Mamdani's Sanctuary Win Makes DOJ 0-for-12. The Judge Says the Fix Belongs to Lawmakers.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, then a state assemblyman running for mayor, campaigning in Flushing, Queens, June 23, 2025. Photo: InformedImages / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

New York's democratic socialist mayor got the victory lap. The Justice Department got a footnote, and it's the part of this ruling worth reading twice.

U.S. District Judge Ramón E. Reyes Jr. of the Eastern District of New York dismissed the federal government's lawsuit against New York City's sanctuary laws on Thursday, Oct. 15. Under those rules, city jails, probation and police can honor an ICE detainer only when it comes with a judge-signed warrant and the person has a violent or serious conviction or is a possible match on the terrorist watch list. Washington sued in July 2025, arguing the rules are preempted by federal immigration law.

Then came footnote 1. The case, Reyes wrote, "is among nearly a dozen recent cases" in which the United States has gone after state and local sanctuary provisions, and "in all prior cases, the United States' challenges to such provisions have been rejected." He listed 11 of those losses, from Illinois and Colorado to Boston, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Newark and Rochester. New York City makes 12. Because "much has already been written about these issues," he added, his decision would be "relatively brief."

Mayor Zohran Mamdani called the ruling "a victory for New Yorkers and a rebuke to ICE's deportation agenda" and promised to "use every tool at our disposal to protect New Yorkers from ICE's abuses." The ruling came a week after an ICE agent shot a man in the neck during an enforcement operation in Manhattan's Marble Hill neighborhood, Gothamist reported.

Losing three different ways

Reyes didn't just rule against the government once. He found it had no standing to sue at all, because even if he erased the city's detainer rules, New York state law still doesn't let local officers make arrests for civil immigration violations. Striking the city code, he wrote, "could not alter this status quo." The information-sharing claims failed too: the federal statute protects sharing a person's citizenship or immigration status, and the city's rules already allow exactly that.

Then, "even if the United States has standing—and it does not," he rejected every preemption theory, and finally ruled that the Tenth Amendment would block relief anyway. "The United States' preemption arguments amount to nothing more than a backdoor around the Tenth Amendment," Reyes wrote, as Bloomberg Law highlighted. He went further than the city needed, finding that two federal information-sharing statutes, 8 U.S.C. 1373(a) and 1644, themselves violate the Tenth Amendment's ban on commandeering state officials.

Here's the uncomfortable part for conservatives. The precedents doing the damage are ours. Printz v. United States, the 1997 case that stopped Washington from drafting local sheriffs into federal background checks, was written by Justice Antonin Scalia. Murphy v. NCAA, the 2018 sports-betting case, was written by Justice Samuel Alito. Reyes leaned on both. The same federalism that keeps Washington from ordering Indiana around is what New York is now using as a shield.

That doesn't excuse a Justice Department that keeps filing the same kind of suit and getting the same answer. Twelve courtrooms is a lot of taxpayer-funded lawyering for one result.

The judge drew a map

Buried in the standing section is the most useful sentence in the opinion. "Other actors, not this Court, hold the authority to grant the United States the redress it seeks," Reyes wrote. The New York legislature "could enact a statute authorizing . . . law enforcement officers to arrest people pursuant to federal civil immigration detainers . . . [o]r Congress (but not this Court) could enact federal legislation granting local law enforcement officers this authority."

In other words, this is a job for elected lawmakers, not Justice Department litigators. Indiana sends nine House members and two senators to that Congress. None of them will vote on anything before the election: the House and Senate are on recess until after Election Day, the Associated Press reported Saturday. That gives Hoosiers a few weeks to ask their own delegation a fair question: if the courts keep saying Congress holds the key, what bill are you carrying?

Indiana didn't wait for Washington

The Statehouse already took the legislative route Reyes described. Senate Enrolled Act 76, in effect since July 1, requires any Indiana governmental body holding someone under an immigration detainer to notify the bail judge, note the detainer in the case file, tell the person why they're being held, and "comply with all requests made in the immigration detainer request." Knowing or intentional violations carry a civil penalty of up to $10,000 each.

Monroe County Sheriff Ruben Marté tested it. His office's policy told deputies not to hold anyone past release on an ICE detainer that lacked a judicial warrant, and he sued Attorney General Todd Rokita in federal court, arguing SEA 76 forces violations of the Fourth Amendment. In June, a federal judge in Indianapolis denied him a preliminary injunction without reaching the merits. The order said the case appeared to be an "intramural dispute" outside federal jurisdiction, because "SEA 76, as applied to Sheriff Marté, is the State of Indiana dictating how its own subdivisions must respond to ICE detainer requests."

That's the difference in one line. Washington can't commandeer New York City's jail. Indiana created its counties, and a federal judge said a fight over how the state directs its own sheriffs belongs in state court and state politics.

It isn't settled. In August, Marté's office agreed in a consent decree with Rokita to drop its limits on communicating with federal agents and on signing agreements with ICE, but the warrantless-detainer question is still being litigated, county attorney Justin Roddye told the Indiana Daily Student, with a hearing set for Oct. 27 in Monroe County Circuit Court. The federal order also noted that detainees themselves can still challenge their detention. And cooperation is thin: only seven of Indiana's 92 sheriffs had signed formal ICE partnership agreements as of Sept. 30, The Indiana Lawyer reported, in Blackford, Dearborn, Hamilton, Jasper, Noble, Rush and Spencer counties.

New York's next move belongs to Albany or to Congress. Indiana's belongs to a courtroom in Bloomington ten days from now.

Photo credit: "Zohran Mamdani Campaigning in Flushing" by InformedImages, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers.