A Biden-appointed federal judge dismissed the Trump Justice Department’s lawsuit against New York City sanctuary laws Thursday, handing the administration another defeat in its push to restore immigration enforcement.
Fox News reported that U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. threw out the case the Trump administration filed in July 2025, leaving the city’s limits on cooperation with federal immigration officers fully intact.
The ruling keeps New York City’s sanctuary framework in place and marks another courtroom loss for a White House that has filed more than two dozen suits against state and local governments over similar policies. Reyes found the federal government lacked standing and rejected every preemption theory the Justice Department advanced.
Joe Abraham, whose daughter Katie was killed in a hit-and-run crash, reacted with sharp criticism of the decision. For families living with the real-world results of non-cooperation policies, the legal fight is not abstract.
Reyes held that striking down the city’s restrictions would not fix the harm the Justice Department described. Separate New York state laws that also limit cooperation would still stand, he wrote, so the city-level challenge could not deliver the remedy the United States sought.
Even if standing existed, the judge said, the preemption claims collapsed. He wrote that the federal statutes at issue do not regulate private actors in the way the Justice Department needed them to.
In the opinion, Reyes put the point bluntly:
"Even if the United States has standing, and it does not, its preemption claims fail."
He added that all of the government’s preemption theories, express, conflict, and field, failed for the same basic reason tied to the reach of those statutes.
Reyes leaned hard on the anti-commandeering rule rooted in the Tenth Amendment. That doctrine blocks Washington from conscripting state and local officers to run federal programs with their own staff and budgets.
The judge framed the stakes in constitutional terms:
"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 also rejected the idea that the lawsuit was a lawful end-run around that limit, calling the approach a "backdoor around the Tenth Amendment."
On information sharing, Reyes drew a narrow line. Federal protections, he said, cover citizenship and immigration-status details. They do not force local governments to hand ICE broader operational facts such as release dates or custody status. He wrote that treating release and custody data as immigration-status information is "contrary to law."
Abhishek Kambli, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Holtzman Vogel, told Fox News Digital the ruling misreads both standing and the Tenth Amendment. He argued the injury to federal authority exists the moment the city law sits on the books.
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 drew a sharp distinction between refusing to help and actively blocking enforcement. In his view, anti-commandeering stops the federal government from ordering cities to jump from doing nothing to affirmative assistance. It does not give cities a free hand to obstruct.
"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, he added, is different from a federal demand that a city actively assist ICE operations. The core issue, in his account, is whether any state or locality that bars cooperation is preempted by federal law, regardless of the category of information involved.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani hailed the outcome Friday in a post on X. He cast the Justice Department effort as an attempt to conscript city workers into federal removal work and said the court had protected the city’s approach.
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." He said the court "rejected that effort and upheld our laws," and he pledged to "stand by our immigrant neighbors, defend our laws and protect the promise that this city belongs to all of us."
The mayor’s message framed fear of deportation as the central concern. It did not address the federal interest in locating removable illegal immigrants who pass through local custody, or the practical effect of withholding release information from ICE.
The New York dismissal did not arrive in isolation. Similar Trump administration suits tied to Boston, Los Angeles, and Minnesota have also been dismissed, according to the same reporting. The White House has opened more than two dozen cases nationwide against jurisdictions that limit cooperation on detainers, information sharing, and related enforcement steps.
In New York, the Justice Department argued the city’s rules unlawfully hinder federal immigration work, restrict information sharing that federal law protects, and single out federal immigration officials. Reyes rejected those theories and left the local barriers in place.
The result is straightforward for officers on the ground. City policies that curb honoring ICE detainers and limit what local agencies may share remain operative. State-level restrictions the judge flagged continue alongside them. Federal lawyers must now weigh appeal options or new theories after a string of early losses.
Abraham’s criticism underscored the human side of the policy fight. When local governments refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, the people left to absorb the consequences are often residents who never voted for the experiment.
Sanctuary rules survive another round in court, while the public is told that blocking ICE is a form of justice, and victims’ families are left to live with the gap between federal law and local resistance.
