Judge Tosses Trump's Lawsuit Against New York City's Sanctuary Laws
A federal judge ruled the Justice Department lacked standing and that its claims fail, a fresh setback for the administration's sanctuary-city litigation.
Not every border and immigration story is a win, and we report the losses too.
According to Fox News, U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr., a Biden appointee, dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit against New York City's sanctuary policies on Thursday. The Justice Department had sued in July 2025, alleging the city's laws unlawfully hinder federal immigration enforcement by restricting local cooperation. Reyes ruled that the government lacked standing to challenge the city's restrictions on honoring ICE detainers, and rejected its argument that federal law overrides the city's policies. He called the department's arguments a "backdoor around the Tenth Amendment."
The standing finding rested on a narrow point: striking down the city's rules would not remedy the alleged harm because separate state laws restricting cooperation would stay in place. On preemption, Reyes wrote that the claims "fail because the relevant federal statutes do not regulate private actors." He also found that federal information-sharing protections apply to a person's citizenship or immigration status, not to broader details like a release date or whereabouts. "If states cannot remain free to control their agencies and employees to resist federal immigration enforcement... the Tenth Amendment anticommandeering doctrine means nothing," he wrote.
A legal critic on the other side was quoted by Fox. Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor now at Holtzman Vogel, argued that the judge misread the line between forcing local governments to help ICE and preventing them from obstructing it. "You can't force states to go from doing nothing to affirmatively assisting," he said. "What these statutes are doing is basically preventing states from actively obstructing federal immigration enforcement."
Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated on X: "The federal government tried to turn our public servants into deportation agents and force New York City to carry out ICE's cruel agenda. Today, a federal court rejected that effort and upheld our laws."
Fox reports this is one of more than two dozen suits the administration has filed against state and local jurisdictions over sanctuary policies. It follows dismissals of similar cases involving Boston, Los Angeles and Minnesota.
Expect an appeal. The question of where cooperation ends and obstruction begins is not going away.