Judge dismisses Trump administration's lawsuit against LA over 'sanctuary city' ordinance

LOS ANGELES (CN) — A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Los Angeles over the city’s ordinance that prohibits use of municipal resources to assist with immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin, in a ruling issued over the weekend, said the U.S. Justice Department may amend its claims against the city but not against individual defendants.

The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, agreed with the city that federal law doesn’t “expressly” preempt its ordinance, as the administration claims, because the relevant federal statute only clarifies that no cooperation agreement is required for state or local officials to communicate or cooperate with the government on certain immigration enforcement matters.

In addition, Olguin said, he wasn’t persuaded by the argument the city’s ordinance was preempted, purportedly because it restricts sending, requesting, maintaining or exchanging citizenship or immigration status by forbidding city personnel from inquiring into or collecting this information in the first place.

The disputed section of the ordinance, he wrote, “merely restricts a city employee from inquiring into or collecting information about a person’s citizenship or immigration status” and “says nothing about the city’s ability to maintain or share such information.”

“This order reinforces the well-established principle that local governments have the authority to decide how to use their personnel and resources,” LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto said in a statement Monday. “The goal of this ordinance, and of LAPD’s immigration-related policies — which date back to Special Order 40 in the 1970s — is to encourage victims of and witnesses to crime to feel safe coming forward to seek help from LAPD regardless of their immigration status. It does not obstruct or impede lawful federal immigration enforcement operations.”

Representatives of the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent after regular business hours.

In its complaint filed in June 2025, the Justice Department argues the city’s ordinance, “Prohibition of the Use of City Resources for Federal Immigration Enforcement,” is preempted by federal immigration law.

“Sanctuary policies were the driving cause of the violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently witnessed in Los Angeles,” then-U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi said at the time. “Jurisdictions like Los Angeles that flout federal law by prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens are undermining law enforcement at every level — it ends under President Trump.”

The city’s updated, 2024 sanctuary city law went much further than other sanctuary statutes, such as the 2017 California Values Act, in obstructing immigration operations and directly seeking to undermine the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts, according to the administration.

The City Council added an urgency clause to the ordinance which the Justice Department says acknowledges the purpose of the law is to thwart the “incoming federal administration” from carrying out its immigration policies.

“Because the city of Los Angeles found that President Trump’s immigration policies ‘will affect the public peace, health, and safety of all residents across the city,’ it decided to ’limit the city’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement,’” the government said in its complaint.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps of businesses in downtown LA and Home Depot parking lots to round up people they suspect of being in the U.S. without authorization sparked days of protests in the city last year and prompted President Donald Trump to send the National Guard to LA to confront the protesters.

The escalation of immigration enforcement, with masked ICE agents cruising through the city in unmarked vehicles to at times violently apprehend working class Latino people, in the city that’s home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over the world, resulted in a bitter war of words between political leaders in California and Washington, DC.

Local police in LA and elsewhere have been reluctant to get involved in immigration enforcement, because they are concerned it will make people in immigrant communities fearful to talk to police and report crimes such as domestic violence.

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