New York City successfully shut down the Trump administration’s lawsuit challenging the city’s decades-old policies that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
A Brooklyn-based federal judge late Thursday dismissed the White House’s case, filed last year, that argued those policies — collectively known as the sanctuary city law — are unconstitutional and make it harder for federal immigration officers to do their jobs. The Justice Department said those statutes are preempted by federal law.
The government’s preemption arguments “amount to nothing more than a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment,” Judge Ramon E. Reyes Jr. of the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York said in his ruling. That amendment’s anticommandeering doctrine, which prevents federal agencies from compelling state action, precludes relief for the US, the judge added.
Ruling in favor of the US government would allow city agencies and individual employees to decide for themselves whether they comply with state and local law as part of their work, making it impossible for the municipality to control those entities, Reyes said.
That kind of system, he continued, would direct “the expenditure of municipal resources and obviously violate federalism, contravene due process, and foreclose efficiencies available through the implementation of uniform processes.”
The decision adds to a string of losses the Trump administration has faced in its effort to take down similar laws in cities across the country and pave the way for the White House to carry out its deportation plans. A federal judge in Rochester, N.Y., dismissed a similar lawsuit against the Western New York municipality in September.
Failing Cases Elsewhere
The law at issue prevents law enforcement from honoring a civil immigration detainer without a judicial warrant. One provision at issue says that no city agency should use its resources or “subject its officers or employees to the direction and supervision of the secretary of homeland security primarily” for immigration enforcement purposes.
The administration’s July 2025 complaint said those laws violate the federal government’s “well-established, preeminent, and preemptive authority to regulate immigration.” The Justice Department argued the laws should be declared invalid for violating the Supremacy Clause.
New York City over the past several months has filed multiple letters with the court pointing to other sanctuary city lawsuits that have been dismissed across the country, including in Rochester, Los Angeles, Boston, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Colorado.
The case is U.S. v. City of New York, E.D.N.Y., No. 1:25-cv-04084, decision 10/15/26.