Federal judge appointed by Biden tosses Trump DOJ challenge to New York City sanctuary laws

A Biden-appointed judge tossed the Trump DOJ’s lawsuit against New York City sanctuary laws, leaving local barriers to ICE cooperation intact despite federal objections.

U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. dismissed the Justice Department’s case on Thursday, rejecting the Trump administration’s bid to force New York City to stop shielding illegal immigrants from federal immigration enforcement.

Fox News reported that Reyes found the United States lacked standing and that its preemption claims failed, keeping the city’s restrictions on cooperation with ICE in place.

The ruling is another courtroom loss for an administration that has filed more than two dozen suits against state and local sanctuary policies. Similar cases tied to Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota have already been dismissed.

New York City’s rules limit how far local officers go in helping federal agents. That includes restrictions on honoring ICE detainers, requests that a jail hold someone a little longer so immigration officers can pick them up, and on sharing details that help locate people in custody.

Standing fails because state laws would still block cooperation

Reyes held that even a win against the city would not fix the harm the Justice Department described. Separate New York State laws restricting cooperation would remain, he reasoned, so striking the city rules alone would not give the federal government the relief it sought.

“Even if the United States has standing, and it does not, its preemption claims fail,” Reyes wrote.

The Justice Department had argued that the city’s sanctuary laws unlawfully hinder federal immigration enforcement by cutting off local help. The Trump administration sued New York City in July 2025 as part of a wider campaign against jurisdictions that refuse to work with ICE.

That enforcement push has also put the department in other high-stakes fights, including when the DOJ appealed a dismissal in a smuggling case tied to immigration enforcement.

Tenth Amendment becomes the city’s shield

Reyes rejected every preemption theory the government offered, express, conflict, and field. He said the federal statutes at issue do not regulate private actors in the way the DOJ claimed.

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

He leaned hard on the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering doctrine. In plain terms, that rule says Washington cannot order state or city employees to run a federal program. Reyes treated New York’s choice to limit cooperation as a protected decision about how to run its own workforce.

“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,” he wrote.

He also brushed aside the government’s reading of information-sharing rules. Federal protections, he said, cover citizenship and immigration status. They do not force local governments to hand over release dates, custody status, or a person’s whereabouts.

“The United States’ assertion that information regarding release dates and custody status is information regarding immigration or citizenship status is contrary to law,” Reyes wrote. He called the DOJ’s approach a “backdoor around the Tenth Amendment.”

Court fights over the reach of federal power have become a steady feature of this term, much like the pattern tracked when Judge Boasberg’s rulings against the administration faced appeal after appeal.

Former prosecutor says the ruling misreads obstruction

Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Holtzman Vogel, told Fox News Digital the standing analysis missed the point. The harm, he argued, exists the moment a city puts a non-cooperation law on the books.

“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,” Kambli said.

He drew a sharp line the judge did not accept. Anti-commandeering, in his view, stops the federal government from forcing states to move from doing nothing to actively helping. It does not give cities a free hand to block enforcement.

“Really what the 10th Amendment anti-commandeering means is you can't force states to go from doing nothing to affirmatively assisting. What these statutes are doing is basically preventing states from actively obstructing federal immigration enforcement,” Kambli said. “That's different from the federal government saying a state or a city is required to actively assist ICE in operations.”

“The issue is mainly whether any state or locality that prohibits cooperation is preempted by federal law, regardless of what the information is,” he added.

That dispute sits inside a larger Justice Department docket that reaches beyond sanctuary rules, from citizenship checks on voter rolls in the suit where the Justice Department sued California over noncitizens on the rolls, to other policy battles now headed upstairs.

Mamdani celebrates while victims’ families watch another loss

Mayor Zohran Mamdani framed the dismissal as a win for the city’s immigrant community. In a Friday post on X, he cast federal enforcement as cruelty and city non-cooperation as protection.

“The federal government tried to turn our public servants into deportation agents and force New York City to carry out ICE’s cruel agenda,” Mamdani wrote. “Today, a federal court rejected that effort and upheld our laws. Every New Yorker deserves to seek help from their city without fear of being targeted for deportation. We will stand by our immigrant neighbors, defend our laws and protect the promise that this city belongs to all of us.”

Fox News noted the decision also drew sharp criticism from Joe Abraham, whose daughter Katie Abraham was killed in a hit-and-run crash. The report did not detail his remarks, but the contrast is plain: city leaders hail legal walls against ICE while families living with the cost of weak enforcement get another reminder that local policy still comes first.

The Trump administration has treated sanctuary rules as a direct threat to lawful immigration control and public safety. It has kept filing cases even after dismissals in other major jurisdictions. Those fights now sit alongside other administration efforts to reverse lower-court blocks, including when Trump asked the Supreme Court to revive a major lawsuit after heavy sanctions.

Reyes’s opinion leaves New York City free to keep limiting detainer compliance and the broader data ICE needs to find and remove people who are in the country illegally. The federal government can still enforce immigration law on its own. What it cannot do, under this ruling, is compel the city’s workforce to stop obstructing that work.

When local officials boast about shielding illegal immigrants from ICE and a federal judge calls that a constitutional prerogative, ordinary Americans are left with the bill, in disorder, in delayed removals, and in the quiet message that border law is optional inside the city limits.