President Donald Trump has targeted sanctuary city policies approved by Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, and Paterson, but the cities’ attorneys say they are protected by the 10th Amendment from efforts to force them to aid in immigration enforcement. (Photos by Andrew Harnik/Getty and Fran Baltzer, Danielle Richards, and Reena Rose Sibayan for New Jersey Monitor)
Four of New Jersey’s largest cities want a federal judge to throw out the U.S. Department of Justice’s lawsuit challenging their sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants, arguing the Trump administration wants to relitigate cases that have already been resolved by federal judges.
In three separate legal briefs filed this week, attorneys for Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, and Paterson said the federal government’s May complaint against them mirrors lawsuits that the Department of Justice and two counties lost years ago over the state’s Immigrant Trust Directive. That 2018 order — which restricts state and local police from aiding in civil immigration enforcement in most cases — was upheld by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021.
The Trump administration has argued that ruling was wrongly decided, and that illegal immigration has become such a bigger problem since then that the decision warrants reconsideration. Attorneys for the four cities argue the 3rd Circuit decision binds the judge who is overseeing the current dispute and that the Constitution protects the cities from interference from the federal government in this matter.
“Cities have the sovereign authority to decide whether and to what extent their officials will voluntarily cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts,” Gurbir Grewal, an attorney for Newark and Hoboken, wrote in that city’s brief.
Grewal is a former state attorney general who was the architect of the state Immigrant Trust Directive.
The dispute is one of many initiated by President Donald Trump’s administration during the first year of his second term, one aimed at boosting his effort to detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The lawsuit targets not just the four New Jersey cities but also some of their elected leaders.
The administration claims the local policies violate the Constitution’s supremacy clause, which prevents state law from overruling federal law. Trump has said he’d withhold federal funds from states and localities that don’t end their sanctuary policies.
The filings from the four cities, which are motions to dismiss the Trump administration lawsuit, largely rest on the same argument: courts have already rejected the federal government’s push to force local police to help enforce civil immigration law. The cities point to the 10th Amendment’s anticommandeering doctrine, which bars the federal government from ordering states or municipalities to carry out federal functions.
Paterson’s sanctuary policy “does not obstruct federal law; it merely declines to expend municipal resources on federal civil-immigration enforcement,” that city’s attorneys wrote.
Newark’s and Jersey City’s sanctuary orders date to 2017, the first year of Trump’s initial term as president. Hoboken’s was issued in January 2018, and Paterson’s came in the form of a police policy that became effective in June 2019.
The cities argue that because its police officers would be bound by the state Immigrant Trust Directive if they didn’t have similar policies on the local level, the Trump administration can’t identify any harm it has suffered from the local orders.
Attorneys for Jersey City said if it rescinded its sanctuary city executive order, that action would “result in absolutely no change in how the Jersey City Police Department voluntarily cooperates with federal law enforcement, since the Directive still governs.”
Lawyers for the cities also note that their sanctuary policies explicitly say local police are not restricted from cooperating with federal agents to apprehend immigration accused of crimes.
U.S. District Judge Evelyn Padin could decide on the matter as early as next month.
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