By Staff Reporter
NEW YORK — A federal judge in Brooklyn has thrown out the Trump administration’s lawsuit against New York City’s sanctuary laws. In doing so he went a step further than most courts have: he found that the federal statutes at the center of the fight over immigration information-sharing are themselves unconstitutional.
The 25-page decision, issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. of the Eastern District of New York, is the second time in six weeks that a federal court in New York has rejected one of these suits. On Sept. 1, a judge in the Western District, which covers Buffalo and Rochester, dismissed the Justice Department’s case against the City of Rochester with prejudice.
The rulings come as Niagara County lawmakers prepare to vote Tuesday on suing the state from the opposite direction, arguing that Albany’s limits on helping immigration agents go too far.
What the judge decided
The Justice Department sued New York City in July 2025. It argued that several sections of the city’s Administrative Code, along with an NYPD order, illegally block federal agents. Those rules limit when city jails honor ICE detainers, bar ICE from keeping an office on city jail property and restrict what city workers share about people in custody.
“New York City has released thousands of criminals on the streets to commit violent crimes against law-abiding citizens due to sanctuary city policies,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said when the suit was filed. “If New York City won’t stand up for the safety of its citizens, we will.”
Judge Reyes rejected the case on several grounds. First, he found the government lacked standing. State law, as interpreted by New York’s courts, already bars local police from making arrests for civil immigration violations. So striking down the city’s rules would not let city jails hold anyone for ICE without a judicial warrant. “Other actors, not this Court, hold the authority to grant the United States the redress it seeks,” he wrote, meaning the Legislature in Albany or Congress.
He also found the city’s information rules consistent on their face with 8 U.S.C. § 1373, the federal law that bars local governments from restricting the sharing of a person’s citizenship or immigration status. The city still allows that kind of information to be shared, the judge noted. What it restricts is release dates, court dates and other custody details.
A step beyond other courts
Then the judge went further. He wrote that the government’s arguments “amount to nothing more than a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment,” which reserves powers to the states.
“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 concluded that Section 1373 and a similar statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1644, violate the Tenth Amendment’s ban on federal “commandeering” of state and local governments. To get there, he declined to follow a 1999 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that upheld those same provisions against a challenge from New York City. He called that precedent’s “continued viability” after a 2018 Supreme Court decision on sports betting “questionable.”
That choice makes an appeal more likely and raises the stakes. Federal judges in Illinois, Minnesota and Boston have thrown out similar suits, according to cases cited in the ruling. But a Second Circuit ruling on whether Section 1373 is constitutional would bind federal courts across New York, Connecticut and Vermont.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani welcomed the decision. “This is a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE’s deportation agenda,” he said in a statement. “The court made clear that the federal government has no standing to bring this case and cannot commandeer our City workers to do its bidding.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Gothamist and Reuters.
The upstate cases
The Rochester case reached a similar result on narrower grounds. U.S. District Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr. ruled that Sections 1373 and 1644 cannot preempt local law because they regulate only governments, not private actors. He did not decide whether the statutes are constitutional, saying he did not need to reach the city’s other arguments. He wrote that Rochester’s policies “are not a prohibition on or interference with the federal government’s role in enforcing immigration policy. Instead, they simply recognize the different functions of each governmental body.”
“Once again, grandstanding of the Trump Administration has been found to be without any legal legitimacy,” Rochester Mayor Malik D. Evans said in a city news release. State Attorney General Letitia James said “the federal government tried to force Rochester to abandon its values, but the court rejected that unlawful effort.”
The Justice Department is still fighting the state itself. It has appealed to the Second Circuit after a federal judge in Albany dismissed its challenge to the state’s Protect Our Courts Act and related executive orders in November 2025.
What it means for Niagara County
Niagara County’s proposed lawsuit, which The Buffalo Chronicle reported Saturday, targets a different law: Section 996-a of the state’s General Municipal Law, adopted in May. It limits what local employees may share with immigration authorities. The county argues the law could stop election workers from flagging noncitizen voters. The statute itself contains exceptions for voter registration and “other election related matters,” and says it does not block sharing under Section 1373.
The Brooklyn and Rochester rulings do not decide the county’s case, which would ask whether a state may limit what its own counties do. But both courts leaned heavily on one principle. In Judge Reyes’s words, borrowed from an Illinois ruling, “A state’s ability to control its officers and employees lies at the heart of state sovereignty.” Under New York law, counties are political subdivisions of the state. Any challenge from Lockport will have to contend with that.
The rulings also leave open the questions voters across the region keep asking. How often do local jails in Western New York get ICE detainers? How are they handled? What information already flows to federal agents under Section 1373? Neither the county resolution nor the court records answer those questions for Erie or Niagara counties.
The Niagara County Legislature meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the county courthouse in Lockport. The Buffalo Chronicle is seeking comment from the Niagara County Legislature on whether the rulings change its plans, and from New York City and Rochester officials on whether the Justice Department has appealed. Any responses will be added to this story.
Featured photo: The federal courthouse for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. Photo by Ajay Suresh via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY 2.0.
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