Since January 2025, the federal government has filed 27 lawsuits targeting over 20 cities, counties, and states with sanctuary city policies — places that restrict local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities. This is not a handful of isolated cases but a systematic legal campaign, and what stands out is not the number of lawsuits filed, but the win-loss ratio tilting increasingly toward local governments.
According to Lailluminator, in just the past three months, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued at least six new jurisdictions including Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, a county in Michigan, and the city of Philadelphia. Combined with previous cases targeting Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and many others, this represents the largest federal legal effort ever undertaken to eliminate policies restricting cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — policies some cities have maintained since the 1980s, according to Stateline.
Six of Philadelphia's seven bills remain in effect despite the federal court's preliminary injunction.
From New Jersey to Philadelphia: A Pattern of Half-Defeated Strategy
In May 2025, the DOJ sued four New Jersey cities — Hoboken, Jersey City, Newark, and Paterson — over policies limiting cooperation with ICE. A federal judge appointed by former President Joe Biden dismissed the lawsuit in June 2025, concluding that the four cities' policies did not obstruct ICE operations. Around the same time, the DOJ also separately sued the state of New Jersey over a law banning immigration officers from concealing their identity while performing duties.
In Philadelphia, the situation is more complicated. The city council in April 2025 passed seven bills related to ICE, including provisions banning immigration officers from wearing masks, concealing badges, or using unmarked vehicles. The DOJ sued to block specifically the identity-concealment provision, and this time a judge appointed by President Trump issued a preliminary injunction, citing the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution. But six of Philadelphia's remaining seven bills remain in effect despite this injunction — showing that even a DOJ legal victory only stopped a small portion of the overall local policy.
This pattern repeats on a larger scale. According to The Guardian, a federal judge in California, Fernando Olguin, dismissed the federal government's lawsuit against Los Angeles, ruling that the city ordinance only regulated the conduct of city employees themselves and did not unconstitutionally interfere with federal operations. The judge also allowed the DOJ to file an amended complaint — meaning the battle is not over, just round one. Similar lawsuits against Boston and Chicago were also dismissed by federal courts.
Maryland: Where Two Legal Fronts Target the Same Law
Maryland is the clearest example showing that the sanctuary city fight is not just the federal government against local governments, but also involves a third front: local law enforcement officials suing their own state. Maryland's Community Trust Act, effective May 31, 2025, prohibits police and state corrections officers from asking about immigration status, and bans detaining or transferring people to federal authorities for immigration reasons without a court warrant.
According to WMAR 2 News Baltimore, sheriffs from 17 of 23 counties in Maryland filed lawsuits against their own state legislators before the DOJ even got involved — lawsuits filed on behalf of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, according to Stateline, and containing language nearly identical to the DOJ's subsequent lawsuit. The fact that two lawsuits — one federal, one from local sheriffs — use the same legal language shows the anti-sanctuary campaign is not merely a one-sided White House action, but coordinated with anti-immigration advocacy groups at the state level.
The DOJ argues that Maryland's law violates the Supremacy Clause and endangers public safety, while Maryland counters that the law does not require concealing citizenship information. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown spoke about the lawsuit on July 13, 2025. Worth noting: similar sanctuary lawsuits previously were dismissed by federal courts in California, New York, and New Jersey — a string of legal defeats that the DOJ continues to repeat rather than adjust its approach.
Connecticut and New Mexico: Campaign Expanding With No Signs of Slowing
On Monday, the DOJ sued Connecticut and the city of New Haven, bringing the total number of sanctuary lawsuits to 16 at that point, according to the New York Post. The complaint alleges only 20 percent of immigration detainers have been complied with by Connecticut authorities since 2020. New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker publicly called the lawsuit content false and misleading, vowing to fight the case to the end.
Most recently, in May 2026, the DOJ opened a new front in New Mexico, suing both the state and the city of Albuquerque to block Bill 9 — signed by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham — which prohibits local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement and requires local jails to end contracts for holding immigration detainees for the federal government. According to abq.news, New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez stated he would defend the law, drawing on experience winning multiple cases against the federal government. At the city level, a Republican-aligned Albuquerque council member publicly criticized Mayor Tim Keller over sanctuary policy — showing that even within progressive cities, sanctuary policies remain politically divisive.
New York Fights Back With an Executive Order, Without Waiting for Court Ruling
While the DOJ continues litigation, some cities choose to strengthen their legal defenses before being sued. At the first interfaith breakfast of his term, with nearly 400 religious and community leaders from all five boroughs in attendance, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed Executive Order No. 13 to reaffirm the city's sanctuary law, according to documents posted on NYC.gov. The order restricts federal immigration enforcement activities on city property — including schools, hospitals, homeless shelters, and parking lots — unless backed by a judicial warrant, and requires agencies like the New York Police Department, Department of Corrections, and Department of Social Services to conduct internal audits within 14 days. The city also distributed nearly 32,000 Know Your Rights flyers in ten languages, including English, Spanish, Cantonese, and Bengali.
New York's approach reflects a different defensive logic from New Jersey or Maryland: rather than waiting to be sued and then defending in court, the city proactively erects procedural barriers — audits, staff training, privacy officers — to reduce the chance the DOJ finds legal vulnerabilities.
Why This Legal Spiral Affects Vietnamese Communities Even Though No One Mentions Them by Name
The cities being targeted by the DOJ — Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Jose (via the Bay Area), Houston — all have large settled Vietnamese communities, from small shopping districts to service industry workers. For families with members lacking secure permanent residency status, the degree of local police cooperation with ICE directly determines whether a traffic stop becomes a deportation proceeding.
The story about Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that Pennsylvania Capital-Star documented in Charleroi is also an indirect warning to Vietnamese communities: the US Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, allowing the federal government to terminate TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals. TPS is a legal mechanism with historical roots similar to programs that once protected Vietnamese refugees after 1975 — once legal precedent allows the federal government to revoke temporary protected status in bulk, it creates grounds to apply the same logic to any other migrant group in the future, including the humanitarian parole categories some Vietnamese families are still waiting to have processed.
Who Is Winning This Battle
Looking at the overall picture over the past three years, cities and states are winning most initial legal battles — New Jersey, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago all had the DOJ's lawsuits dismissed. But this is not final victory: Philadelphia shows the DOJ only needs to win a narrow provision to establish precedent for gradual expansion; and in Maryland, coordination between the DOJ and local sheriffs shows the campaign operates on multiple fronts simultaneously.
At its core, this is a battle over defining the boundary between federal and local authority in US immigration law, and federal courts, regardless of which party appointed the judges, have mostly sided with the principle that local governments have the right not to use their resources to enforce federal law. Unless the US Supreme Court directly intervenes on sanctuary city issues — something that has not yet happened — the trend will likely continue: the DOJ opens new fronts in other states, most lawsuits continue to be dismissed at federal court level, and each city is forced to calculate its own risk tolerance.