NEW YORK — A federal judge in Brooklyn has dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit against New York City's sanctuary laws, rejecting the government's bid for a permanent injunction that would have forced city agencies to cooperate more closely with federal immigration enforcement, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Ramón Reyes issued the decision on Oct. 15 in United States v. City of New York, a case the administration filed in July 2025.

The suit targeted city rules, in place since 2014, that bar the New York Police Department and the Department of Correction from honoring civil immigration detainers in most cases, restrict city agencies from sharing release dates, whereabouts and other custody information with ICE, and stop city resources from being used for civil immigration enforcement. The administration argued the laws obstruct federal enforcement and are overridden by federal law under the Supremacy Clause.

Reyes disagreed on each point, according to Reuters and the New York Daily News. He held the federal government had no standing to challenge the detainer limits because New York state law already prohibits police from detaining people at the request of federal immigration authorities, so striking down the city rule would change nothing. He also found the information-sharing limits valid because no federal law requires state and local governments to hand over that information, and he rejected the preemption argument — writing that the government's claim that the city laws 'impede' enforcement was 'nothing more than a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment,' and that Washington cannot commandeer the city's own civil servants.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani welcomed the ruling. 'This is a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE's deportation agenda,' he said in a statement reported by the Daily News. '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.' The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.

The dismissal ends the case at the trial-court level, though the administration can appeal. For immigrant families across New York — including the city's large Punjabi and South Asian communities in Queens and Richmond Hill — the ruling means the existing limits stay: city police and jails will not hold people on ICE detainers alone or routinely share custody information, while federal officers remain free to carry out enforcement with their own resources. Sources: Reuters (Oct. 15), New York Daily News via Police1, The New York Tribune.