Biden-appointed judge dismisses Trump DOJ challenge to New York City sanctuary laws

A Biden-appointed federal judge has tossed the Trump Justice Department’s lawsuit against New York City sanctuary laws, handing the administration another setback in its push to restore local cooperation with ICE.

U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. dismissed the suit Thursday after finding the federal government lacked standing and rejecting claims that the city’s policies are preempted by federal immigration law. The ruling leaves New York City’s limits on working with federal immigration officers firmly in place.

Fox News reported that the Justice Department filed the case in July 2025, arguing the sanctuary rules unlawfully hinder immigration enforcement by restricting local cooperation, limiting information sharing, and singling out federal immigration officials. The Trump administration has brought more than two dozen similar suits against state and local jurisdictions over sanctuary and related policies. Prior cases tied to Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota were also dismissed.

For families, taxpayers, and lawful residents who want the laws enforced, the courtroom pattern is plain. City rules that block cooperation stay on the books. Federal efforts to clear them keep running into the same wall.

Standing claim collapses under city and state limits

Reyes ruled the United States lacked standing to challenge New York City’s restrictions on honoring ICE detainers. His core point was practical as much as legal. Even if the city rules fell, separate New York state laws restricting cooperation would remain. Striking the city policies alone, he wrote, would not fix the harm the government described.

The judge also rejected every preemption theory the Justice Department advanced, express, conflict, and field. He held that the federal statutes at issue do not regulate private actors in the way the government claimed, and that the city’s framework could not be wiped out on those grounds.

Reyes framed the dispute through the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine, the constitutional rule that Washington cannot force states and cities to use their own employees and budgets to run federal programs. In his words, the government’s approach looked like an end-run around that limit.

He wrote that the suit amounted to a

"backdoor around the Tenth Amendment."

He went further on the legal bottom line:

Reyes stated,

"Even if the United States has standing, and it does not, its preemption claims fail."

And he added,

"All of the United States’ preemption claims, express, conflict and field, fail because the relevant federal statutes do not regulate private actors."

On the anti-commandeering point itself, he wrote,

"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."

The opinion also narrowed what local governments must share. Reyes found that federal information-sharing protections cover citizenship or immigration status. They do not, he said, require cities to hand ICE broader operational details such as release dates or whereabouts. He called the government’s broader reading “contrary to law.”

Former prosecutor says the court misread the harm

Not everyone accepted the standing logic. Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Holtzman Vogel, told Fox News Digital the injury to federal authority exists the moment the city law is on the books, whether or not other barriers also stand in the way.

Kambli said,

"The sovereign harm is done just by the fact that New York City has the law (on) the books, no matter what other factors prevent practical application of the United States's position."

He argued the judge blurred a basic line. Anti-commandeering stops the federal government from ordering states to jump from doing nothing to affirmatively helping. It is a different question, he said, when a city actively blocks enforcement.

“Really what the 10th Amendment anti-commandeering means is you can't force states to go from doing nothing to affirmatively assisting,” Kambli said. “What these statutes are doing is basically preventing states from actively obstructing federal immigration enforcement.”

That obstruction is the live issue for officers in the field. When local rules cut off detainers and basic custody information, federal agents lose time and leads. Illegal immigrants who should be held for removal can walk out of local custody before ICE can act. Kambli’s critique puts that operational reality back at the center of the case the court dismissed.

Mamdani cheers the ruling as a win for noncooperation

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani celebrated the decision in a Friday post on X. He cast federal enforcement as cruelty and framed city noncooperation as protection.

Mamdani wrote that the federal government “tried to turn our public servants into deportation agents and force New York City to carry out ICE’s cruel agenda,” then added that the court “rejected that effort and upheld our laws.” He closed by pledging to “stand by our immigrant neighbors, defend our laws and protect the promise that this city belongs to all of us.”

That message fits a larger pattern under Mamdani’s leadership, where city power is used to draw hard lines against federal priorities and to expand municipal projects that critics say leave taxpayers exposed, including city-owned grocery stores that could stick New York taxpayers with the bill. The sanctuary fight is the immigration version of the same impulse: city hall decides what national law will mean on the ground.

Public patience with that approach has already shown cracks elsewhere. Mamdani was booed off stage in under a minute at an NYPD event on Staten Island, a raw signal that not every corner of the city accepts his framing of safety, policing, and local control.

His posture also collides with voters who want order at the border and honesty about who pays when local officials refuse to help enforce the law. A mayor who treats ICE as the threat, rather than illegal immigration itself, is making a policy choice with consequences far outside one courtroom.

Victims’ families see a different bottom line

Fox News noted sharp criticism of the decision from Joe Abraham, whose daughter Katie was killed in a hit-and-run. The report did not detail his full remarks, but the placement was not subtle. When sanctuary rules and noncooperation debates hit the news, families who lost loved ones become the human measure of what “local control” can cost.

That is the gap the ruling does not close. Judges can parse standing and preemption. Mayors can issue victory posts. Parents burying a child are left with the real-world result of policies that keep federal officers at arm’s length.

The Trump administration’s broader litigation campaign treats that result as intolerable. Filing more than two dozen suits against sanctuary jurisdictions is an attempt to force a single national standard: local governments do not get to nullify immigration enforcement by starving it of information and custody cooperation. Thursday’s dismissal in New York is another obstacle on that path, not the end of it.

National politics around Mamdani keep underscoring the stakes. Trump has already condemned Mamdani over conduct during a 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero, and he has moved toward direct engagement on the mayor’s own ground, including plans that put him at Gracie Mansion for a first meeting on Mamdani’s turf. The sanctuary case is one front in a larger fight over whether New York will assist federal law or wall it off.

City governance fights keep piling up in the same file. A separate court action recently halted Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax push and ordered the city to pull a 900,000-name homeowner list, another reminder that sweeping city hall initiatives are drawing legal resistance on multiple tracks. Immigration noncooperation now sits beside those fights as a defining test of how far local power can go.

Court doctrine versus enforcement reality

Reyes’s opinion turns on constitutional structure and standing limits. The Justice Department’s case turns on whether a city can build a legal shield against federal immigration officers and still claim it is merely “doing nothing.” Kambli’s rebuttal is that active obstruction is not neutrality, and that the sovereign harm begins with the statute itself.

Those are not abstract points for agents trying to pick up priority illegal immigrants before release. Detainer honor and timely custody information are bread-and-butter tools. When city law withholds them, enforcement becomes slower, leakier, and easier to evade. A ruling that leaves those barriers untouched does not make the underlying conflict disappear. It freezes it in favor of the city.

The administration came to court arguing federal immigration law should not be optional at the municipal level. The court answered that this plaintiff, in this posture, could not force the change, and that the Tenth Amendment protects a state’s power to refuse a federal chore list. Supporters of sanctuary policy heard vindication. Supporters of interior enforcement heard another jurisdiction told it may keep its noncooperation regime.

New York’s separate state-level restrictions, which the judge said would remain even if the city rules fell, tighten that bind. The decision does not only bless city policy. It points to a stacked set of local and state barriers that, together, keep federal officers outside the cooperative channel they use in non-sanctuary jurisdictions.

That is why the standing holding matters so much to both sides. If the federal government cannot clear city rules while state rules still block the same cooperation, then winning against one layer never restores the enforcement pipeline. The opinion effectively tells Washington that the remedy it wanted would not fix the problem it described. For an administration trying to rebuild deterrence, that is a strategic loss as well as a legal one.

Mamdani’s language after the ruling left little doubt about the political meaning he drew. City workers would not become “deportation agents.” Residents could seek city help “without fear of being targeted for deportation.” In plain terms, the mayor is promising that city systems will not feed federal removal efforts. That is the policy the DOJ sued to upend. It is also the policy the court left standing.

Across the country, the same argument is being tested as the Trump administration presses its multi-suit campaign. New York is not an outlier case so much as a high-profile one. When a major city can restrict detainers and information flows and survive a federal challenge on standing and anti-commandeering grounds, other sanctuary jurisdictions take notes. Each dismissal becomes precedent in the political sense even before it becomes precedent in the legal sense.

The human ledger remains simple. Laws against illegal immigration mean little if local gatekeepers will not open the gate. A courtroom win for sanctuary rules is a loss of leverage for the officers tasked with finding, holding, and removing people who have no right to stay. Mayors can call that compassion. Victims’ families and enforcement-first voters call it a refusal to do the basic work of government.

Borders and laws only hold when the people sworn to enforce them are allowed to work together. A city that celebrates noncooperation is choosing sides against that basic duty.