A federal judge on Thursday rejected the Trump administration’s lawsuit against New York City’s sanctuary laws, ruling that the U.S. government can’t compel police officials and other city agencies to help enforce civil immigration laws.
The dismissal was the latest defeat for President Trump as he attempts to force cities and states to work with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s mass deportation campaign.
Across the United States, federal judges have spurned the administration’s legal challenges to sanctuary laws in nearly a dozen localities led by Democrats, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Colorado and Minnesota.
“Because much has already been written about these issues with which this court agrees, this decision will be relatively brief,” Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr., a judge in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, wrote in a footnote to his 25-page ruling.
Judge Reyes, who was appointed in 2023 by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said that the federal government lacked standing and that the Constitution protected cities and states from being forced into spending their own resources to enforce immigration laws, which are the purview of the federal government.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, celebrated the ruling in a statement, saying that the judge had made it clear that the federal government “cannot commandeer our city workers to do its bidding.”
“This is a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE’s deportation agenda,” the mayor said. “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.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision came a week after an ICE officer had shot and injured a 28-year-old Dominican man, Oscar Belgal, in Upper Manhattan as agents sought to apprehend him while he was in his car with his 5-year-old son.
The Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of ICE, had highlighted Mr. Belgal’s criminal record to argue that he would not have been on the streets if the city had a policy to transfer undocumented immigrants who were charged with crimes to ICE custody for deportation.
Democratic leaders in New York blamed the shooting on the agency’s aggressive tactics. In more than two dozen instances across the United States, ICE agents have shot at someone — including demonstrators — since Mr. Trump returned to office in January 2025.
New York’s sanctuary laws, which were passed in 2014 when Bill de Blasio was mayor, all but prohibit the Police Department and city jails from helping ICE apprehend undocumented immigrants, except under certain circumstances.
The laws allow the city to honor ICE’s requests to detain immigrants only if they have been convicted of certain “violent and serious” crimes, including rape and murder, and only if ICE presents a judicial warrant. The laws also strictly limit communications and information sharing between ICE and city agencies.
The Justice Department challenged New York City’s laws in July 2025, when Eric Adams was still mayor.
The lawsuit argued that the city’s restrictions against honoring what are known as detainer requests from ICE had “resulted in countless criminals being released into the city who should have been held for immigration removal from the United States.”
Because New York rarely transfers undocumented immigrants from city jails into ICE custody, the agency was forced to send agents into communities, putting its officers and the public at risk, the lawsuit argued.
Supporters of the sanctuary laws argue that they foster trust between the city government and New York’s undocumented population, ensuring that those immigrants report crimes to the Police Department, testify as witnesses in court and seek medical care without fearing that they will be deported.
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