NEW YORK — A federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit challenging New York City’s sanctuary laws Oct. 15, ruling that the federal government cannot compel local authorities to assist with immigration enforcement.
According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge Ramon Reyes rejected the Trump administration’s challenge to city laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities, finding that the federal government lacked a valid legal basis for its claims.
Reyes ruled that city laws restricting local authorities from sharing release dates, whereabouts or other custody information about immigrants were valid because federal law does not require state and local governments to share that information.
Bloomberg Law reported that Reyes also found that the federal government cannot force local governments to assist with immigration enforcement, describing the administration’s argument as amounting to “nothing more than a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment.”
The Tenth Amendment protects powers reserved to the states and limits the federal government’s authority to compel state and local governments to administer federal programs.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York in July 2025, was part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign against sanctuary city policies, which restrict certain forms of cooperation between local governments and federal immigration authorities.
The challenged laws restrict local police from holding people solely on federal immigration detainers and limit the disclosure of certain information, including release dates and whereabouts.
New York City defended the policies as lawful measures intended to preserve the separation between municipal policing and federal immigration enforcement.
Reyes’ ruling leaves the city’s sanctuary laws in place and limits the federal government’s ability to require state and local participation in immigration enforcement. Federal immigration authorities retain the power to conduct enforcement operations independently.
The constitutional issue centers on whether the federal government can require state and local officials to use their personnel and resources to carry out federal immigration enforcement, including operations conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
When local authorities decline to detain individuals solely on federal immigration requests, federal immigration officers must independently arrange to take those individuals into custody if they seek to detain them.
State and local sanctuary laws limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, raising constitutional questions about whether the federal government can compel local police to participate in immigration enforcement when those jurisdictions have declined to do so.
According to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the Trump administration has pursued litigation against sanctuary jurisdictions over their policies and has filed several lawsuits challenging the legality of restrictions on local cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
States and local governments have also challenged the administration in court over efforts to withhold federal funding from jurisdictions that limit cooperation with immigration enforcement.
Sanctuary jurisdictions have initiated lawsuits alleging that the federal government unlawfully conditioned funding on cooperation with immigration enforcement or improperly federalized and deployed the National Guard.
Reyes’ decision follows other federal court rulings dismissing Trump administration challenges to sanctuary policies in jurisdictions across the country. In September, a federal court in Rochester, New York, dismissed a similar lawsuit.
New York City filed multiple letters with the federal court identifying other sanctuary-related lawsuits that had been dismissed, including cases involving Rochester, Los Angeles, Boston, New Jersey, Minnesota and Colorado.
Reyes cited a Massachusetts federal court decision earlier this year that dismissed the administration’s lawsuit challenging Boston’s sanctuary policies.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani welcomed the ruling, describing it as a rejection of the administration’s attempt to require municipal employees to participate in federal immigration enforcement.
“This is a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE’s deportation agenda. 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,” Mamdani said in a statement reported by Bloomberg Law.
Mamdani also reiterated the city’s commitment to protecting residents from what he described as abuses by federal immigration authorities.
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