agency issues a detainer order and “not adopt or enforce a policy or take any other action under which the local entity prohibits or discourages the enforcement of immigration laws.” (A “local entity” is defined as “the governing body of a city or county… [including] an officer or employee of a local entity or a division, department, or other body.”)
That section of Iowa Code was created when Reynolds signed SF 481 into law in 2018. According to the governor and the Republicans in the Iowa Legislature who passed the bill, it was needed to address the problem of “sanctuary cities” in Iowa, even though there were no sanctuary cities in Iowa. Of course, 2018 was an election year, and Reynolds and other Republicans running for office that year appealed to fears about immigrants as part of their campaigns…