This article was first published in the May 1, 2025 Complete Colorado.

You have to wonder about a large portion of the Colorado legislature. I’ve already written about their bills to squelch freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the right to keep and bear arms, and the constitutional right of parents to raise their own children. Not to mention the loony idea of wasting taxpayer money on a frivolous lawsuit to take away our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights refunds.

But now comes Senate Bill 276, or as I like to call it the “Venezuelan Gang Protection Act.”

If you want gangs of illegal immigrants terrorizing your neighborhood, you’ll love SB 276.  You’ll also love it if you want less-violent illegals taking away American jobs or being subsidized at your expense.

And if you are a legal immigrant—someone who plays by the rules and is committed to America—then you’ll love it only if you want others cutting ahead in line and looting the public treasury.

On the other hand, if you have a normal level of sanity, you won’t like SB 276 at all.

In any legislature, you usually can find one or two lawmakers demented enough to introduce a nutty bill. But this one has 46 sponsors—quite a comment on the current General Assembly. You can find the bill and the sponsors at this link.

What SB 276 does

Due to previous leftist legislation, Colorado state government already obstructs immigration enforcement and subsidizes illegal immigration. But SB 276 would go further:

*          It imposes stiff fines on public employees who fulfill their civic duty by cooperating with immigration officials.

*          It purports to deny federal officers access to state and local facilities unless they have a warrant—even in circumstances (such as hot pursuit) where a warrant is unnecessary.

*          And while Colorado now subsidizes tuition for illegals who say they will or have applied for legal status, SB 276 would extend that to people who admittedly have no commitment to this country. A person can sneak across the border, cash in, and then go back—richer at the expense of Colorado taxpayers.

Disregard for democracy

Progressives talk interminably about their commitment to “democracy.” I’ve fully documented why that talk is a crock. But just in case you have any lingering doubts, take a look at SB 276. First, it attempts to sabotage laws adopted by a majority vote of a democratically-elected Congress. Second, Section 6(2) of the bill features a legal dodge that prevents Coloradans from reviewing SB 276 in a referendum—even if they meet all legal requirements.

So much for “democracy.”

Constitutional absurdities

In SB 276, the sponsors go out of their way to recite several parts of the U.S. Constitution that have little relevance to the bill’s obstructionist purpose. What particularly caught my eye is the recital on the Tenth Amendment. The first part of the recital says:

“The tenth amendment of the United States constitution affirms the principle of federalism, which reserves for the states or the people the powers that are not delegated to the federal government by the United  States constitution. The tenth amendment of the United States constitution divides power between the federal government and the states.”

Actually, the Tenth Amendment divides nothing. As the Supreme Court has made clear, it is a re-statement of what the Constitution does elsewhere.

But a bigger issue is this: Where the heck were all these dedicated state’s rights devotees in previous years?

Here’s an example of what I mean: The Constitution clearly reserves health care issues to the states. (No less an authority than Chief Justice John Marshall said so.) Where were the sponsors when the Independence Institute was promoting Amendment 63 to protect Coloradans’ health care rights from federal intrusion?

Answer: Some of them were AWOL. The rest were cheering for the feds.

Okay, so maybe they are recent converts. The recital in SB 276 continues:

“The United States constitution reserves to the states or the people the powers that are not delegated to the federal government and are not forbidden to the states.”

Well, yes. But the power over immigration is NOT one of those wholly “reserved to the states.” The Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 10) specifically delegates to Congress authority to “define and punish Offenses against the Law of Nations”—a category that includes immigration law. Article I, Section 9, Clause 1 also acknowledges congressional power over immigration.

According to the Constitution, federal immigration statutes are the “supreme Law of the Land . . . any Thing in the . . . Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding” (Article VI).

Apparently the constitutional wizards sponsoring SB 276 haven’t gotten that message yet.

Now let’s proceed to the last part of SB 276’s Tenth Amendment language:

“The federal government cannot command the states to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”

The sponsors apparently are referring to a line of Supreme Court decisions called the “non-commandeering” cases. Those decisions recognize the states’ prerogative, in some situations, not to comply with direct federal mandates.

But there are two details the sponsors seem to have missed. One is that SB 276 goes way beyond non-compliance. It affirmatively subsidizes illegals and mandates criminal obstruction of justice.

The second problem is that the sponsors don’t understand the Supreme Court’s non-commandeering rule. So far, the court has applied the rule to congressional laws adopted under the Constitution’s Necessary and Proper Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 18)—in other words, in areas outside Congress’s core enumerated powers.

But immigration laws are within the Constitution’s core enumerated powers.

It’s also a good bet that the solons who cooked up this bill never read the Supreme Court’s 2006 opinion in Rumfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights. That case is directly relevant to SB 276’s effort to deny federal law enforcement access to state facilities. Here’s what happened:

Congress had passed a statute requiring universities—including state universities—to open their campuses to military recruiters. Congress acted under its core constitutional powers to declare war and raise military forces. The statute provided that any university out of compliance would lose federal aid.

The universities—again, including state universities—objected to conditioning federal aid on federal access to campus. But in Rumsfeld, the court upheld the statute. In fact, it said that Congress could have mandated open access directly, not merely as a condition for federal aid.

Not a word about the “commandeering” doctrine.

And the decision was unanimous.

Hypocrisy on display

SB 276 reeks of the Left’s congenital hypocrisy. When some conservatives argued that the states should fulfill their duty to push back against federal laws of dubious constitutionality, leftists smeared them as “nullifiers”—a clear effort to tar them with the actions of 19th century Southern slaveholders. Some even smeared as “nullifiers” those officials in border states who wanted to enforce federal immigration statutes.

But now they want to disregard a perfectly constitutional federal law.

In this way, as in others, it is the so-called “progressives” who are the true heirs of the Southern slaveholders.