The judge agreed with the city that the Justice Department had failed to show how LA’s sanctuary city policies are preempted by federal law.
LOS ANGELES (CN) – A federal judge has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Los Angeles over the city’s ordinance barring the use of municipal resources to help with immigration enforcement.
US District Judge Fernando Olguin, in a in power issued over the weekend, said the U.S. Justice Department may amend its claims against the city, but not against the individual defendants.
The judge, an appointee of Barack Obama, agreed with the city that federal law does not prevent its ordinance from “expressing,” as the administration contends, because the relevant federal statute clarifies only that no cooperative 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 was unpersuaded by the argument that the city’s ordinance was prejudicial, allegedly because it restricts the sending, requesting, holding or exchange of citizenship or immigration status by prohibiting city personnel from investigating or collecting this information in the first place.
The controversial section of the ordinance, he wrote, “simply limits a city employee from seeking or collecting information about a person’s citizenship or immigration status” and “says nothing about the city’s ability to retain or share such information.”
“This order reinforces the well-settled 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 intent of this ordinance and LAPD immigration policies — dating back to Special Order 40 in the 1970s — is to encourage victims and witnesses of crime to feel safe coming forward to seek assistance from the LAPD regardless of their immigration status. It does not impede or impede lawful federal immigration operations.”
Justice Department representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent after regular business hours.
In it complaint filed in June 2025, the Justice Department argues that the city’s ordinance, “Prohibiting the Use of City Resources for Federal Immigration Enforcement,” is preempted by federal immigration law.
“Sanctuary policies were the root cause of the violence, chaos and attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently witnessed in Los Angeles,” US Attorney General Pamela Bondi said at the time. “Jurisdictions like Los Angeles that violate federal law by prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens are undermining law enforcement at every level — ends under President Trump.”
According to the administration, the city’s updated 2024 sanctuary city law went much further than other sanctuary statutes, such as the California Values Act of 2017, in impeding immigration operations and directly seeking to undermine the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.
The City Council added an emergency clause to the ordinance that the Justice Department says is intended to prevent “the next federal administration” from implementing its own 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 throughout the city,’ it decided to ‘limit the city’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement,'” the government said in its complaint.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement enforcement of downtown LA businesses and Home Depot parking lots to round up people suspected of being in the US without authorization sparked days of protests in the city last year and prompted President Donald Trump to send the National Guard to LA to deal with protesters.
Escalating immigration enforcement, with undercover ICE agents cruising the city in unmarked vehicles to sometimes pull over working-class Latinos in the city that is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from around the world, has 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 worry that it will make people in immigrant communities afraid to talk to the police and report crimes such as domestic violence.
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