In Dissolving Cities, Professor Michelle Wilde Anderson suggests that municipal dissolution could enable counties to serve regionalist goals. This Essay argues that, on balance, municipal dissolution will not trigger the emergence of counties as agents of regional reform. Modern metropolitan regions span city, county, and state borders. As the scale of the region expands, state and local governments, including counties, will increasingly lack the territorial jurisdiction and regulatory capacity to respond to complex metropolitan problems. The Essay concludes by considering the role that the federal government can play, and has historically played, in facilitating regional collaboration at the appropriate scale.

This Essay disputes the legal claims set forth in a recent lawsuit that seeks to invalidate a policy of the Department of Homeland Security. The policy gives protection against deportation to unauthorized immigrants who came to the country as children, and the Department defends it as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. The plaintiffs claim that no such discretion exists, because the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended in 1996, requires that virtually all aliens who entered without inspection be detained and placed in removal proceedings whenever encountered by immigration agents. Closely examining the statutory language and drawing on the author’s own extensive involvement as General Counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in the 1996 consideration of legislative amendments and administrative implementation, this Essay makes the case that the plaintiffs’ argument misunderstands both Congress’s intent and consistent agency practice before and after those amendments.