A Brooklyn judge dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit against New York City sanctuary laws blocking ICE cooperation, which advocates hailed as a rebuke to federal enforcement.

District Judge Ramón Reyes threw out the case on Thursday, rejecting a Trump administration bid for a permanent injunction against local rules that keep city agencies from aiding federal immigration enforcement. The suit, filed in July 2025, named New York City, Mayor Eric Adams, former Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, the NYPD, and the Department of Correction.

Police1 reported that the administration argued the city's sanctuary laws obstruct lawful immigration enforcement and that the Supremacy Clause preempts them. Reyes held there is no federal law requiring states to join federal immigration work, found no standing to commandeer city civil servants, and called the government's "impede" claims a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment.

The ruling leaves intact local barriers that stop New York from honoring civil immigration detainers and using city resources to help remove people who are in the country illegally. Immigrant advocates celebrated. Lawful residents and frontline officers still face the same limits on cooperation that the lawsuit tried to lift.

Reyes treats ICE cooperation as optional for the city

New York's sanctuary laws date to 2014 under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. They restrict communication and cooperation between federal immigration officers and local agencies, including the police and jails.

The Justice Department sought a permanent injunction to wipe out those bars. The complaint said New York "has long been at the vanguard of interfering with enforcing this country's immigration laws." It pointed to the shooting of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer in Fort Washington Park and the arrest of two migrants who were in the country illegally.

Reyes was not persuaded. He wrote that no federal statute forces states into immigration enforcement and that the government lacked standing to order city workers to act as federal agents. In his view, claims that the laws "impede" enforcement were "nothing more than a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment."

That framing treats noncooperation as a protected local choice. It does not require the city to free jail space or police time for ICE detainers. It also leaves federal officers to chase removable aliens without the basic local help other jurisdictions still provide.

Similar fights over state and local favoritism toward illegal immigrants have already drawn hard judicial lines elsewhere, including when a federal judge struck down Illinois laws that handed in-state tuition and aid to people here illegally.

Mamdani calls blocked enforcement a win for the city

After the dismissal, Mamdani issued a statement framing the loss for the Justice Department as a public good.

"This is a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE's deportation agenda."

He went further:

"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."

And:

"Our local laws make New York City safer. They allow us to focus our resources on protecting and serving our communities and ensuring that every New Yorker can turn to their city government without fear that asking for help will make them a target for deportation."

Those lines cast ICE removals as cruelty and treat city noncooperation as safety policy. They do not address the federal interest in removing people who entered or stayed illegally, or the cost to officers who must work around local blackouts on detainers.

The same Mamdani orbit has taken other legal hits on city policy, including a judge's block on New York City's pied-à-terre tax rollout.

Advocates attacked the suit from day one

When the case was filed, Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, rejected the federal claim of authority.

"Unfortunately, Donald Trump thinks that he and he alone can decide our country's local laws, undermining the 10th Amendment."

Awawdeh also said:

"(This) lawsuit is frivolous at best, and an attack on New York's ability to govern itself at worst. New York must reject Trump's continued assaults to its constitutional right to pass local laws that serve our communities best. Mayor Adams must fight back against this federal overreach and defend the well-being of all New Yorkers."

That message puts local control above joint enforcement. It also presses Mayor Adams, already a named defendant, to defend the sanctuary structure rather than narrow it.

Federal-local collisions over immigration keep stacking up in other venues too, from a First Circuit ruling against a DHS third-country deportation policy to street-level ICE actions that snag people tied to Democratic offices.

Crime cases sat in the background of the complaint

The Justice Department did not sue in a vacuum. Its filing cited the Fort Washington Park shooting of an off-duty CBP officer and the arrest of two migrants present illegally. Separately, just more than a week before the dismissal, ICE agents shot and wounded Oscar Belgal, an illegal immigrant, in the Bronx.

None of those episodes decided the legal question Reyes answered. They do show why the administration wanted city jails and police to honor detainers instead of releasing people federal officers already flagged.

Sanctuary rules break that chain on purpose. Civil detainers become optional paper. City employees are told not to spend time or resources on immigration holds. ICE is left to re-find the same people after local custody ends.

That pattern is why enforcement fights stay hot on the Hill and in the field, whether the dispute is a city statute or a bill like Ilhan Omar's Make ICE Pay Act that would drain billions from immigration enforcement and redirect the money.

Recent ICE work has also reached into Democratic political circles directly, including the arrest of a California assemblywoman's staffer after a long visa overstay.

Standing and the Tenth Amendment closed the door

Reyes rested the dismissal on two pillars. First, Congress has not written a law that orders states or cities to join immigration enforcement. Second, the federal government could not show standing to seize the labor of New York civil servants for detainer compliance and resource sharing.

He treated the Supremacy Clause argument as an end run. If federal law does not command local participation, calling nonparticipation an "impediment" does not create a commandeering power the Constitution withholds.

The practical result is simple. New York may keep its 2014 rules. The NYPD and Department of Correction remain shielded from routine detainer cooperation. The Trump administration's bid for a permanent injunction is over in the trial court on the terms Reyes set.

No injuries, arrests, or closures flowed from the dismissal order itself. The policy fight remains. Federal officers still need local partners. The city still refuses the role the Justice Department asked the court to compel.

When judges bless sanctuary walls that keep cops and jailers from helping ICE, illegal immigrants gain cover and lawful residents inherit the risk, accountability does not end at the city line just because a courtroom says cooperation is optional.