Main: President Donald Trump listens during a briefing with the media, Friday, June 27, 2025, at the White House in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin). Inset: Mayor Karen Bass speaks at a vigil by community religious leaders on Tuesday, June 10, 2025, in Los Angeles (AP Photo/Eric Thayer).
The Trump administration is suing the city of Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Los Angeles City Council over its local immigration laws, claiming that the city”s sanctuary city policies were enacted with the express intention of interfering with with the president’s ability to enforce federal immigration laws.
The 21-page complaint, filed Monday in the Central District of California, seeks to have the sanctuary policies declared unconstitutional as well as a court order blocking their enforcement.
“Days after now President Trump won the November 5, 2024 election, the Los Angeles City Council, wishing to thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations, began the process of codifying into law its Sanctuary City policies,” the filing states. “The express purpose of Los Angeles’ Sanctuary City law is to thwart Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) from carrying out their statutory obligations as directed by Congress. The council members who passed the bill have publicly declared as much.”
The suit claims that the city’s immigration laws are “illegal” and in violation of the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution because they are “designed to and in fact do interfere with and discriminate against” the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration law.
Notably, the state of California has taken the opposite position and earlier this month sued the Trump administration, claiming the president illegally and unnecessarily took over the state’s National Guard in violation of the Constitution, a measure that “needlessly escalated chaos and violence in the Los Angeles region.”
The state laws being challenged by the Trump administration allegedly obstruct federal enforcement by preventing any consultation or communication between federal state and local authorities, which the Justice Department claims is “necessary” for federal officials in enforcing federal immigration laws. The result of the city’s “refusal to cooperate” with feds has been more than three weeks of “lawlessness, rioting, looting, and vandalism” that was “so severe” it “required the federal government to deploy the California National Guard and the United States Marines to quell the chaos,” per the DOJ.
“Sanctuary policies were the driving cause of the violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently witnessed in Los Angeles,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement accompanying the lawsuit. “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 Justice Department further alleges that because Los Angeles’ sanctuary policies are “designed to deliberately impede federal immigration officers” in carrying out their responsibilities, the city’s ordinances and laws “intentionally discriminate” against the federal government by “treating federal immigration authorities differently than other law enforcement agents.”
Such “discriminatory” practices include restricting access to property and detainees, prohibiting city contractors from providing information to the federal government, and “disfavoring federal criminal laws that the City of Los Angeles has decided not to comply with.”
The suit further claims that members of the city council have sought “to undermine federal enforcement actions” by requesting to be “warned” about pending ICE raids.
According to the DOJ, the supremacy clause prohibits the city from “singling out the Federal Government” for adverse treatment and the corresponding laws are thereby “invalid.”
“The Los Angeles Ordinance and other policies intentionally obstruct the sharing of information envisioned by Congress, thereby impairing federal apprehension and detention of removable aliens, including dangerous criminals, as required by federal law,” the suit states. “Obstructionist Sanctuary City laws preclude Los Angeles officials and law enforcement agencies from assisting federal immigration authorities unless federal officials procure criminal arrest warrants to take custody of removable aliens. The preferences of the City of Los Angeles notwithstanding, Congress made an explicit policy choice that such removals can be effectuated by civil arrest warrants for immigration enforcement.”
Despite the administration’s position, “sanctuary” policies have generally been found lawful, as the 10th Amendment prohibits the federal government from compelling states to participate in federal immigration enforcement through the anti-commandeering doctrine.
As the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 1997 Supreme Court case Printz v. U.S., “The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. Such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.”
