WASHINGTON—Earlier this week, the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a brief in a New York federal district court attacking the sanctuary policies of Rochester, New York, which bar city law enforcement officers from cooperating and sharing information with federal immigration law enforcement. The federal government has sued the city over these policies, claiming they violate the supremacy of federal law set forth in the Constitution.
The city’s policies, IRLI shows in its brief, stand as obstacles to Congress’s purposes in the immigration laws, such as apprehending and removing illegal aliens, removing aliens who have committed aggravated felonies, and achieving operational control of the border. In this way, the policies conflict with federal law, and are preempted under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Also, IRLI makes another argument the government so far has not: the city’s policies also conflict with federal law because they command local officials to commit the federal crime of harboring removable aliens. For example, if federal authorities ask local officers for the date a criminal alien will be released from custody, and local officers refuse to say, they thereafter are concealing where that alien is from federal authorities, in violation of the harboring law. Because the city’s policies thereby make it impossible for officials to obey both federal law and city policy, they present a textbook case of conflict preemption.
“United States Border Czar Tom Homan has vowed to arrest and prosecute officials in sanctuary jurisdictions to the full extent of the law, and our brief shows why he can do just that,” said Christopher J. Hajec, acting executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “And because it is Rochester’s policies that make its own officers criminals, those policies are flatly unconstitutional. We hope the court sees the patent logical inconsistency of these sanctuary policies with federal law, and strikes them down.”
The case is United States v. City of Rochester, No. 6:25-cv-06226 (W.D.N.Y.).
