As the Trump administration continues to challenge New York’s laws that protect immigrants in court, the Legal Aid Society is helping the state push back — filing papers Wednesday it hopes will help judges see the importance of upholding legislation that prohibits civil arrests in state courthouses.
The advocacy organization filed an amicus brief to advance the state’s arguments, asking an appellate court to side with New York over the federal government in Trump’s 2025 suit attempting to strike down the state’s Protect Our Courts Act, which prohibits ICE from arresting people in state courthouses.
“The entire purpose of the Trump administration’s lawsuit is to commandeer New York’s state courts in the service of the federal government’s deportation agenda,” said Legal Aid attorney Evan Henley. “The federal government wants to use the state courts as a place where they can easily arrest people and then deport them.”
That’s bad, Henley said, because it creates a culture of fear around going to court and results in people avoiding both their own scheduled immigration hearings and law enforcement entirely, which can hurt not only their cases, but public safety at large: If people aren’t willing to report crimes, sue a landlord taking advantage of them or serve as a witness in someone else’s criminal trial because they’re scared they’ll get arrested by a federal agent, the police and courts system doesn’t work at large.
“Officers from ICE were really disrupting court activity,” Henley said. “Immigrants, whether they were undocumented or not, were terrified of coming to court, whether they were defendants, whether they were witnesses, or whether they were complainants. People were not willing to come to court to participate in the state’s justice system. That has negative impacts for everyone.”
The amicus brief, which acts as a channel for groups that aren’t directly involved in a suit but are affected by it, includes testimony from immigrants impacted by the law to help the court understand the importance of upholding them.
Trump immigration crackdown scares away clients, Legal Aid says
A man is detained by ICE inside 26 Federal Plaza.Photo by Dean Moses
One non-citizen Legal Aid client, a domestic violence survivor, says she is too scared to go to family court to get an order of protection against her abuser, because she feels like ICE will arrest her if she appears in court. Another chose to settle an eviction case they likely could have won because they were nervous that appearing in court would result in their arrest, and a group of non-citizen tenants say they’re too scared to report their landlord for serious housing code violations because he’s threatened to “call ICE” on them and fear that, if they appear in housing court to litigate their case, they’ll be arrested by agents.
The brief also urges the court to uphold two statewide executive orders that the Trump administration’s suit also challenges. One prohibits state employees from sharing a person’s immigration information with federal immigration authorities and from inquiring about an individual’s immigration status. The other requires judicial warrants for civil immigration arrests in all state facilities.
Essentially, these orders prevent things like a state prison handing someone who’s been arrested or detained directly over to ICE, or a state agency sharing people’s immigration status with the federal government, which could effectively give the Trump administration a list of people to target.
The Trump administration has argued that the law and executive orders should be struck down because they unjustly regulate federal action and discriminate against federal officials, violating the Constitution by obstructing the execution of federal immigration law.
“The [laws] impede federal immigration enforcement in New York because their combined effect is to dictate where federal immigration officers can enforce civil immigration laws and prevent even the most basic coordination and information-sharing between New York law enforcement agencies and federal immigration officers,” the federal government’s suit reads.
So far, courts have disagreed with those arguments and sided with New York in the case: U.S. District Judge Mae D’Agostino dismissed the case when it came before him in the Northern District of New York last fall, ruling that the state had the right to safeguard access to its courts.
However, the Trump administration has appealed the case up to the Appellate Division, Second Department, where a panel of judges will give the arguments from both sides another look and issue its own ruling.
Legal Aid said it hopes the appellate court will continue to agree that ensuring that people feel safe entering courts is essential for a functioning society and that the law is constitutionally sound.
“The voices of our immigrant clients need to be heard in this conversation too, to illustrate what the real-world impact of the state’s policies is,” Henley said. ”They combat these well-documented chilling effects that were keeping people from going to court to assert their rights.”
There isn’t a date the court is expected to rule by, but it’s likely a decision will come within the next few months.