Judge Throws Out Trump Administration’s Lawsuit Against NYC Sanctuary Laws, Finds Two Federal Immigration Statutes Unconstitutional
A federal judge in Brooklyn on Thursday threw out the Trump administration’s lawsuit against New York City’s sanctuary laws, ruling that the federal government lacked standing to challenge some of the city’s rules and that the rest do not conflict with federal law. In the same ruling, the judge found that two federal statutes requiring cooperation with immigration authorities violate the Tenth Amendment.
U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. of the Eastern District of New York granted the city’s motion to dismiss in United States v. City of New York, No. 25-cv-04084, and directed the clerk to close the case. The Justice Department filed the suit in July 2025. The defendants now include Mayor Zohran Mamdani, City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the NYPD, the Department of Correction and the Department of Probation.
WHAT THE NYC SANCTUARY LAWS DO
The lawsuit targeted four sections of the city’s Administrative Code, 9-131, 9-205, 14-154 and 10-178, plus NYPD Operations Order No. 4. Under those rules, the ruling says, the Department of Correction, the Department of Probation and the NYPD may honor an ICE detainer only if federal authorities provide a judicial warrant and the person has been convicted of a violent or serious crime or is a possible match in the terrorist screening database. Other provisions limit what city workers may share with immigration authorities, such as release dates and court appearance dates, and bar the use of city resources for immigration enforcement.
The government argued that the rules violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. Its complaint said they force immigration officers “to engage in difficult and dangerous efforts to re-arrest aliens who were previously in local custody, endangering immigration officers, the particular alien, and others who may be nearby.”
‘NOT REDRESSABLE’
Reyes found the government lacked standing to challenge the detainer limits. He pointed to a 2018 New York appellate ruling, People ex rel. Wells v. DeMarco, which holds that New York officers are not authorized by state law to make arrests for civil immigration violations. Because state law already bars those holds, he wrote, the government’s claims about detainers “are not redressable by the relief it seeks.” Only state lawmakers or Congress could change that, the ruling notes.
On information sharing, the judge rejected the government’s argument that release dates count as “information regarding the citizenship or immigration status” of a person under federal law, 8 U.S.C. § 1373. He called that reading “contrary to law,” citing other courts that read the phrase to mean “a person’s legal classification under federal law.” He found the city’s rules expressly allow sharing citizenship and immigration status.
A RULING AGAINST TWO FEDERAL STATUTES
The judge went further. He wrote that a 1999 Second Circuit decision upholding those federal information-sharing laws has “questionable viability” after the Supreme Court’s 2018 Murphy decision, and he “respectfully declines to follow” it. He held that 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373(a) and 1644 “violate the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine.”
“If states cannot remain free to control their agencies and employees to resist federal immigration enforcement, which is within states’ constitutional prerogatives, the Tenth Amendment anticommandeering doctrine means nothing,” Reyes wrote.
He also rejected the government’s claim that the city rules unlawfully regulate or discriminate against the federal government.
PART OF A NATIONAL STRING OF LOSSES
The ruling notes that this is “among nearly a dozen recent cases” in which the federal government has challenged state and local sanctuary policies, and that “in all prior cases” those challenges were rejected. It lists rulings in favor of New Jersey, Newark, Rochester, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Boston, Colorado, Illinois, Washtenaw County, Michigan, and New York State.
Mamdani praised the decision. “This is a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE’s deportation agenda,” he said in a statement reported by Gothamist. “The federal government came to court seeking to force New York City to turn its public servants into deportation agents and divert our resources toward carrying out ICE’s cruel agenda. Today, they lost.”
The government can appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The ruling comes the same week the Justice Department filed new suits against St. Paul and Portland over city laws banning masks for federal agents.
Sources: Memorandum & Order, United States v. City of New York, No. 25-cv-04084 (RER) (PK) (E.D.N.Y., Oct. 15, 2026), ECF No. 79, via CourtListener: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.534207/gov.uscourts.nyed.534207.79.0.pdf; docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/70906146/united-states-v-city-of-new-york/; Mayor Mamdani’s statement as reported by Gothamist (Oct. 15, 2026): https://gothamist.com/news/federal-judge-tosses-trump-administration-lawsuit-challenging-nyc-sanctuary-laws. Cover: U.S. Courthouse, Eastern District of New York, photo by Ajay Suresh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. In-post background: New York City Hall, photo by Kidfly182, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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