Interstate extradition is supposed to be boring. Someone commits a crime for which they are charged in State A; they turn up in State B; the governor of State A requests their arrest and extradition; and the governor of State B signs a piece of paper directing local law enforcement to hand them over. That was rather the point of writing that obligation directly into Article IV of the Constitution; the Framers had watched what happened when the return of accused criminals was left to the discretion of whoever happened to be sitting in the executive mansion next door.
That’s why the lawsuit that was filed by the State of Minnesota in Brownsville, Texas, on Tuesday deserves more attention than it has received. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has sued Governor Greg Abbott to compel him to sign a rendition warrant for Christian Castro, a former ICE agent charged with firing into an occupied home in Minneapolis who is currently in state custody in Texas. Abbott is refusing to sign the extradition warrant, at least until Minnesota “step[s] up and repay[s] the United States of America and Americans for all the fraud that they’ve committed in their state through federal programs.”
That’s just not how any of this works. As I explain in more detail below the fold, Abbott has no legal leg to stand on—and he’s destined to lose Minnesota’s new lawsuit. Federal law provides governors with virtually no leeway to resist valid interstate extradition requests—a point the Supreme Court has reiterated every time the question has come up over the last 40 years. And although some might point to New York’s and California’s refusal to extradite doctors indicted by Louisiana for prescribing abortion-related medication via telemedicine, the constitutionally dispositive distinction is that, unlike Castro and Minnesota, those defendants weren’t in Louisiana at the time of their alleged offenses.
Instead, the messier issue is the timing—the distinct possibility that Abbott, perhaps with some help from the Fifth Circuit (and maybe the Supreme Court, too), is not trying to win, but rather is trying to run out the clock, which may expire as soon as next Wednesday.
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