A federal court on Thursday dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit against New York City’s sanctuary laws, with the city’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani announcing the loss, saying he would not allow the government “to use fear to divide our city.”
The ruling marks the latest defeat for the federal government, which is suing cities and states over legal protections for immigrants. Federal courts in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minnesota have dismissed similar lawsuits over the past two years.
U.S. District Judge Ramón E Reyes Jr. affirmed in his Thursday ruling that “there is nothing in federal law that requires states to participate in federal immigration enforcement or that requires states to comply with them.” He argued that city agencies could not be forced to use their resources to enforce civil immigration laws, and rejected the Trump administration’s argument that local officials were illegally obstructing its immigration agenda.
Sanctuary laws limit cooperation between local authorities and the federal government in controlling civil immigration. In New York, there are limits on the police department’s ability to detain immigrants for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through detention requests, as well as on sharing general information between agencies.
Mamdani celebrated the decision. “The federal government has come to court to force New York City to turn its public officials into deportation agents and divert our resources to implementing ICE’s cruel program,” he said in a statement. “The court made clear that the federal government does not have standing to bring this case and cannot commandeer our city employees to do whatever they want. Our city belongs to all of us, and we will not abandon our neighbors to satisfy an inhumane and xenophobic agenda.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in its initial complaint that New York’s sanctuary policy had led to the release into the city of criminals who should have been detained for deportation.
New York City has recently faced increased scrutiny of its sanctuary laws. Earlier this month, an ICE agent fatally shot Oscar Belgal, 28, while he had his child in the backseat of his car, before the agency arrested him.
The NYPD eventually arrived on the scene and was criticized for its heavy-handed response to the protests, which notably included the shoving of Darializa Avila Chevalier. The Democratic congressional candidate said police conduct violated “the spirit, if not the letter” of the city’s sanctuary laws.
Jessica Tisch, New York City Police Commissioner, said at a news conference Thursday that the New York Police Department was not involved in the federal immigration operation before the shooting. Tisch said officers arrived in an effort to preserve evidence.
Although the federal government lost its case in New York City, it managed to significantly expand a program that formalized the relationship between federal immigration agencies and local police departments. These 287(g) contracts, as they are called, task local agents with enforcing federal immigration law. New York City does not have such a contract, but the ACLU has tracked the program’s rapid expansion across the country during the second Trump administration.
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Still, local immigration advocates are relieved that the federal court stepped in to protect the city’s protective laws. They had explained in an amicus brief in that case that the city’s sanctuary laws served a “key trust-building function” and encouraged immigrants to apply for public benefits, go to hospitals and seek police help without fear of arrest.
They wrote: “The city’s decision not to participate in federal efforts to control civil immigration has particular gravity under this administration, which has pursued immigration control on a large scale, in ways that are often illegal, violent and gratuitously cruel. »
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